# Improving Customer Experience: How to Increase Revenue and Profitability

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Social Media Examiner
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7_wOBtlKT0
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/21594

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

Most businesses put way more effort on getting the sale than they do on actually helping people achieve the mission and fulfill the outcome that we sold them on. And if we only focus on marketing, then we are missing the point. We're not fulfilling our mission just by getting sales. The job of marketing is yes to get the word out there so that we can acquire a customer. But if we can't keep a customer, then we're gonna have refunds. And many of us have business models where we have recurring billing courses, software products, events where you want people to come back year after year. And it's getting harder and harder now to acquire customers. The longer somebody is in your base membership, the more likely they are to buy more from you. On top of that, the kiss of death in a business is over promising and under-delivering. Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Shana Lynn Bresnahan. If you don't know who Shana is, she is a retention strategist who specializes in helping small businesses scale their courses, memberships and coaching programs. Her courses cultivate her group coaching program is called Retain. Her podcast is Community Creators. Shana, welcome to the show. Hey, Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here. Super excited that you're here today, Shannon and I are gonna explore how to improve customer experience so that you can increase your revenue and your profitability. Before we go there, I'd love to hear a little bit of your story. How'd you get into this whole customer experience thing? Yeah, I mean, I think so much of it was timing. I was in college and I was in this honors program, and they're like, you have to do this big senior thesis, right? And at the time, social media was just getting big. It was around like 2006, 2007. So I wrote this whole paper on, uh, building community and marketing in, in virtual reality world's like Second Life, which most people are not gonna linger, but like I Remember, Yeah. Way back in the day. So that catapulted me. I was speaking in college, and that led to internships, which led to, um, a full-time marketing job right outta college at Vanderbilt University Medical Center here in Nashville, where, uh, we were the first medical center to start like a social media policy, start doing Google ads, um, meta ads back when they would like send you a proposal back in the day. Wow. Also, um, yeah, so really took off there, started, um, full-time consulting in 2012 and worked with a lot of traditional businesses, helping them take what they had done and traditional marketing with their brand and move it online. And then I just kept getting more niche and more niche. Worked with Stu McLaren, who's a membership expert for three years as his director of community has started teaching in-person workshops. And that's really where we really just started to narrow down on how do we create amazing experiences after the sale that keep people coming back for more and COVID shut down those in-person experiences. And that launched me into courses and group programs and private consulting. Wow. So tell me a little bit more about what you're doing now. Yeah, so my focus is primarily helping membership and subscription businesses, but we do kind of support other businesses as well on creating incredible customer experiences that keep people coming back for more. Because at the end of the day, that's ultimately how we increase profitability. So we have a course that teaches the community aspect of that. And then we have a group consulting program called Retain, which is all about the after the sale experience, we call what, uh, building member journey maps from the sale to getting people onboarded, what happens if they're not engaging with our product, even creating great cancellation experiences. I believe that's super important, and we work privately with the select few clients as well. Love it. Okay. So let's talk about kind of what, what's the benefit or the upside for everyone listening, whether they be a marketer or entrepreneur when it comes to improving, uh, the customer experience? Because so many of us marketers, I think I speak for a lot of us when I say this, we think our job is to bring the customer in and then that's somebody else's job after we bring them in. But in many small businesses that somebody else kind of maybe falls on us as well. So talk to us a little bit about why this is so important. Yeah, so, um, I'm gonna speak just to the heart of it first. I always think like there's always like a heart aspect and a head aspect. And depending on who you are, I'm always driven more to like the head. But there's many people who are heart driven, who are very mission driven in their business, and they started because they wanted to help people achieve some sort of outcome or feel a certain way or get a certain result, right? We fulfill our mission when people get results, but most businesses put way more effort on getting the sale than they do on actually helping people

