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15 Situations When It’s Time to Hire a Consultant or Freelancer  It feels great to build your business from the ground up. Along the way you learn quite a few new skills, try out new tools or apps that make it easy for ‘anyone’ to - build websites, create advertising, take ‘professional’ photography, send marketing emails, build a social following, fulfill orders, keep track of finances and accounting, manage projects, and basically “DIAY” - you got that - “do-it-ALL-yourself. Too bad no one has created that cloning app yet. You are still only 1 person - or maybe a very small team of people. And you are probably not an expert in all of the things needed to run your business. That’s not to say you didn’t do an excellent job up until this point putting it all together. But there is that point in every business where is it no longer sustainable to keep running with the DIAY mentality. Here is a list of key indicators it’s time to bring in outside help:
Fits like a glove At the end of day - hiring an external partner is about finding the right fit. You need to find not only someone with the right set of expertise and knowledge, but also someone with whom your personality jives; along with other members of your team that the person will be working closely with. I’ve seen relationships with outside partners fail simply because internal team members didn’t know how to work with the external team members. See how flexible that person is to meeting your needs, do they have a package that works in your budget and delivers a valuable return for your business? Do they have a way for you to ‘trial’ working together? How easy will it be to start working with this consultant? Hiring the wrong partner can be a costly mistake, but hiring the right partner will be a huge asset to your business, complimenting your strengths and filling your gaps, while showing you a valuable return. Stay tuned for our “Shake Off Your DIAY Mentality Series” where we will dive deeper into the what and how of the above indicators. To discuss your project (those areas you need to bring in outside expert for), fill in our project request form. Start to dispel the need in your organization for DIAY today.
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Most business leaders know that to have a successful business - having great customer engagement is super important. But, in reality - customer engagement isn’t a single metric. Before we layout how to improve your customer engagement metrics we have to define what it is. At the very simplest level - to be engaged means to be greatly interested or involved in an activity. So - which activities are most impactful for our customers to be involved with?  No doubt, you begin by thinking about metrics where you can track interest. Customer activities like opening or clicking emails, following you on social media, and visiting your website are quick and easy ways to trend engagement. Yet, engagement goes far beyond these activities - to your core KPI metrics. You can also gauge how involved a customer is by how big their basket is each time, how many orders they have placed with you, and how often they are telling their friends about you. The secret to improve all of these metrics: At the end of the day, engaged customers are those who see you as trying to understand and solve their problem(s). Okay, so what motivates your customer? Let’s take a look at the problem they are trying to solve by using your service and receiving your product. 1) Nurturing & Reinforcement They’ve already signed up to give your product a chance - how are you nurturing that experience and setting your customer up for success? You need to reinforce both how your service solves their problem AND help them use your service in the best possible way. In other words, keep them actively engaging in a relationship with you and seeing you as a true solution. 2) Brand Persona How do you fit in their little world? Who are you to them? This is one of the key ways to make your brand feel more human. In a primarily digital situation, customers still want to feel like they are interacting with people on the other end of the terminal. By knowing exactly how you want to come across to your customers, you can make sure that each interaction is consistent. Your brand persona is a set of personal human-like attributes - ie. friendly, humorous, formal, quirky assigned to a certain role. Is your brand a friend, a coach, a caregiver, a comedian? This helps set you up to use a particular tone and imagery that will appeal to your target customer and inspire interaction. 3) Personalization - no, not just {{firstname}} Why should they care about the activities you want them to be involved in? With each communication you send or action you ask customers to take - you should evaluate it from the customer’s perspective “WIIFM” (what’s in it for me). Customers won’t engage with activities they don’t see as valuable to them. If your ‘ask’ is only pushing a company objective, they will see through it and become less engaged each time they receive something that doesn’t take into consideration their interests. Whether it offers them a deal, highlights a new product, educational content, answers a question or helps them use the service better - this content has to be something that customers find value in and is relevant to them. By segmenting your customer lists and only sending relevant asks and activities - your customers will naturally find you more appealing than someone who ‘blasts’ everything to everyone. Beyond Relevance & Meeting a Need While the key steps to improve customer engagement come from evaluating each ‘customer ask’ from the 3 areas listed above some additional ways to improve your relationship with your customers are:
