How MeetEdgar reduces churn by scaling a personal onboarding experience and building a community

Megan McMullin

|

Outreach Lead

of

MeetEdgar
EP
39
Megan McMullin
Megan McMullin

Episode Summary

Today on the show, we have Megan McMullin, Outreach Lead at MeetEdgar.

In this episode, we discussed in-depth how MeetEdgar uses office hours, webinars and educational content as a channel to talk to customers at scale, gather feedback, build a robust community, and ultimately improve retention.

Megan also shares the exact formula MeetEdgar uses to measure the effectiveness of their efforts in reducing churn, how she passes the qualitative data collected to the product team, and how they use Facebook ads as an engagement and reactivation channel for their users.

As usual, I'm excited to hear what you think of this episode, and if you have any feedback, I would love to hear from you. You can email me directly on Andrew@churn.fm. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter.

Mentioned Resources

Highlights

Time

Why is customer onboarding especially important? 00:02:14
How Megan get customers to get their “first win” on MeetEdgar 00:03:00
How Megan identify and build a relationship with power users at scale via office hours 00:06:50
Megan’s typical conversation with customers and how she navigates it in the office hours 00:10:50
Building the community via “content batching” 00:13:50
The formula Megan uses to measure the metrics and effectivity of the courses and office hours 00:22:32
How Megan passed the feedback from these sessions to the product team 00:26:12
What Megan would do to turn a bad churn situation around in a company 00:32:33
Utilizing Facebook ads as a channel to put content in front of your audience 00:35:57

Transcription

Andrew Michael
Hey, Megan, welcome to the show.

Megan McMullin
Hey, thanks so much for having me today.

Andrew Michael
It's great to have you. For the listeners. Megan is the outreach lead at MeetEdgar. MeetEdgar is a bootstrapped social media automation tool that helps small businesses succeed in social media marketing. There are fully remote team and have built the business up to 4 million a year are serving over 7000 customers. Megan leads the execution of onboarding activities and helps them Teach customers how to win new customers, create raving fans and nurture an engaged community. Prior to me they'd go Megan worked in customer success at Captain you with a focus on customer onboarding. So my first question for you, Megan, is why the focus on onboarding and why do you think it is important?

Megan McMullin
Yeah, great question. So onboarding, especially when it comes to software where no one wants to take a huge amount of time to set it up, especially a software like ours where we promise saving you time. onboarding just gives you not only the ability to build trust with your followers right from the start, get them to their first win right away. But it also allows for you to make sure people are getting set up from the beginning in the way that it's going to help them grow with the software, depending upon their goals. So we've found that upfront, putting in the time and putting in a little bit more effort of hands on effort really sets people up to stay with us much longer in the future.

Andrew Michael
Cool. So you mentioned a couple of things I want to touch on and let's take them in order. I think The first thing that you mentioned was get customers to their first win. What does that mean? What does it look like? And how do you get them there?

Megan McMullin
Yeah, great question. So it's this concept that people are going to be really excited when they see results. And they see success right away when you're marketing to your customers. Typically, you want to market the results they're going to get and you want to deliver on that right away. So getting people to their first one, when it comes to our software is essentially getting you to send out your social media posts right away to get our tool to send it out and for you to see the benefit of not having to log into your accounts and actually do that work. However, it takes some time to get set up getting your social media updates into our software and setting up the schedule. And with our software, it really comes down to teaching people the strategies in order to do that the quick so getting people to their first win for us means paying attention to what our power users do, which is they batch their content and they make sure they do all of this in a really streamlined fashion. So if we can teach that to our users at the beginning, and make sure that people are getting these behaviors that we see people who are with us longer take part in, it really has led to us making sure that we can get people excited to continue to build up their libraries and continue to use the software since we do have a monthly subscription for them. So these behaviors month over month, but we'll just go ahead and compound and make sure that people continue to be excited with the workflows that our software is promising them.

Andrew Michael
Cool. So I was going to take them in order, but you've opened up a few other things till we get to that order now. So the next thing you mentioned, was the concept of power users and focusing on what they're doing. How do you first of all identify who these users are? And then why do you focus on what they're doing?