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

achieve the mission and, and fulfill the outcome that we sold them on. So there's that heart piece, like if we really care about this mission, if we really wanna serve and help people, like we so often say we do, then we need to put just as much, if not more energy on after the sale. And then secondly, there's the headpiece, which is, you know, where I tend to focus, which is our job is to create a profit at the end of the day. And the way we create a profit in a business is super simple. We increase the customer lifetime value and we decrease the cost per acquisition. And so often as marketers, we are so focused on getting that cac that customer acquisition costs down, we're not thinking about the other side, which is increasing the lifetime value, and not with upsells and downsells and all of those sorts of things on the checkout cart, but by actually creating loyal customers who want to buy from us again and again, but also who wanna tell other people about our program and product, which is the most affordable way to get new customers is by word of mouth. So that's why I am incredibly passionate about, um, retention, about keeping customers happy, about creating amazing customer experiences because it's the best way to increase profitability in your business, whether that be through just the fact that you're getting repeat buyers that you don't have to pay to acquire new buyers or because those buyers are getting incredible results. And so they're free marketing for you down the line. I love that. And I just wanna like double down on that a little bit. Um, the job of marketing is yes, to get the word out there so that we can acquire a customer, but if we can't keep a customer, then we're gonna have refunds. And many of us have business models where we have, uh, products that have recurring billing courses, software products, events where you want people to come back year after year. All these kind of experiences are, um, exceptionally challenging and it's getting harder and harder now to acquire customers. And that's the really critical part. Um, emails are getting stuck in spam and promotion filters, uh, organic posts aren't getting seen. The cost for paid ads is going up. All these kind of things are very expensive. And when we calculate the true cost of acquiring a customer, it's exceptionally high. So if we can keep that customer, then all of a sudden we can keep our jobs, right? Because our job as a marketer is to justify our existence by generating enough revenue in the company that we are profitable for the business. And if those customers have a great experience, like you said, they're going to turn into evangelists, and when they turn into evangelists, that is free marketing, good old fashioned word of marketing. That's why I think what we're talking about here, here today is exceptionally important. So I'm just doubling down on that. Yeah, And let me just give you a little stat. Okay. So, um, I get really nerdy in the details on this because I think it's so important for marketers to understand what we're talking about when it comes to retention and churn. Um, so many businesses are moving to a subscription model in some way, shape or fashion. So let's just pretend like we have a $47 a month per, uh, subscription, whether that be a digital membership, a you know, uh, some kind of spa discount membership, I don't know. But $47 a month if you are, um, monthly retention rate is 80%. Okay? So you retain 80% of customers, you lose 20% every single month. You'd have a $235 lifetime value per customer. So every customer is worth $235, which means you can, as a marketer, alway always be thinking, now how much can I actually spend to acquire a customer if I know I'm only gonna make $235? And, you know, maybe it takes me eight months to make that amount of money. If we can increase that to a 90% retention rate, which is, you know, not impossible to do, when we create a great experience, we double that lifetime value to $470. If I tell a marketer that you don't have to do anything, you don't have to run meta ad, you don't have to switch to YouTube ads, you don't have to redo your ad suite, all you have to do is get better at actually keeping customers happy and getting them results so that they stick around and you can double your lifetime value, which allows you to essentially double your marketing budget. You would do it. Um, but it gets even better because let's say it's 90% retention and we, we just went from 80 to 90, that's a 10% retention rate improvement. We doubled our lifetime value. We go from 90 to 95%, which is a 5% retention rate improvement, and we double again, it gets exponential, the better we get at it, Okay, help those of us that are math challenged and how in the world you're doing the math on that because some people are gonna be like, I don't understand the math. Yeah. Okay. So I have calculators for this because it really isn't something like super simple, but, um, you're, uh, at, at the end of the day, your, um, your lifetime value is determined by one over your churn.