Why wait? Evaluate some of the recent ‘asks’ you’ve sent to customers or jump into your website user experience. Can you spot some customer turn-offs that might be making your customers less engaged? What small tweaks can you make right away. Do you have the time and ability to pull out your customer lists and look for ways to use segmentation? Do it! If not, it might be worth your while to bring in a customer engagement expert. Stay tuned for our next blog: "Your Business Needs Outside Help When..." For an evaluation of your current customer experience/retention strategies and where to focus, fill in our Communications Insights & Action Plan request. There are often two or three quick wins you can implement right away to start seeing your engagement metrics trend upwards. Let’s get started finding some revenue opportunities for you. Key Indicators That You Should Be Looking to Improve a Specific Growth Metric in Your Business  With all the tools available to support entrepreneurs these days, you probably have a wealth of data at your fingertips. That however, while it may seem like a good thing, can lead to paralysis if you don’t know where to focus. The top line rule for business metrics - a key performance indicator (KPI) should be just that - it should tell you at a high level how your business is trending over time and thus should be tracked on a regular and specific basis. A level below that are other data points that help you to troubleshoot problem areas within those KPI trends. Each business is unique, but in general the metrics that help you understand if your eCommerce Subscription business is healthy and growing on the topline have to do with 3 things - how many new customers are coming in, how many existing customers are sticking around, and how engaged your customers are with your business. You might need to improve your conversion rate if:
Why Conversion Rate Matters: For some portion of the new traffic driven to your website - you are paying for that traffic. Ideally, 40% or more of your traffic is organic/non-paid (but that can be tough if you have aggressive growth goals), 25% or more is from referrals, and the remainder is from paid traffic. In simplest terms, you want as many of these new visitors to complete your sign-up as possible - not just because that means more customers, but in order to have a lower CAC. Your CAC is calculated by dividing what it cost you to acquire customers in a certain time period divided by all customers acquired in that same time period. You are distributing your acquisition spend across those customers that were essentially free as well as those from paid channels to track this metric. The lower your CAC - the less time you need to break even on that spend; and the longer the revenue from that customer has to contribute so that it can be reinvested into your business’ growth. You need to ensure, no matter where the traffic comes from, that they feel comfortable understanding your product/service and buying from you. You might need to improve your retention rate if:
Why Retention Rate Matters: As we’ve discussed in previous posts - losing customers is expensive for a variety of reasons, but number one is the exponential impact that losing customers has on your top and bottom line revenue. Much like a retirement investment benefits by starting earlier, so does the retention of customers. Your investment in customers can’t grow to its full potential when those customers are falling out early and you are constantly chasing new customers to replace them. As noted related to conversion rate - each consecutive order the repeat customer places helps your business toward profitability. By looking at all of the factors that cause your customers to cancel and understanding the typical lifecycle of various cohorts (groups) of your customers you can find programs that will help to keep each of these cohorts to be better engaged. You will understand their problems and solve them at each point of their journey with you which will make them stickier and give them reasons logical and psychological for having a sense of loyalty to you. You might need to improve your customer engagement metrics if:
Why Customer Engagement Metrics Matters: Customer engagement doesn’t simply refer to your social media following or email rates - it has do with every touchpoint your customer experiences including how much they are willing to vote with their wallet. Depending on your business - how much customers spend on each order, if they are able to increase or add on to their subscription and how often they purchase from you matters as much as how often they read your blog, emails, enter contests, or share content with you. Most people have heard of customer personas when talking about your target market - but what is your brand persona - who are you to your customer? A friend, a mentor, an expert, a liason, a comedian… This matters because it’s how customers see you in solving their problem and how excited they get about hearing from you or telling friends about you. When you reach out to them regularly - do they care? Are you seeing areas that could use improvement in your business? Do you know how to address them? If not - it might be a good idea to get help from an expert in customer experience. Stay tuned for our next blog: "How to increase your customer engagement metrics" For an evaluation of your current customer experience/retention strategies and where to focus, fill in our Customer Insights & Action Plan request. There are often two or three quick wins you can implement within a few weeks to reduce churn or start winning back lost customers immediately. Let’s get started finding some revenue opportunities for you.  Dos and Don’ts of Subscription Reactivation Last week we discussed 5 proven win-back strategies to re-engage your lost customers. This week we will take a deeper dive into what to do and what not to when implementing these strategies. 1. The Automated Immediate Web Offer
2. Customer Care Phone+Email Follow-Up
3. Timely Re-Targeting Ads
4. Automated Email Series
5. Seasonal Email Campaign
Hopefully these tips give you a good starting block to get each of these campaigns going. Need help with the details - schedule time with an expert in re-engagement. Stay tuned for our next blog: "Which Growth Metrics Matter for Your Business & Are They Healthy?" For an evaluation of your current customer experience/retention strategies and where to focus, fill in our Customer Insights & Action Plan request. There are often two or three quick wins you can implement within a few weeks to reduce churn or start winning back lost customers immediately. Let’s get started finding some revenue opportunities for you. Proven strategies that work to win-back lost customers. Losing customers costs a lot of money! First there’s the lost revenue they were giving you, then there’s the replacement cost to acquire a new customer, along with the lost opportunity that they might refer you to friends and gain you new customers. So while you should be focusing on loyalty and retention up front, what can you do after you have lost a customer to win them back? Re-engagement strategies should be at a low cost to you, certainly less expensive than acquiring brand new customers. They might include the cost of an offer or very minimal ad dollars. The following strategies are all about timeliness and being relevant, and can and should be used all together if possible. That doesn’t mean you have to implement all at once - but as you implement each consecutive effort - remember to take into account how it fits in with your other tactics and messaging. Ultimately the key to re-engaging customers is to solve their problem or help them meet a goal. Somehow, the first time around you either actually fell short of doing this or the customer didn’t realize the value in your service and how it actually did help them. So, all the timely communications and appealing offers in the world won’t make a difference, unless you can answer this question for them – what will help them reach that goal or solve that problem while making their life easier and more convenient? Once you've figured out the answer to that question, here are 5 win-back strategies to use to convey that answer to your lost customers. 1. The Automated Immediate Web Offer The Strategy: Give an offer immediately upon a cancel. In general, this is about asking the customer to reconsider and give you a second chance to “solve their problem”. (Dos & Don'ts) Why It Works: Because this offer is immediate, you are asking them to re-evaluate why they cancelled and if it is worth the friction of finding a different solution to their needs. Customers may cancel when they are undecided about whether your service meets their needs and you simply need more time to show them. How It Fits: This is the first of several times the customer will hear from you asking them to give you back their business - you don’t want to seem desperate here - simply helpful and wanting to make sure that they really want to stop getting what you offer. 2. Customer Care Phone+Email Follow-Up The Strategy: Have your customer care team reach out to dissatisfied customers within a week or so of their cancellation - apologize for the negative experience. Customers often have unreported problems and simply cancel - even when you offer a guarantee. Your team should focus on helping them resolve that negative experience if they hadn’t already, and ask them if there is anything you can do to help them re-engage. (Dos & Don'ts) Why It Works: This outreach is the most personal - it addresses a problem that the customer had with your service or product. This effort feels like you are going the extra mile (and that’s because you are). This effort is certainly more time-consuming and manual than many of the other efforts, but will pay off in the impression you give customers. Even if they aren’t ready to re-engage immediately - this will influence how they react to other win-back efforts in the future. How It Fits: This is the second time many customers will hear from you depending on their cancel reason. The tone should be about repairing the relationship, but again not seem desperate for their business, simply that you want that friend back. 3. Timely Re-Targeting Ads The Strategy: Deliver