Megan McMullin
Yeah, so I think it's all about finding the bright spots and not building things in a vacuum. So many people say not to do but it is hard to kind of reach out and really, truly understand the mindset behind the Users who stay with you the longest. So identifying power users really goes into looking, you know, the lifetime value of the people who are staying with you the longest. Those are the people you want to look out what they're doing. And if you're not paying attention to what they're doing, rather, you're just paying attention to what you want people to do, you might be missing out on a huge segment of users who could benefit from different behaviors. So say perhaps we think that you should set up your categories in our system first. However, we've recently realized that people who get their time slots on the schedule first without customizing their categories are actually the people who stay a little bit longer. And this goes into really digging deep not only and doing things like customer interviews, but also just looking at the data of how people are setting up using different tools to do that. can lead like I said, two different ways on how we want to educate and how we want to teach people and without that it's just something that we looking at our software every single day might have missed saying, you know, this flow makes sense for us. But that's not the flow that the people who are selling Staying with the longest, or who will get set up the quickest are taking. So it's really being so conscious of those behaviors of what your users are actually doing, not what you want them to do. That makes the biggest difference. And I'll tell you, you know, we find that doing things that might be a little bit more hands on to gather this information that might take a little bit more time. Not only gives us that information, but it builds a stronger relationships where things like word of mouth marketing from these power users to when we get them on the phone when we sit down with them and do screen shares, to look at kind of what they're doing and offer them some compensation station in return, of course. But having that connection and having that trust built up between them actually being able to talk to us and have a face behind the software has really led to some great word of mouth marketing for us as well.

Andrew Michael
I can imagine. But what also comes to mind is 7000 customers or at least over 7000 customers. How do you scale this How are you able to effectively be able to get on the phone with these customers? Like, what? What tricks? Do you have it needed?

Megan McMullin
Yeah, great question. So we are a very small customer support team, there's just two of us who work with 7000 users, like you said. So we have to be really intentional of how we use our time and educating people. So there is a few things that we've done. You know, with the trends of online learning these days. One thing that we've really set up in order to give people their own ability to master the software obviously, is a Help Center. But beyond that, we want to make sure we have that high touch and have that community feel with people, but without losing a ton of time or having to hire a ton more customer support people. So what we've done is established daily office hours where we go in for an hour and we open up just a zoom call, we open up on a program that we use called demio. Whatever means works for you. You can set up an hour where you're going to be in there on that screen share and your customers can pop in and out during the hour, just as They're questions to see a demo of something, to chat about the goals that they have and how best to set up the software. And we find us doing this for an hour allows us to reach between five and six people in that hour where before we were doing one on one calls to set this up, which is a little bit harder to scale, obviously, with that many people, and it gives us the opportunity to reach people every single day. So if you just have a question, you want to pop into you and ask for 15 minutes, or if you want to stay for the whole time and listen to what other people have to ask. We see that it provides a sense of community and some people will just pop in there to see, you know, hey, what do I not know what questions do other people have, that I might not actually be able to? To realize as well. And this not only allows us to educate our users, but during that time, it allows us to see you know what questions they're asking. It allows us to ask them questions about what industry they're in, and all this stuff that helps us personalize our app more, helps us personalize the user emails and how we're communicating to people. Lets us ask questions. As you know, in our user updates, would you rather read about workflows or ever watch a video about how to do it so that everything we're doing to educate our users can really be tailored to what they want. So again, it doesn't have to be something where you're doing one on one calls all the time. And doing this one hour out of every day has really helped to us not only be able to feed this information back to our product team, and become that bridge with them and become that bridge with the marketing team to let people know, you know, these are the users who are succeeding, this is who we should be reaching, to really make an impact. All of this stuff can be brought together. And when you put like customer support in the seat of really having the responsibility of reducing churn and thinking about the ways that it can all work with your entire app and lifecycle. You know, beyond that, we do give people the opportunity to be educated with stuff like our office hours, we have something called Egor University, which we've seen a really great outcome from, because we're not only teaching how to use our app and that but it's a self serve. courses that are continuously being added to you about marketing strategies. So our ideas, this is a value that comes with your subscription to our app. And if we're continuously adding to it, you'll see that value of being educated on the broader side of marketing and social media. And that's just a value add so that when you're thinking about your monthly payments, it's not just for the app software that saving you time, but you're also continuously being kept up to date on marketing strategies. And we all know these days online education and courses are so hot topic and they're definitely the way that people are liking to learn. So paying attention to the trends going on in your industry to can really lead you to ways that you can produce these kind of high touch but scalable options of educating your customers, customers to get to those wins.