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

And their churn is actually easy to calculate. But I won't go into the details on that formula. I'll give you, uh, access to a free guide later. The, which has all of the calculations for everything like this that you could ever want. And they're actually pretty simple. You can do 'em on, on the back of a napkin, but the way that it works exponentially basically means that going from 80 to 90 doubles your lifetime value, 90 to 95 doubles that lifetime value again, and then you have the opportunity to continue to double again. It's almost like compound interest at, at the end of the day. Yeah, I think easiest way to understand this is that every customer that sticks is paying you X amount per month. And that actually can add up a lot, um, because the average value of a customer goes up and the percentage of customers that are, that have that average value goes up and somehow that's how the math works. Does that sound about right? Exactly. That's right. And the cool part is, is like if you, many people have many products that they're layering into this. So you might have, let's say you have a subscription, but then you have upsells. So you have private, um, uh, private fitness packages on top of the subscription base, right? Or you have private coaching on top of the subscription base. The longer, the longer somebody is in your base membership, the more likely they are to buy more from you on top of that. So we're just talking about like the base membership price and how that lifetime value can increase the longer you keep them as a member, but you also have way more opportunity to, um, ascend them to your higher level programs or other products, the longer they're in that base membership. So that's why I'm extremely passionate about it, because there's so much profitability to be had. And also getting back to that he piece, like do we really care about the customer? getting them a result? Well then we need to be really thinking about how to do that, not just because it increases profitability, but that's actually what fulfills the mission that we started this business for in the first place. We're talking about customer experience and we're talking about how to improve that customer experience so that we can have all the benefits we just talked about. Now for those that are listening, before we even kind of get into, um, customer experience, is there anything we need to consider or is there any groundwork, um, that's really important before we get into the how side of things? A hundred percent. There always is. And I feel like this is the conversation that I have with people who wanna work with us as clients. Um, I'm always asking them these three questions, do you know your product? numbers? And do you know your people? And by know your product, I'm really saying, is your product good? Because no amount of customer experience, uh, great customers for, you know, shiny retention efforts is going to fix the fact that the core product that they bought doesn't work. So if you're getting a lot of refunds, if you're not getting repeat customers, what's the first question you need to ask yourself is like, does my product actually kind of suck? Do I actually need to build a better product? Do I need to do some improvements here? And that's where you're gonna start, is how, how Do you know if you have a good product? What are the, what are the symptoms we're looking for here? Yeah. So if you have a great product, if it's a subscription base, then you're usually gonna have, um, good repeat to customers, which means a lower churn rate. You're gonna have people who are coming back if, let's say if it's a consumable product, they're gonna be repeat buyers, typically you're getting referrals. So you're getting that word of mouth customer, and then also just look at your customer support. So we're talking about, you know, marketing here, we're talking about retention. But one of the best things you can do in your business is break down the, the department silos where marketing thinks they're on their own customer experience, own, and customer supports over here by themselves. Talk to your customer support department. They're gonna be the first people who know if you have a defective product that needs to be fixed. And they will also know exactly the problems that you need to solve to improve your product. Yeah. And then who are my customers? Talk to us about that a little bit. Yeah. So this is really important for us to understand as marketers. Um, I think we kind of, in our industry, we, we do ourselves a disservice because we listen to one podcast or we download one worksheet that says, fill out your ideal customer avatar. And we complete that worksheet, we spend 15 minutes on it. We go, oh, I know my customer now. And then we put all of our marketing and all of our product creation effort around this 15 minute exercise that we did in traditional marketing. If any of you listening right now are, um, coming from a corporate marketing background, or you're still in corporate marketing, you understand all of the money and investment that actually goes in to understanding who your current customers are and who your future customers are, because they're always changing. And the more that we understand their demographics, their buying behaviors, what their wants and needs are, the better we can cater the experience and personalize the experience and also take good direction with our products. Um, especially for people who have to invest a lot. Like I think about franchise businesses who have to

