1. Identify your most engaged customers.Customers who are fully engaged represent a 23% share of profitability, revenue, and relationship growth compared to the average customer.

Additionally, your most engaged customers spend more. For example, in the consumer electronics industry, engaged customers spend $373 per shopping trip, while actively disengaged customers spend $289.

You can find out who they are by including top-of-mind customers.

Or you can check your past product reviews and look for the top twenty customers who gave in-depth, comprehensive and helpful product reviews that discussed product improvement.

These people are the key to helping you with your product development.

1. Interact with your most engaged customers during the product ideation and prototyping phase.Let them join the conversation. Ask for their initial feedback on your ideas. Show them sketches. Tell them the product’s benefits and ask if these will be helpful to them. Show them product packaging ideas. Heck, ask for their thoughts on the product’s initial name.

It can be as “small” as deciding on the font of the packaging, or as “big” as finalizing on the product features — it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that you include them in the process and to show them that their input is valuable.

After all, their feedback may help you improve product development, product marketing or both.

1. Once the product’s first version is available, send it to them for free.This is done with the spirit of gratitude: their feedback helped you shape the product’s development, so you’d like to thank them by gifting them the product.

Surprise them (small gesture to delight your customers, remember?) by including a handwritten note in the packaging or sending a personalized email before delivery.

1. Build social proof.Once they’ve had time to try our your new product, ask them to leave a review. Including a photo of them using the actual product would be great too!

2. Enjoy the social proof and the authentic product reviews on the launch day.Step #4 kills two birds with one stone: having authentic product reviews on your new product means:

– You don’t need to spend a lot of money getting a copywriter to create your sales copy for you. This way, people can read honest-to-goodness product reviews written by clients who’ve actually tried your product and experienced the results first-hand;

– You’ve already built social proof for your product so the likelihood that someone will buy it increases. Nearly 63% of consumers say they’re more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews.If you’ve successfully followed this five-step process, I’d like to congratulate you in advance — it’ll be your best product launch day ever!