Andrew Michael
Absolutely. And I love the the concept of the office hours as well. It's something that I haven't actually heard of very often, like you hear it in different other circumstances where people have open office hours and you can go in But specifically in replace, or sort of like the one to one book a call with their sales or support, our success? rep is quite an interesting concept. And I can see as well, like, how enables you to scale those conversations quite a bit more. What are some of the things you're trying to do to leverage these conversations then as well with your customer? So you mentioned like having a really positive word of mouth as a result of it and walk us through what like a typical conversation would look like? And then our like, what would be some of the questions that would be asked, and how do you sort of maybe even deal with like you said, five or six people in a call? How are you dealing with, like multiple people on a call at the same time, and just give us a little bit more detail?

Megan McMullin
Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, it definitely depends how many people are in there. Sometimes we'll give access for people to have their microphone on if it's just like three people, and typically that works well. Otherwise, we'll just keep it as a chat feature if there are a bunch of people on that day. But typically how it starts out is we just ask people to you know, say what industry you're in which Again allows us to collect this information, but we don't have to put it on our page for where you're signing up, which oftentimes can lead to less signups because you're asking for that extra field. So we found asking this in these calls is a lot better of a way for us to gain this information. And then we ask people where they are in their life cycle. Typically, before the calls, I will go ahead and check out the accounts of the people who have signed up for that day. I'll go in there, and I'll see kind of where they are. But I also like to hear you know, if they do feel like they're brand new, or what questions they have, and then typically, I'll just go off one by one. And you know, you do find that people especially, who are there really do like to learn from the other questions. So don't stress too much about the fact that you're going to answer someone else's question. They might not be there, you know, it is for an entire hour. So those people who aren't interested in the answers, you can just say, you know, hey, I'm going to go through these questions in this order. Come back and when you hear yours and people can still be doing other things on their computer until they hear their question, with the screen sharing Especially, it's very nice to be able to have people, you know, direct you to make sure that you're seeing kind of the flow that they're taking as well. So asking people, you know, when you log in here, where are you going first to kind of have them actually describe it to you can be really helpful if you are on a call with fewer people. So you can see the workflow and not kind of lead them in the same way, again, feeding that back into the design of the app to make it more intuitive for our customers, stuff like that. But typically, the conversations just go with a quick setup demo. And then I asked her the questions that are a little more specific on the advanced features that people might like to know. And then beyond that, we really like to leverage these customer conversations by bringing some of the people like I was mentioning our power users into doing sessions with us. So like I said, we're really high touch in a scalable way and that we do office hours every day. We also do something called content batching parties once a month, which is where we send out an invite for everyone to come on in to a webinar software called demio, where we can all hang out and we can take some time to actually write our status updates together. This is the main reason we do this is because we know we serve a lot of small teams and one person team so that people can then come together and have that sense of community that they don't get when they're working alone. And it also leads us again, to have this way of saying, Hey, this is really the efficient way of loading your account and really using our software. And we're teaching people like you could do this every single day. But if you come once a month, do this with us. You're not only gaining a community and being able to brainstorm, but you're also setting up the software and the way it's going to save you the most time. And then beyond that, we do things called coffee chats where we invite in customers to go ahead and talk about something that they are especially a expert in. Last week, we did one on social media mindset for one of our customers, or she uses our software but she is also keynote speaker, just on mindset stuff. And she came on in and talked about that and we found that this is really Great because we've had that connection with her. We know she's a power user, and she has something to offer our community. And the shortcut sessions are just smaller 20 minute periods where we invite our entire list whether your user, or whether you're just on our marketing list as a lead, we invite everyone to these. And we find that this is a really great cross between being able to bring in our existing customers, as well as our leads, which builds trust so much faster than anything that we have seen, because our existing customers will start to talk about the features they like and start to talk about things amongst each other. And then the leads who are there can start to kind of see those conversations play out and decide, you know, wow, this community is something I'd like to be a part of. And all these things, like I said, Go into doing the office hours or an hour once a day, the content matching parties are usually an hour and a half once a month. And these short cut sessions are run short cut coffee, coffee breaks around once a month for 20 minutes. So adding all that up, it is really not that much time. To have these huge outreach campaigns to like you mentioned 7000 users that we have an over 100,000 subscribers on our email list, but giving them these opportunities to come and have those one on one connections with us so that our website isn't just kind of faceless, but that we're really proving, you know, that we are worth sticking with over competitors over those who might do the same thing as us. Because of this high touch ability to get in touch with us beyond just the email beyond just the things that typical kind of software companies are doing. So it's thinking outside of the box and thinking how you can have these conversations with each segment of your audience in a really high touch, yet scalable way.