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

you know, determine they're gonna open up a facility and invest a whole bunch of money in a facility or people who are creating new physical products. They would never do that without knowing the customer, without doing this kind of research. But for those of you who are in the digital space, you may fall victim to, um, not having to invest a lot of money upfront in your business. And so you skip right over this piece, or you might just do that 15 minute worksheet. I want you to invest way more time in knowing your people so that you can make sure you really understand their language and that wants and needs. And then, yeah, like the on the numbers, I also wanna know like what numbers should marketers be paying attention to? Yeah, So we kind of talked about that. LTV lifetime value is really important. CAC cost to acquire your customer, your churn slash retention rate, those are just the opposite of each other. We need to pay attention to those. But depending on our business, there's other numbers that we can be paying attention to. So for example, if you have an online community, what's our community engagement numbers? Um, if you have like onboarding, you know, what percentage of people complete onboarding? How long are, are members participating before they fall off? And, you know, stop opening emails and stop engaging, um, what is our a OV average order value so that we can really understand how that impacts lifetime value. And the biggest question I get asked all the time is like, well, what, what is good? What's a good number? And I really encourage you to benchmark against yourself, which is why I'm saying before you even start trying to improve customer experience, you need to know your own numbers and not start comparing them to industry averages, but just know them so that you have your baseline benchmark so that as you start to test and play, which is what we do as marketers and customer experience people, we, we test and play. We have metrics to look at to see are we improving our numbers or are we not? Um, otherwise you're gonna have a hard time justifying your efforts, um, to, you know, the department head or whoever you need to justify your efforts for to make sure that, um, things are, uh, aligning with profit. We need to have that benchmark in place. Okay, so we've talked about three critical things we need to be thinking about before we begin improving customer experience. Number one, ensure that we have a really good product. Number two, know our numbers. And number three, understand deeply who our customers are. So let's assume we have that many of us do. Um, how do we now, what's next? Like, where do we begin with improving our customer experience? There's really three things that you need to focus on, and I call this my retention accelerator formula. Um, but also, you know, just generally it's the foundations of a great customer experience. And the first one should be no surprise, based on what I've been saying so far, it's results. We have to make sure that our customer is getting results with our product or service, or it doesn't matter what we do, they're not gonna be coming back. Okay? So let's spend some time digging in on this. Um, so when we say the customer gets results, like, talk to me about what that actually means and, and like, let's, let's unravel that in detail. Yeah. Um, I see this all the time, but the kiss of death in a business is overpromising and under-delivering. And this is where marketing and customer experience have to be aligned. Because I meet so many people who are really, really great salesmen. They're wonderful marketer marketers. They know how to get the sale on the call. They know how to position the product to make sure that people buy, but they aren't making sure that what they're selling people on is actually aligning with what they're going to be experiencing once they get inside of the program. And so we never wanna put ourselves in a position where we've overpromised and under-delivered, which means we need to make sure that either our marketing and our selling is aligning with the delivery experience, or that we're upleveling the delivery experience to meet this beautiful offer, this beautiful promise that we've given to people who are buying into our products and services. Because if people don't get results, they're not gonna come back for more, and they're not gonna have a story to tell. And that doesn't mean the end result. That doesn't mean, you know, the perfect, uh, testimonial. It just means that they need to see themselves making progress. You know, I, I was talking to somebody today about, um, uh, giving them an example of going to a store and going to shop for a dress. And you go dress and you buy the dress, but you don't actually have the accessories. You don't have the shoes, the jewelry, the, all the other things you need to make that dress really shine and to feel good in that dress. So what happens? You buy the dress, you go home, you maybe try it on in front of your mirror, you can't get it to look the way you think it's supposed to look, so you ultimately return it, or you never wear it, right? At the end of the day. But I was sold this idea of how amazing I was gonna look in the dress. It's a very different experience. If I go home with the accessories, with the shoes, and I know exactly what to do, my chances of wearing

### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00]

that dress have just gone up, which means I'm likely to come back because I had an amazing experience. They made sure I didn't just buy something, but I knew how to wear it. use it, which increased the likelihood of me using it, which increases wearing it out with my girlfriends to dinner, telling all my girlfriends about how awesome my experience was and getting compliments on this dress. So we've gotta make sure that what we're doing is really creating the desired result for our customer. Okay, so how do we know what the desired result is for the customer? Let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah. That goes back to knowing our people. At the end of the day, we're always selling people on some type of outcome. Now, uh, if people have listened to your podcast for any amount of time, they know that they're not selling the widget. They're selling what the widget makes possible. That's, that's what we need to focus in on. What is the widget make possible? Am I selling somebody a dress or confidence? Am I selling somebody the feeling that they're gonna get inside of that dress? Am I selling some somebody, you know, this idea that they can launch their online course or am I selling them progress towards financial freedom, towards time freedom in their life? And so when we get really clear on what it is, then we not only make sure that we remove as much friction as possible, which is really the thing you need to be asking yourself, where is the friction? What is getting in the way of this person utilizing my product or service, actually showing up to my coaching calls and getting the results that they need? Which sometimes it's mindset, that's the friction. Sometimes the friction is actual physical friction getting in the way. Sometimes it's technology friction, but what we need to do whatever we can to make sure that they're getting better results easier and faster. Any tips on how to determine where the friction is? Because I think this is really something like, um, I will say folks that are listening to this podcast, um, may know that we have a new software product that we've not revealed to the world yet, but we are dealing with all the friction that comes with software. You know, there's like a lot of steps. You have to first open the message, then you have to click on read the sales page, then you have to, um, create an account, then you have to activate a Chrome extension, and then you have to actually create something with that Chrome extension. These are, this is the journey, right? Yeah. And I'm tracking every single step of the journey and making sure it's clear and like finding where it's not clear and it's like, it's complicated. So I know where my friction points are with the software product we've created, but it's not intuitive right outta the gate sometimes to know where the friction points are. Exactly. I have two fun little examples to share with you just from today. Um, I was meeting with a client that is, uh, SaaS customers. They have a SaaS membership for teachers. And they were talking today about what they need to do. They, their retention has improved drastically, but they've got a launch coming up. They wanna improve it even more. We were talking about, um, how we could get teachers to utilize this massive library of lesson plans even more than they already have. They just removed some friction for them. So they used to have to download lesson plan by lesson plan. Now they can download in bulk. So that was one thing that they did. But I said, let's come up with a dream scenario. Let, what's the dream world? Well, the dream world is I, as a teacher come in, you ask me a few questions via an AI bot, and this AI bot then designs the lesson plans for me, gets my approval, yes, this is what I wanna do, builds out my lesson plan for the whole year, and then prints, you know, it all prints out and it's good to go. And it checks in and it answers any questions that I might have about the lesson plans. I was like, they would spend way less time on your platform, but they would never leave. And so what we did is we came up with what is the dream scenario that removes every little bit of friction and it makes using the product just as easy as the snap of a finger. And then we started working our way back based on our own technical financial limitations to figure out what could we do today to get closer to that. And we realized what we could do today was actually upload all of their video training into an AI bot and get it to where they can ask questions to, um, improve upon their training to get the training videos linked in the answer and that AI bot. And so, can we do the lesson planning thing? No. But at least we know what we're working towards and we can start getting rid of the friction that gets in the way. And my other, my thing that I read today, which I thought was so funny, the sheriff here in Nashville was getting complaints, which again, were listening to customer service. He was getting complaints that prisoners in the local jail here were getting cold at night, that the, the jail was not adequately heated. And so he is getting this complaint, and he is like, well, okay, do you know what he did? He put on the same gear that they wear, gave to all the prisoners, and he spent the night in a jail sale on one of the coldest nights

### Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00) [25:00]

that we've had in Nashville in the last week, which is like two degrees or something. And he was like, I mean, it was kind of chilly, but I slept and it was fine. I had my blanket, I had my hat, I had my things. He's like, we have adequate heating in our jail. So I, I think about that kind of experience of how often do we put ourselves in the shoes of the customer. Um, I have a friend who has a whole membership, uh, um, on, um, mystery shopping. That's all they do is mystery shop, movie theaters and gas stations. They are the customer for the owner so that they can figure out where's the friction? But we can be that for ourselves, right? We can go through, as a customer, go through our own experience and keep asking ourselves the question, how can I make this easier? How can we do this faster? Love it. Okay. So, uh, step one of this three step process is, uh, focusing on results. And what we've talked about is what is that really desired outcome that your ideal customer wants to achieve? And where are those friction points? And when you can determine where those friction points are that are preventing them from having that ideal outcome, you can greatly improve the likelihood that that, um, they will get where you want to get, which is ultimately, uh, recurring revenue referring to other people. That's the first part of the process. Um, what's next? Well, next is focusing on recognition. And recognition may seem like, oh, wait, what? I need to give them a gold star. Most people's brains go to this idea of gamification, but more than ever, the foundation of recognition is seeing them as an individual. It's humanizing the experience in a world where people are using AI to alienate. We wanna use AI to automate, not to alienate, but to create space for more human to human connection whenever we can. And if that allows us to personalize this experience, then we can personalize the engagement. So instead of just getting a normal customer support or, or new customer email, they may actually get like a personalized video or something that feels like a personalized video. Um, instead of just getting generic guidance, they get, um, specific guidance. So think of it again, like a shopping experience. So if you go into a generic shopping store, they might ignore you or they might say, Hey, if you need anything, please let me know. But then some higher end shopping experiences, you go in, they greet you kindly and they say, Hey, what are you looking for? How can I help you today? And that's what we're looking for inside of our businesses, is getting to know why did this person join so that I can then customize the experience? And here's the reality, it's expected because when I sign on to Netflix, my experience is personalized. And that's gonna happen more and more in business. People are going to expect a personalized, a customized experience that you recognize that I am a u unique individual, not just a number, not just any other buyer. And I have unique preferences and needs, and I want an experience customized for that. So that recognition piece on that personalization's really important. But also recognizing their progress and their wins as they make progress, as they're contributing as a member inside of your community, as they're a repeat customer, right? There's so many opportunities for us to celebrate the progress that they're making, celebrate them as a customer so that they are recognizing who they are as an individual, but also that they're seeing the progress that they don't see for themselves. We're gonna call it out for them because we all know, we don't look back. We don't look back and go, oh, man, I, I started out wanting to start an online course, and here I am, I have a hundred thousand dollars course. Like, how did I get here? We don't pause to recognize that. We're always thinking about the next thing. So taking a moment to recognize that progress and those contributions for our customers is another really great thing we can do. Think about it like Spotify wrapped, that's a recognition of the customer. Okay. Talk to me a little bit about how we can personalize this, because sounds really complicated for those of us that have lots of customers. Um, any tips on how to pull something like this off? Yeah, so as we're going through this member experience, I always think of it like a member journey map. People say customer journey map, but so often marketers stop at the sale with the customer journey map. It should, it should extend way beyond that. So as I'm going through that, I'm thinking about where is there an op opportunity for personalization or praise? Now, if you have any type of tech involved with your service or with your program, then this can be actually rather easy to do because I can identify and tag people based on what they are doing or not doing. So I should know if somebody is actually logging into my site, I should know if they're watching my videos or completing my onboarding, or they haven't been on the site in 45 days, I can reach out with them with a customized experience, right?

### Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00) [30:00]

Um, I should know if they are completing something and I can send them sort of a praise for the progress that they're making. So if you have tech involved, it gets easier. But I think about traditional businesses, like for example, staying at the Four Seasons. They know my preferences. They've saved them, they took the time to ask. Now asking, didn't look like somebody on the phone with me asking me these preferences. It looked like a form that I filled out. Very simple, right? Do you want like a fluffy pillow or a, not a flat pillow? A hard pillow, a soft pillow. They ask all of these sorts of questions and then they just save those with my customer profile. So then every time I check into a Four Seasons, I have the exact same experience. I'm gonna have my gluten-free toaster in there, um, literally truly labeled gluten-free. I'm gonna have a pillow that I want, et cetera. Um, so it's the same sort of thing when I go to my hairstylist. My hairstylist has zero tech, but you know what she does? She listens to me and she takes notes. And so then when I come back, she's got that note tied to my customer profile. So we pick up a conversation right where we left off. So at the end of the day, I, I encourage people before they think, I can't do this because I have too many customers. First off, I have clients with 15,000 members that do this. They have 15,000 members. They track the data, they do assessment questions, they do small group onboarding, coaching calls to remove friction, and they can pay for that because of the retention results that increase their profitability. It's worth it to them to make that investment. But before we think about all the things we can't do, we need to create that dream experience and look for all of those opportunities to personalize or to recognize and praise the progress that people are making, uh, or to meet their needs because they're not utilizing the product or they're having trouble with the service and say, how could I do this? What would I want it to look like? Then we can start figuring out where the tech limitations are. Then we can start asking ourselves the question of like, well, what is the easiest way to, for me to meet this need to create this kind of personalization? Because if you can't do it today with the way technology is going, it, maybe you're six months or a year away to creating the kind of experience that you want for way more affordable than you ever could have five years ago. Okay. So let's, let's give an example. Let's assume that the people that are listening have technology platforms that are smart enough to know when a certain goal is achieved or a transaction or upgrade or action or whatever. Um, give us an example of how we can give praise in such a way that, um, 'cause praise seems to be, excuse me, the obvious one we could all do. So help people that are more mind focused, like you and me. Mm-hmm. Understand what praise might look like in this context. Yeah. Well, and, and to back it up even more, I think of it like a stoplight system. Green, yellow, red. Okay, green is a praiseworthy action. You logged into the site, woo, praiseworthy, you completed onboarding, right? You watched your first video, you achieved your first milestone. You, uh, got your first referral, right? These are all praiseworthy actions. Yellow are things that are warning signs for me. They haven't logged in 45 days. Oh no, they haven't completed their onboarding within 10 days of joining. Ugh, that's not good. So my, my green actions are like my praiseworthy. I want to just send them a little, Hey, I see you. Congratulations, you just completed onboarding. We've just unlocked this special bonus for you. Or now you can get this private podcast, or, hey, now you can actually access the community. That's awesome. Keep going. Your next step is to do X, Y, Z. Or congrats on reaching that milestone. That's, that's really hard for you to get your email list set up and get your first subscriber. We're so proud of you for getting that done. Your next step is to, you know, create a landing page or whatever it might be. Mm. And then the same thing like with your yellow stuff, like what if somebody hasn't logged in for 45 days? Or if I have, let's say I'm a gym and I have a gym member who hasn't shown up at the gym in two or three weeks. It doesn't take anything to have somebody send them a note or get an email automated out to them that's like, Hey, we just wanted to check in. How are you feeling? Are you sick? Are you injured? How can we support and help you? And then, you know, the red is just people who are canceling or aren't having a great experience, and they're in customer support asking for help or asking to cancel. And we still wanna win these people over, even if they don't ever come back as a customer, because our reputation is our best marketing. And if our reputation is soured because we don't treat people well when they have a bad experience, we don't treat people well. When they go to cancel, then that's gonna impact us over the long run. So that's how I think about it, is like in these buckets. And then I just ask myself like, what can I do to praise? to, um, activate the people in the yellow bucket who need to be activated? And what can I do to rescue the people, um, who are in the red bucket or send them away feeling really good about their experience with us? Love it. Uh, when we were prepping for this, you had an example that you were gonna share? Yeah, that of course. Yeah.

### Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00) [35:00]

So, um, with the Nonprofit Leadership Lab, which is a membership for nonprofit organizations, we work specifically with them on their annual renewals. And this is just super simple. Their annual renewal rate was around 40%. And we were like, okay, what if we did two things differently? We're gonna check in with them 60 days before their annual renewal. So the first time they hear from us is not gonna be when they get billed for the year, we're actually gonna check in with them 60 days out. Very simple email that just said, Hey, we just wanted to check in. How are things going? How can we best support you right now? What do you need? Right? Email, that's just basic email. That's all it was, is an email 60 days out and they had the opportunity to reply and get support if they needed. But I'll, I'll tell you, we've done this study with, with over a membership with over 14,000 people, and we offered private calls, right? Majority people did not take them, but retention rate increased for everybody who opened the email. Even just reaching out. If nobody replies, if nobody takes you up on the opportunity for the call, if nobody takes advantage of that coupon code that you sent them for $5 off for being a loyal customer, we have stats that prove that simply offering it and them seeing that personal, um, outreach, that personal touch will increase their retention rate. And this proved, we sent that email, and then at their 14 days before their renewal, we sent a video, which was an iPhone video from the founder who was just walking around saying, Hey, I get this is hard work. You're a nonprofit leader. This is exhausting work. This is what's going on in the government right now. This is so hard. We're here for you. Here's what we have planned for the next year to make sure that we can keep you going and help your organization go. And we increased their annual renewal rates from the 40% to 60 and 70% by doing those two things that were both automated. Took us a couple hours to implement, And that radically improved the lifetime value of those overall customers, right? Of course it did. And their impact on all of these nonprofits that they wanna serve. That's super cool. All right. So, so far we've talked about the first two steps of the process. Uh, the first one was results, right? Um, what's that desired outcome that this customer wants, and where are their friction points? The second thing is recognition. And under recognition, we talked about how we should praise, uh, people or, uh, congratulate progress. And we just gave a great example. I think that helps people really process this in their mind. There is a third part of the process, so talk to me what's next? It's my favorite. It's relationships. And I, I think we, we cannot, um, underestimate the power of trust and belonging. And trust is at a all time low in our industry right now. People are talking about it all the time. We have a trust recession. There's all sorts of buzzwords around it. This is nothing new. This is human nature, human biology. I'm really big into psychology. We have to have trust and belonging. So when we think about relationships, there's really three ways that people can build relationships within a business. And whether you're a corporate business, an in person, you can always think about a way to apply this because we're talking about their connection to you as the owner, the founder, the face of the brand, their connection to your team. So your community people, your front desk worker, your, um, your customer support person, right? Those, there's connections that can be made there as well. And then their connection to each other, right? So how are we showing up authentically as a brand? You can no longer hide, be behind a brand name anymore. And I'm sure you've talked about this a ton on the podcast, that even brands need to have this feeling of humanization of authenticity within the brand itself. And then when we talk about the team so often, uh, especially if you're a founder focused business, you think, oh, I can, I can never have somebody in my community. else take a sales call. do a coaching call because nobody can do it as good as me. But the reality is, is that when we empower our team, we don't hide our team, but we empower our team to represent us and to build connections. It only strengthens our ties with our customers. It makes them even more sticky. It's why when old school advertising agencies and even agencies of now when they walk into a room to pitch somebody, they bring a team, not just one person. They bring a team because there's power in that team. We can build relationships and trust and connection there and then with each other, which, you know, obviously I'm a huge proponent for online communities that have a whole course. I'm creating online communities and, and making those communities sticky. But this is true whether you have, uh, virtual products in communities or whether you have in-person, people more than ever are craving community connection

