The following is a guest post from Dave Schneider, of Ninja Outreach. The post covers 4 techniques that they are currently using to increase their customer engagement and retention. Use this real life actionable business advice to increase your customer retention and engagement. Enjoy!
At NinjaOutreach, our blogger prospecting and outreach software startup, we’re always interested in three things:
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Activation
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Engagement
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Retention
Naturally data is always at the focal point of understanding how we can improve these critical metrics. While I always try to advocate speaking with customers directly, sometimes it isn’t always possible. For example, maybe you have too many customers and not enough time. Or perhaps the opposite, plenty of time but too few customers wanting to meet.
In our case, we have had phone calls with probably about one-third of our customers. The other two-thirds simply weren’t interested or didn’t have time. As a result we tend to look at the data to get deeper answers to our questions and through this data we have been able to see noticeable improvements in our activation rates, engagement, and retention with just some simple tactics.
In this case study, I’m going to show you the four ways we are using data and how it has positively affected our customer activation, engagement, and retention rates. Additionally I will include word-for-word templates that we have been sending out to our beta users, which you can use.
Following Up With Inactives
Step one in the process is getting the customer to activate the tool. This can be more difficult than it sounds. Surprisingly, even customers who say they will activate it oftentimes will not. For example we have sent out over 400 login details for potential beta users, but have seen only about one-fourth of them have actually logged in even though they requested the details. Consider how hard it is to acquire an interested lead only to find that 75% of them are not activating the software!One simple thing that we have done is a follow-up series with those who have not activated it. It works like this:
If the customer has not activated the software within five days they get an email that looks like this:
Subject: Have you activated Ninja Outreach yet?
Hey Kevin,
I just wanted to check in and see if you’ve had a chance to download NinjaOutreach?
As a reminder, here are your details:
Email: your address
License Key: your address
Installation takes less than 5 minutes:
Download Link: members.ninjaoutreach.com/beta/
If you’d like me to walk you through it, please schedule a meeting at sohelpful.me/dschneid
If there is a reason you do not want to or can’t activate it, please let us know.
Thanks,
Dave
Key Features
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Ask them if they have activated. Even if I know they have not, I think people prefer a less big brother approach.
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Give them a snapshot of all the details they need to activate (low friction!).
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Remind them how quick/easy it is to activate.
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Offer a meeting
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Solicit relevant feedback as to why they haven’t activated.
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5 days makes sure we are on top of activations while they still remember us, without being overly pushy
As you can see data is quite important. For example this email would be a nuisance to anyone who had actually activated the software. Additionally we need to know when 5 days has passed, so as not to follow up too soon or too late when the opportunity has passed. Although this email is relatively simple it has helped us activate over 20 users who likely would not have activated otherwise.
Offering A Consultation After Activation
So they’ve activated - now what? They’re going to need help and guidance. Again it is all about timing and segmentation. We use our data to find out who has activated the software and then allow them 15 days to play around with it, after which we send them a quick follow-up.
Subject: Follow Up Meeting?
Hey Kevin,
I just wanted to check in and see how things are going with Ninja Outreach?
We’d love to schedule a follow up meeting just to learn more about your experience and what we can do to improve things:
You can book a time with us here: sohelpful.me/dschneid
If you’re too busy to meet, then perhaps you can just answer these questions via the email:
How often are you using Ninja Outreach (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Never)
What’s one thing you REALLY like? Dislike?
What is one value add feature or improvement that we could make for you?
Thanks!
Dave
Key Features
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Offer to schedule a meeting for customer development.
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Offer an alternative solution to solicit the feedback you want
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15 days allows the customer a No Rushed way to get used to the software, but also is right about the time when many people start to forget and move on.
In addition to a number of meetings scheduled, we’ve receive great feedback like:
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How often are you using Ninja Outreach (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Never) If I were using it regularly, I would say it is Daily or Weekly.
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What’s one thing you REALLY like? Dislike? I tried to find influencers by search word Virtualization and instead of listing people there were company blogs (like VMware) media websites etc that are useless.
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What is one value add feature or improvement that we could make for you? It would be great if the software provided people names and contact details.
Funnily enough, our software does provide names and contact details, so this interaction allowed me to point her in the right direction.
Follow Up with Trending Inactives
NinjaOutreach follows a SaaS model and customers are billed monthly, therefore it is important to retain them as best we can. Retention is best achieved proactively as opposed to reactively, that is, don’t wait until the customer churns off to engage with them. We use our usage data to identify when a customer hasn’t used the software in a while as an opportunity to reengage them and find out what’s troubling them. Maybe it is a customer support issue that they simply didn’t bother to ask about, or maybe they got confused by a particular feature and just gave up altogether.
Here’s the template:
Subject: We miss you!
Greetings Kevin,
Our system tells us that you haven’t logged in to NinjaOutreach in 30 days.
We miss you!
And we’d like to hear from you.
If you’d like to talk to our CEO (yes, not customer support, our CEO) please call this number.
(***) ***-****
Or schedule a Skype/Hangouts meeting here: sohelpful.me/dschneid
He will be happy to pick up the phone, and discuss how you can continue to get the most out of NinjaOutreach.
Thanks,
NinjaOutreach Team
Key Features
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I offer my personal cell phone number as the most direct way to get in touch and as a way to show my commitment.
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As an alternative we offer a meeting scheduler
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30 days feels like the appropriate amount of time to try and re engage an inactive.
Offering A Consultation
You may have noticed that we always offer a consultation. Why? We have noticed a difference in perception between those customers we met with and those customers we haven’t. Although we don’t have quantitative data to back this up, from our qualitative experience customers we met with tend to overall have a more positive opinion of the software. They find it more intuitive to use and they have a better understanding of all the full features suite. On the contrary, customers who go it alone tend to send me emails wondering why such and such a feature was not very intuitive. As a result, it’s in our best interest to
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Improve the user interface so that customers can seamlessly understand it.
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Meet with as many customers who are willing.
Therefore, we have a meeting scheduler at a variety of different customer interaction points, such as:
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Our follow up series
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Welcome emails
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Our knowledge base
Conclusion
Our company is very much in the early stages and we don’t actually have a lot of data at our disposal. We only have a few things such as activation times, usage, and some statistics from the website. However, even with such little data we can still make improvements on our customers experience that will probably affect the bottom line.