Andrew Michael
Yes, you mentioned with each segment of your audience as well. And so just get this right and understand who you're reaching with these various calls and things. So coffee chats you mentioned would be somebody it's a power user talk about an area of expertise, and that would open up to basically everyone anyone you have as leaders on your new Did this was a customer will use them? Then you have the content batching Sessions is that for users and customers, which is customers? Great

Megan McMullin
question that is just for users, which we do leverage and kind of our marketing as well being like, Hey, this is something that you're going to get if you come on in. So that is kind of gated to just if you're a subscriber to our software.

Andrew Michael
Cool. And then the office hours in is that just customers again, or is that open to needs as well?

Megan McMullin
Yeah, so that's just customers as well. We do have an automated demo setup for our leads. We have found that we did one on one kind of demos with customers before but we didn't find that it really added a lot of value to selling the software and it was kind of high touch. So we decided that instead of doing these one on one demos and being more like salesy towards it, we're just going to do an automated demo if you want to see the product. And then after you're part of the product, then you can come to these office hour sessions where we can get a little bit further into the setup sessions.

Andrew Michael
Very cool. So The next thing is where you mentioned, like the content batching. And I love this concept sort of taking one of the like main tasks, typically that might seem mundane for the everyday user and like building community around it and sort of maybe even motivating people to get this done as a group sort of having peer pressure to some extent. What was the idea behind this? And like, what are some of the things that happened on a typical session like this?

Megan McMullin
Yeah, great question. So one of the main ideas behind this was that, you know, we promised even you about eight hours a week on your social media, and you had a lot of our users, we were finding in our feedback responses or cancellation feedback. A lot of people were saying, you know, it takes too long to set up I just don't have the time right now, since we do market towards usually small businesses and one person marketing teams. A lot of the feedback for people dropping off in their first month was I don't have the time to get set up right now. So brainstorming this in a way of saying, Okay, how can we keep these people past their one month period because Really, if you stay with the software for three months, you're going to see a ton more returns if you're building up your content in this way. So it was just an idea born out of the feedback, we saw on our cancellation survey that we have, saying if we can get people to understand all they have to do is write social media updates once a month, batch it out. This not only allows you to take a task that you might be doing every single day and you might be task switching a lot. So you're losing a lot of time during that. But it also allows us then to take these users who might have been feeling like I never get my questions answered when I email support in the past not with us but with other products. You know, they might have this mindset being like customer support people helping with software, they might have had terrible experiences before and this allows us to prove to them you know, know you can come in and ask your questions live get this answered, and really see that high touch, ability to say you know, we are a community here we are here to not only support you in just being an automated Soft, Claire, but like you said, getting the right mindset and getting the right efficiencies in your business overall. Because really, when it comes down to it, our values at me, Edgar are internal values. One of them is value for value. So the value we offer, we want it to match the value they offer, as well as the value that the company offers should match the value that the employee feels. So this is a really important value for us. And we truly do live by it. So it's just something else that is really driven by the core concepts and the mission of our product internally and externally. And we really hope our community feels that in a way because when it comes down to it, you know, people are going to remember how you made them feel as a software company far more than they're going to remember just a random email teaching them how to do something. So these are hour and a half typically, that we go in there, you know, people can pre submit questions. So we make sure we have a list of questions where we're just going through and answering sort of setup questions for people if they have them, and then teaching the concept of batching things out and doing the math within the software saying, you know, this is how many updates you need to load this month, if you want this many to send out on social media, so we help them do the math there. And then we just brainstorm ways that they can keep a consistent story and have a really consistent social media schedule going out that provides their value, the value to their followers being that they're really diverse and consistent social media feed to follow. And just talking about all of these things that might not be really top of mind when you're using just software, you know, thinking about your whole business, and how this software can really help to streamline other efficiencies that way, and we've seen really great returns. And you know, these parties also allow us to see, okay, if the person signed up, and they didn't come, let's do some more personalized outreach to them. If the people signed up, and after the party, they didn't actually add content to their account so we can compare how much content they had before and how much after that's another signal to us to pay attention to. Okay. This cohort of people didn't add content after the content. batching party that's month, let's reach out with a little bit more of a motivational email. Let's reach out with a little more support with a video, you know, loom video showing them how to do something, let's reach out offering them you know, access to office hours and make sure that they know we're here for them, because they're going to be a little more at risk than the people who actually took the steps to add content. So it's a really great thing for us to keep an eye on kind of our at risk people as well, before and after these parties.