re-targeting ads to your cancelled customers saying “We miss you”. Start these at 2 weeks post cancel and run through 6 weeks post cancel. Remind the customer about your brand and what they are missing now that they have cancelled. (Dos & Don'ts) Why It Works: It starts to remind customers when they are away from your site and emails about how they used to engage with you. These ads are timely, regardless of whether your subscription is weekly or monthly, this time frame gives them a chance to re-think that cancellation. It helps them evaluate how they are now solving that problem they originally intended to solve using your service, and whether that is working for them or not. How It Fits: This is either the second or third time customers are hearing from you, depending on if they had a problem your customer care team reached out about. This effort is simply a reminder; a way to stay present in the customers realm of solutions. While you will likely see lower reactivation from this campaign alone, this is part of the nurturing process that will make your latter outreach that much more effective. 4. Automated Email Series The Strategy: Setup an automated series of emails, starting at 45 days post cancel, that give those inactive customers a special offer for reactivating. With each email give them a short, concise reason why or how you help them solve their problem. (Dos & Don'ts) Why It Works: At this point your customers have gotten a taste for life without you; have they found another solution to meet their needs? If they have tried a few other ways to solve their problem, each of these may not have worked for them either - this is a good time for you to swoop back in and help them re-understand how your solution will do it. How It Fits: This is likely the fourth of the various ways customers might see you trying to re-engage them. It is timely to their personal experience - it’s been long enough, but not too long to ask them for their business again. You want to be seen as the solution they didn’t realize was actually the best. 5. Seasonal Email Campaign The Strategy: Identify your top season and promote a big reactivation campaign with a great deal to your longer cancelled customers. Add urgency to your campaign by keeping the timeline short. Take this opportunity to give the customer a refresh on why your service solves their problem - some of these customers may have been latent for quite some time. (Dos & Don'ts) Why It Works: The timing of this outreach should align with a time of year that they need your service more than ever and will remind them of that. The offer is too good to pass up. While they may have come back you on their own, you want to help them feel valued, make them know you want them back and want to help them be successful - you are their partner in solving that problem. How It Fits: This is one of the longer-term outreach strategies you have to keep customers engaged. It should happen only once per year, at most twice per year, otherwise you will start to see this campaign become less and less effective over time. Bonus Strategy - This one is a little more costly, but adds a unique touch that will get noticed - use a service like Navistone Personalized Post-Cards to send a timely physical note like “We’re sorry to see you go, but when you’re ready to come back we’ll be here waiting. Thanks again for being our customer.” Timing on this would be most well received within a few days of the customer cancelling. An Evergreen Strategy for Re-Engagement? Okay so you might ask - how do I keep latent/lost customers who don’t reactivate in any of these efforts engaged for my next annual campaign. You don’t want to drop off the map only to be heard from once a year. This is where your content marketing comes in. You should be sending these customers, along with your unconverted prospects, valuable content at least once a month. Content that helps them solve their problem or entertains them; gives them a reason to feel a connection with your brand. These emails should have an ever-present call to action to re-activate or subscribe. You will see a few customers trickle in from these communications, but the goal is to use those communications to nurture them throughout the year. Don’t have the capacity to create this strategy for your brand, much less to implement that strategy - schedule time with an expert in re-engagement. Next time, we will go deep into the dos and don'ts of each strategy above. Stay tuned for our follow-up blog: "In-Depth Tips on Win-Back Strategies That Work". For an evaluation of your current customer experience/retention strategies and where to focus, fill in our Customer Insights & Action Plan request. There are often two or three quick wins you can implement within a few weeks to reduce churn or start winning back lost customers immediately. Let’s get started finding some revenue opportunities for you.
Help Your New Subscribers Succeed by Setting Expectations Early
When human beings better understand how things will progress and how they need to engage with an experience, the outcomes are generally more successful for everyone involved.
So while the element of receiving a surprise is often welcome, knowing more about the overall experience is comforting. Here are 10 questions you should make sure that your subscription customer understands before they receive that first order.