### Segment 9 (40:00 - 44:00) [40:00]

after what we experience with the lockdown. But I feel like now even more to with ai, people don't know what to trust. They don't know who to trust. And they're craving, they're craving whether they realize it or not, real community and connection with each other. And so if our business can be the place where that kind of connection is facilitated, then we 100% are going to build a loyal customer. Do you have an example you can share with us? Yeah. My, uh, I love this 'cause it's not a client, it was my husband's sweet aunt. She had a boutique business in North Dakota. Okay? Small town, North Dakota. She could have just sold clothes. That's what a lot of businesses do. I'm here, my job is to sell clothes, make money, selling clothes, but she said, I want to create community. And when businesses were shutting down left and right, her business was staying open and here's what that looked like. Okay? She understood relationship building. So she knew her customers by name. She took notes on our customer's preferences, but even more so, she started to create events. And her, her little boutique was the hub for these sip and shop events that would happen on Saturdays. Anytime she'd have boxes come in with new releases, she would post online and she'd be like, I got all these new boxes. So what would be happening after store hours are closed right on Sunday afternoon or in the evenings where you unbox and you get everything out, put it on the racks. She invited her customers in, they helped with the unboxing. They were the first to see the new things that were coming out. And they, they felt so special and they're all there together, together getting to experience it. She would do girls night out to create the shopping experience. And so when I went there and I went on one of those girls night out sip and shop days, I left there knowing other customers names. I bought stuff that I probably would not have bought, but Janice, who I just met, who was shopping with her daughter, thought it looked fantastic on me and picked it up off of the rack and thought, oh, I need this necklace too. She created a place where the community was able to gather and when her business shut down, not because it was failing, but because she wanted to be grandma and she shut down a successful business to be grandma, the community was sad. They mourned the loss of a clothing boutique because of what it created for them from a community perspective. I love that. What about for those of us that do business with, you know, online and not in person, do you have any tips or examples of how we could pull something like this off? Yeah, a hundred percent. So if you don't have an online community platform, I highly encourage you to have one. Even if you're a SaaS product. I was just talking to somebody who had a SaaS product last week, and we were talking about how having an online community is actually gonna help them improve their SaaS product over time because their community is going to be brainstorming together about what they need and how to improve it. And that's gonna help drive actually their development of their product and program. But, so having an online community is so important, but at the end of the day, even if you don't have that, how can I create connection? Well, in the emails that I send, am I sending just a boring email or am I sending a short little video message? You know, we think about, we need to think about how people consume information now, how they create connection. We are living in a TikTok and Instagram reel culture in a YouTube shorts, right? So why can I not record a 32nd video greeting a first time customer and thanking them for buying my widget and have that go out in the email the day after their product arrives, right? So instead of just sending them a receipt, I sending them an email from a founder that's like, Hey, I just want you to know here's who we are. Here's our team. We're actually building this thing and packaging it for you right now, and we care about you r experience. And I'm so grateful that you're supporting our fa small family business. If you need anything, we're here for you. That little touchpoint of humanization is a way to start creating more connection and build more relationship with your customer. Wow. Uh, Shana Lynn Bresnahan, this has been really fascinating. I have all sorts of notes Yeah. Taken for our own product that I'm thinking about right now. Um, if people wanna work with you or, uh, want to connect with you on the socials, uh, where exactly should they go? Yeah, you can just go to shanalynn. com. So S-H-A-N-A-L-Y-N n. com. I've got a guide that you can get that's gonna go way deeper into what we talked about. And then honestly, my podcast community creators with Shana Lynn, it's everywhere you listen to podcasts and on YouTube, and that's all I'll talk about is these sorts of topics day in and day out. Cool. And then if p what about on the socials? Do you have a preferred social platform? Yeah, Instagram. It's usually where I hang out at. Shana speaks on Instagram, and uh, you can connect with me. It's really me. You can send me a dm, I'll send you a voice message back. Very cool. Shana, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Hey, thanks for having me. This is so fun.