Andrew Michael
Very nice. And that actually leads me to the next question I had was, how are you going about measuring the effectiveness of this? So again, it's like pretty high touch but you're able to scale it and reach a large audience. What are some of your measured like metrics for success? And how do you sort of know that you're on the right track when it comes to these different calls that you set up and parties?

Megan McMullin
Yeah, absolutely. So overall, we look at making sure that the people who are coming to these are staying upgraded month over month that way, but mostly we kind of break it up into lead indicators being You know, if they're adding that piece of content to their account, that is a great sign to us that this works because we know that is an indicator people will stay along long around longer. If they've added at least 10 pieces of content within the first week. We look at things like if you do a drop off and you do not add things, you know, again, we look at ways of being able to reach out to you to see if you'll come to an office hour session if you didn't do anything after your content batching party. So again, a whole kind of slew of making sure these all work together. But the main things we look at is is people at our people adding things to their account, because we know that allows people to stay along around longer and we look at the lifetime value. Do people who attend these actual workshops with us stay along around longer than the same cohort who signed up at the same time but didn't attend this and we find that they do and we find that overall there are adding more content to their accounts. So that is a really great way of us saying okay, this is worth our time and investment and making sure that we have this kind Actually with our community, we also do a survey at the end of any of them to get a little bit more qualitative feedback. We just have a Google forum setup that asks them, you know, what teacher did you love learning about today? You know, do you have any feedback for what you'd like to learn next time, which helps us inform our content strategy quite a bit more, as well. And we asked them for any other feedback sort of about the actual party. So it's a really great way, not only to kind of see the language that people are using, and to get that qualitative feedback, but month over month looking and making sure that these people are staying around and trying to make it beneficial for people to actually come back every single month so that they can come in here and say, Oh, look, I see that this person from last month isn't here too. I love chatting with them. Like let me chat with them again. So that's really our goal is again to keep this as high touch as possible. And we found that it is an amazing differentiator when we get feedback on you know, I love your customer support team. I love this. This is a reason that will stay with Edgar rather than the To a cheaper option. So it also allows us again, that value for value saying, okay, we feel good about our price point of our app, because we're offering these other things that people are seeing some really great returns on and they don't have to spend the time searching around for these things. We can save them the time and teach them right then and there.