Where & When to Answer:
Now that you’ve gotten your list of answers to the questions above - think about creative, relevant and timely ways to distribute these answers. Try not to bombard the customer with all the answers in one go or they will be overwhelmed (unless it’s in your FAQs). Perhaps you confirm their first order arrival date in several places - on site throughout the checkout process, in a confirmation email, in a reminder email if there will be some time between placing the order and when it arrives. Can you send a shipment confirmation email when the first order is on the way that helps them with the logistical questions of their first order and reinforces how it’s going to help/benefit their goal to solving a problem? Can you include a welcome note that while making them feel good also helps them with a few more of the questions above? For instance tells them how they can benefit by referring their friends and family. Can you send a follow-up email to check in on how they liked their first order and remind them about the timelines for second order delivery and billing? By making it very apparent what is happening each step of the way and how you will help your customers they will see that your brand goes just a little bit beyond other brands and they will give you their loyalty because the experience is easier and more comfortable than elsewhere. Not sure how to craft this messaging in a way that will nurture those customers along or create processes to make this doable for yourself - schedule time with an expert in new customer onboarding. Stay tuned for our next blog: "5 Ways to Win-Back Lost Customers"
For an evaluation of your current new customer onboarding experience and where to focus, fill in our New Customer Insights & Action Plan request. There are often two or three quick wins you can implement within a few weeks to lower churn immediately. Let’s get started finding some revenue opportunities for you.
Last week we talked about why onboarding new customers around their first order is a great place to focus your retention energy. In our example scenario, you could score yourself bonus revenue to the tune of $39K. It's time to get started with some actionable tips! Here are our top 3 quick wins that will help you start to reduce your churn rate. 3 ideas to implement right away Let’s start with order 1 - here are a few simple ways to get started focusing on customer onboarding. Keep in mind that these are basic ways to dip a toe in the water - you don’t need to have it perfect to get started and you don’t necessarily want it perfect either. Why? It may inhibit you from being able to easily test or change direction if you learn something from customer behavior or feedback.  Quick wins:
Your next steps:
When you feel stuck and unable to move forward with the measurement or implementation of these programs, you are in the perfect spot to hire a specialist. Don’t forget to read our follow-up post: "10 Answers New Subscribers Need - Help Your New Subscribers Success by Setting Expectations Early" For an evaluation of your current new customer onboarding experience and where to focus, fill in our New Customer Insights & Action Plan request. There are often two or three quick wins you can implement within a few weeks to lower churn immediately. Let’s get started finding some revenue opportunities for you.
Is this what your retention data looks like? Let’s look at the common retention curve in subscription model businesses:  A pretty dismal story for subscription businesses, right? Wrong! It looks like opportunity - now let’s take a peek at a sample of how that curve might change if you simply get more of your ‘trial’ customers to get a second order. Instead, you could make it look like this:  Why you should spend time and energy on onboarding (hint: $$$) Let’s pretend the price of your subscription for consecutive orders is $49.99 / order and you are acquiring 100 new customers per month. By simply improving first to second order retention by 15%, you’ve now scored yourself $39,000 in additional annual revenue by getting more of your customers to receive 9 orders. But that's a conservative ROI. You can do the math - the number almost doubles to $72K if they stay with your brand even longer - which you can assume they will do. Note your churn rate levels out around order 10. While this gives you a place to focus your retention energies - onboarding doesn’t stop at order 1! So what additional ways to delight your customers between each early order can you deploy to install a sense a value and loyalty to further increase revenue? Cheers to opportunity sleuthing! A word of caution...Keep it simple...at first. You are running with low staff and a lot of tasks to attack in each order cycle. So, what are some quick wins you can try out right now? Don’t forget to read our follow-up post “Tangible Quick Wins: 3 Customer Onboarding Tactics That Will Score You Significant Payoff” For an evaluation of your current new customer onboarding experience and where to focus, fill in our New Customer Insights & Action Plan request. There are often two or three quick wins you can implement within a few weeks to lower churn immediately. Let’s get started finding some revenue opportunities for you. |
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