Discover Sujan Patel’s tried-and-tested creative tips including getting customers from your customers and letting your customers write your copy for better distribution.
Key Takeaways:
- Increase your business by leveraging your existing customers.
- It’s cheaper and more effective to get more customers from your customers. These people that are walking and living testimonials for your company.
- Make sure to survey customers, identify their problems and thank them.
- Educate customers about your service, site etc.
- Remember that your customers are human.
“There’s B2B there’s B2C, but there’s human beings behind every acronym possible. There are people that you’re selling to, so never forget that.”
10 offbeat ways to grow your business
So, first and foremost I want to talk about growth hacking and growth. There is no magical bullets or magical tricks to help you gain traction and grow. You have to figure it out for yourself.
I want to leave you with a few tactics that you can go back to your office and tests and hopefully inspire you to do one thing, which is test. Hopefully you do another test, and another, and build this framework around rapid pace testing. That’s what’s gonna help you 10x your business and 10x growth.
1. NPS Survey your customers
First and foremost, NPS. NPS is a Net Promoter Score. You could survey your audience or your customers, and ask them how likely they would rate you or recommend you to your friend on a 1 to 10 scale. I find that in app gets a better response, but I don’t really care about the NPS number. What’s actually important to me, is the next step. It’s when whatever they rate you, you have an input box and they can give you feedback. The 1 to 8 are going to give you feedback. They’re gonna say it’s buggy, it’s great but I wish it did this… This is all critical feedback from people literally telling you what they want to see or what’s wrong. The 9–10s probably already love you and are your promoters. They are already telling other people about you and all you have to do, is ask them to do a little bit more. So, what I like to do is ask them for reviews.
- Like on directories, or the App Store, if you have an iOS app.
- Social shares: I just ask for Facebook shares or I asked for LinkedIn or Twitter shares. Whatever kind of traffic source social Channel you’re getting your best traffic from, ask for that.
- Lastly, ask for testimonials. You don’t even actually have to ask for testimonials as that input box gives you a testimonial. The company, asknicely.com has a super slick system, where it’s easy to create your testimonial page, and their NPS survey powers.
2. Thank your customers
At the end of the day, people are buying from other people. Human to human interaction gets lost on the web. It gets lost in B2B SaaS. It’s really about that one person or people that are buying from you and so thank them. A great example is Buffer. They thank their customers, and update them on what’s going on. For me, it’s the one invoice I actually open and read. So, thank your customers, be human, be genuine.
3. Thank your customers in real life
Thank your customers in real life. The internet is not the only place a transaction happens. Some human is sitting in their chair putting their credit card details on your site, and buying from you. Why not appeal to that human being? I found that when I hand wrote Thank you cards, my customers loved it. I kept doubling down in that area and started with swag bags and things.. It all started with just thanking people in real life.
4. Creating a community around your customers
The trick with growth, is if you can get your customers to talk to each other, and other potential customers, that is when things start happening where they’re not so forced from your marketing department. They’re not forced from you.
We created this support group on Facebook, and what ended up happening is, it became a way to share updates and fix people’s problems. What ended up happening, is customers started talking to each other, and started sharing tips on the way they did things, and talking about new features. It just became a great place to learn and talk to our customers.
5. Share with community
Our customers are small businesses, and at the end of the day, we would be communicating with our customers in that platform, and not necessarily talking about our software. When they’re in a Facebook group, they care about themselves. So, what we did, was just shared everything we knew. That’s the key to community. But also, don’t be afraid to go back into real life. Some of the best contacts I have made have been in real life.
6. Let your customers write your copy
Your jargon copy of what you think you do, is not what your customers are buying. They’re not necessarily buying whatever solution you’re selling, they’re buying a solution to whatever problem they have. Use a tool like Qualaroo and survey them, and ask your customers two questions.
- Describe our product, service or software in one sentence.
- What problem did you come here to solve or what solution are you looking for?
Our customers responded back to our questions saying scheduling takes too long, it takes me hours and I want to do it in minutes. I chose a headline that beats every single landing page variation I’ve tested, and we’ve done like 500 test last year. The reason it wins, is because this headline resonates with the customer.
7. Ask your customers to spread the word
Another thing people focus on is a referral program, an affiliate program or a rewards program to reward your customers, in order to spread the word or get new customers. Sometimes that’s overkill for a business. You’re not going to just automatically have a referral program that’s going to be successful. I like to start with just asking people to spread the word.
We started with an Intercom message. We AB tested all the different things that we could do essentially to to ask people to do something for us. We wanted to grow our word-of-mouth. People were already sharing their experiences, so I didn’t want to pay them immediately because you don’t have to pay the people that are already doing it organically. So, as a bootstrap founder, I was like let’s just test the variations of asking people to spread the word. So, what ended up sticking out of everything we asked them:
"love using narrow?" Tweet it
People started sharing it. We were getting around 7/8 of these shares every day, so it works. Then from there we’re going to iterate into a referral program, and all these things if they perform better, and we’ll test it with with Intercom.
8. Create resources, ebooks and tools for your customers
I still want to really focus on helping that customer. Customers have lots of problems. There’s a high search volume for the problems they have. So, we started solving these problems through content.
We made resources, books and tools. And, what ended up happening, is we built this 800,000 monthly unique visitor blog and content resource section. That is the cheapest way for us to acquire a customer, and it brings in the best customers. It brings in about 1500 new trials a month.
The other thing you can do, if you don’t have customers yet, or you don’t know want your customers want, use something like marketizator.com, and survey them. So, **you could essentially find out what people are interested in, and then you have their emails, and you can email them that content, **so you could get really personalized with that, and just ask your customers what they want to hear about.
9. Educate your customers
Sometimes, your customers may not understand how to do something, that is related to your product. We taught a lot of our customers for free or potential customers. It started working so well, and people wanted more, so we created a program. Our best customers come through this program, because they’re well educated on the subject. This is exact the 10-week framework that you really need to do, to use our product successfully
10. Swag your customers
I know we talked about sending customers gifts and thank you cards. We created these marketing t-shits, and people started wearing them. I was getting emails asking if people could get a t-shirt for their friend or their coworkers. I thought it was interesting that people wanted to wear my t-shirts. So, what ended up happening, is that people started recognizing our brand from the t-shirts. It all stems from people getting t-shirts. I gave thousands away, and it’s mainly because people would wear them in different organizations. Long story short, it made me a million bucks in new customers…
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