Andrew Michael
Excellent. I love that. I think there's like so much value. That's often one of those things when it comes to community. And it's like, what is the ROI. And it's very difficult to sort of pinpoint the exact ROI. But when you start to lay out all the different benefits that you get from it in terms of feedback, fitting into the product, being close to your customers, the viral word of mouth comes out of it becomes sort of a no brainer. But also I love how you've thought through sort of the measurement process and you've taken sort of retention and churn as a lagging metric and try to understand what were those inputs were impacting it and figuring out some of those key driving actions, for example, like adding content and the amount that they're adding and really been building around your calls and the practices that you do to try and drive these actions and measure the success of those actions against it. So sounds like you've got a really, really great formula going there. Currently. The one thing I also wanted to ask them was, you mentioned earlier that you you serve as sort of like the bridge between the product and the marketing team. Maybe you want to talk us through how you leveraging these calls then and what is sort of the process to collect and like, pass this feedback in this input on to the various teams?

Megan McMullin
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that we really kind of look out when it comes to especially getting this feedback out to our marketing team is just what does our community want to learn and what do they actually have struggle with? You know, this idea that it takes about seven touch points in order to build brand loyalty and trust with your followers is something that we consider very strongly when it comes to getting a lead in and our customer support support team and our marketing team. work really closely to nurture to make sure you're in the right mindset and you've been educated properly before you buy our software. So you're ready to hit the ground running and feel like you're getting the most value out of it right away. So one thing that we've done, that has really come really a great Long Way is making sure that in our marketing emails, that we're putting the access to these things like shortcut sessions and mentioning things like our content matching party, in the marketing emails to our whole list again, to add value. Another thing that we did was we actually set up a program that's called social by seven for leads. And what this is, it's a seven day email course that you can opt into. So we use it as a list builder, but we use it in a way that we're able to send out lessons that we've taken from what our actual power users are doing and what kind of strategy they have come up with within their account to build trust with their own followings and to sell on social media. And we teach them these lessons in a seven The email series that's really actionable, we give people many action points to to actually go ahead and tackle so that they can see results right within that email. Right after they take the action that was presented to them in that email, social bicep and again, goes only to our leads. And we also have a Facebook group that people can come in and interact with, just for our leads there. And after that seven day course, we then nurture them a little bit further until we actually present them with an offer for our software. And this was really born again, out of some of these things that we were seeing people who are churning and who were weren't staying longer than a month just really didn't get some of the concepts like how to batch your content, how to create consistency on social media, and how to create a really diverse social media posting schedule. So we found, you know, these were the main things coming up on our cancellation feedback. These were the main things we were struggling to kind of teach in these content, bachelor parties and office hours in a way that we felt like we are repeating the same thing over and over again. So feeding that information back and really getting into the minds of who our ideal customer is, and where are they, when they buy, you know, when they buy? Are they ready? And what kind of actual things are they coming into the software with that's helping them succeed? So noticing these things of who's succeeding? Who's not? What mindset are they in? What action are they taking, if we can get people ready in that seven day email course before we try to sell to them, we have a much better opportunity to them be able to keep them, which is much easier to do to keep that customer than continuously try to sell to them without them being in the right mindset. So that's one way that these things have really helped guide our marketing strategy quite a bit, for building up a great opportunity for people to be successful right away. With our product, we have a lot of different ways where we feed these things back and we have a slack room dedicated to just making sure that we're putting in the feedback from what questions and what industry people said that they were in when they come to these parties, we also have a really great Trello board that anyone on the team can contribute to us feature requests. And it's very much so done in a way that we look at the majority of feature requests coming in from our customers and seeing, you know, are these things that are going to actually help? You know, what are the signals versus what's just noise on what people think that they want, I'm working through it with our team. And our team is really great at making sure that we're staying prioritized in what's going to help the customer rather than what we think is going to help the customer. So just relying on these up the ability to communicate to this to our team, especially being a remote team here at Edgar, using things like a Trello board in order to storyline out what features and why people will use it, as well as kind of software's that are more task oriented like Asana to go on in there and make sure that everyone from our team, all of the stakeholders have had their voice heard and why and how to build this feature that people want has become really useful as well. We use other things like hot jar in order to really see where on the pages, people are clicking stuff like that. But really the things that inform kind of are a great bridge between having a customer support feel like they have a voice. And this has really helped our team, the customer experience and support team to be able to have real discussion with people, you know, you don't want to write into a customer support team and feel like they're just saying, Okay, thanks for your feedback, it really helps us go a little bit deeper and say, Oh, I love this feature idea. Can you expand on that a little and tell me, you know, what circumstance would you use this in, you know, present me with kind of this real life example and stuff like that. So we can not only let that inform, is this really important for our ideal customer? Is this something that's just going to be used by one person or will it be used by the majority of our people and also helps us inform you know, who these customers are if we feel like we have a say in the support team and making these arguments and making These priority decisions for our product team, it helps us have those conversations in a way that we really want to dig deep. And it just helps us get to know our customer user base that we can feed back into the persona that our marketing team is working off of writing towards and producing video and stuff towards.

Andrew Michael
Very cool. Sounds like you got a good processes going on all around and really good alignment in terms of understanding who the ideal customer profile is, which then makes it so much easier to prioritize and ensure you feeding back the right inputs to the different teams. So I have another question I ask everyone on the show. And this question is basically if you had to start a new role at a company and you moved in and you saw like churn and retention wasn't great, and you were tasked with turning things around, what would be some of the things that you're doing the first three months to get results for the company?

Megan McMullin
Absolutely. Great question. So I think first and foremost, it's thinking about how you can have real conversations with real people. I think that this is the biggest thing like you were just mentioning, whoever is aligning with their customer best is going to be the person who's able to speak to that customer in a way that they want to be heard and felt like this software, this product was made exactly for them. So I think first and foremost, any way that you can have real conversations, whether it is doing like a town hall meeting or something with an open format, where anyone can join or sitting down looking for ways to be in contact with like three power users, three at risk users and three people have cancelled or something like that. So you can get an overall feel of the things that are working, not working. The things people are ambivalent about versus excited about and getting a good idea there. I think next, it's doing things and thinking outside of the box on how you can communicate different things to your customers, you know, like, we do user emails that help to educate people. We have an onboarding sequence, obviously to help educate people in the email form, but we also know that not everyone opens Up email. So looking for other ways that you can start to really get in touch with and educate your customers. So we do things like we do Facebook ads to our users. So we spend money for retention on that end, that we run ads in order to show people how to do different workflows, or different suggestions on content to add stuff like that. So just putting, looking for ways to maybe put a little bit of money around reaching people outside of just user email else, again, whether that's doing the webinar, or whether that's doing Facebook ads, stuff like that. And third, and third, I would definitely look for ways for how you can make your product be a little more integrated with the person's entire day. So when someone is about to use your product, think about what they've done before, what they're going to do after it and think about how your product really fits into that because if you're just thinking about making a product for someone when they're just using it, you're not going to think how it fits into their whole entire day. So thinking how it streamlines a little bit. further beyond when they're just using it can help not only with your communication, but can help you sit in the shoes of your user a little bit and say, Okay, what features would make this easier? Whether it's just communicating your onboarding sequence, or whether it's actually changing the design of your app, again, thinking about kind of a whole day of your ideal customer.

Andrew Michael
Yeah, I love so much of what you said now, and just on the last points as well in terms of making sure you're aligned with what their day looks like. I think also this is also something a misconception sometimes when people try to look at churn and retention, that perhaps looking at the daily retention rates, when really maybe the natural frequency of use case of the tool would be weekly or even monthly. So having a clear picture of what their customers are doing on a day to day basis on a weekly and monthly will give them a good indication of where they should be fitting in with that flow and how do you stay relevant and make sure that people are thinking of you when they need you. The one thing you mentioned as well, which I'm super keen to hear a little bit more About see, we're running a bit on time, but I wanted to find out more was using Facebook ads to put content in front of existing customers? What spawned this idea? And how is it working out for you?

Megan McMullin
Yeah, great question. So of course, we have a strategy on Facebook ads to get brand awareness out to those who might not know about our solution, or those who we think are ready to buy so well market with Facebook ads, but it really came down again to the fact that we were seeing on our onboarding email sequence says, and our user updates a lower email open rate than we would really hope for, we really want to make sure that people are seeing our new features, learning about how to best use and optimize our older features. But when people don't open their emails all the time, it's a little bit hard to be like, I want you to make sure you have this information. So our idea is, you know, if people don't want to consume our content, or don't open their emails very often, how else can we get this content out to them because again, it's not what's best for us. It's what's best and how and wait Your Community consumes content that you need to think about. So our community, we do a social media automation service. So our community is on social media pretty often, they're marketers who are focused on marketing their product or service on social media. So if they're not opening their email, where else can we reach them? Well, the next step would be to perhaps think they're on social media during the day. So you really need to go out there and reach them with these this information on social media, because that's where they want to consume it. And it doesn't take that much, you know, it doesn't take a huge budget. In order to do that. That's, it just makes sure that we stay on top of mind and it catches those people again, who might not have opened our email, but we still want to get that information across to them. And if you can stay on top of people's mind and do things like educate them, that's going to give them a really great value or entertain them some way that again is going to give them a great value if they're on social media just for entertainment purposes. So we try to make these really light and try to make them really conversational. We try to have them with a face in it. We find That does really well again for that connection that might not be available, or seeing right away just being a software company being like, Hey, we're real people behind it, please reach out to us, the more contact we have, the better. This is how you do this a certain workflow or like, have you thought about doing this. And now we've seen it work really well. And just making sure we're staying top of mind to people and saying, in a way that they feel like they're getting a ton of value and being educated by us. So these ads are purely educational, we try to keep them really light and just making sure that people are staying brand aware, kind of especially with it in that first three month period. And where we know, people are going to drop off at a higher rate than if it becomes a part of their actual workflow. And they feel like they can't post the social media without us because they've seen all the time saving that it's done for them.

Andrew Michael
I love that. And so you've seen this work really, really well for you.

Megan McMullin
Yeah, absolutely. It's something we love being able to offer again, where people can consume and get educated it during the Email, if that's not where they hang out, at least we give them another option for where they can have that education.

Andrew Michael
And it makes a lot of sense as well. I think like certain channels or supersaturated people prefer to consume content in different ways and different vendors, some might be tech, some IP video. But being able to sort of cater to the multiple different ways in which people prefer to consume the content, you sort of raise and increase your chances of actually reaching them, reaching them at the right point in time and having an influence being able to educate them.

Megan McMullin
Absolutely.

Andrew Michael
Great. Well, Megan, it's been a pleasure having you on the show today. Before we end the call today, though, like is any last bit of advice you'd like to leave your listeners with? Maybe let us know how they can keep up to date with things that needed gurren from them.

Megan McMullin
Yeah, absolutely. So me, Edgar is Meet Edgar. com. Like I said, you're more than welcome to join in on these conversations for our shortcut and coffee chats, just get on our email list and we'll let you know where those are at. We have a great blog that goes ahead and That does a lot of content marketing around social media. So check that out if you're interested in learning more about social media, and just kind of last words on what's worked for us? Well, I was just thinking about ways that even if you're a small team, that you can still be really personal. Because when it comes down to it people buy from people in life, they want to have connections to people, not just logos. So the more personalized you can be, even as a small team, the better and there's a lot of really creative ways that you can go ahead and have these one on one conversations, and have these kind of group calls with people without it kind of overtaking your job and feeling like you don't have time for anything else. So just get creative with that, and know that it is so worth the time for your entire team to be able to have that face to face or have that connection with your users.

Andrew Michael
Yeah, I think it's a super, super powerful message. At the end of the day, it's like sometimes we forget behind the software as people and making sure you maintain that connection and be able to get close to your customers ultimately going to keep them happy. Keep them like brand aware and loyal as well and again, helping with trend and retention as a result. So, Megan, it's been a pleasure having you on the show today. I really, really appreciate your time and I wish you best of luck going forward.

Megan McMullin
Thanks so much. It was a fun chat. Have a good one.

Andrew Michael
Thanks.

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Megan McMullin
Megan McMullin
About

The show

My name is Andrew Michael and I started CHURN.FM, as I was tired of hearing stories about some magical silver bullet that solved churn for company X.

In this podcast, you will hear from founders and subscription economy pros working in product, marketing, customer success, support, and operations roles across different stages of company growth, who are taking a systematic approach to increase retention and engagement within their organizations.

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