You’ve started a Social Media Marketing Agency are are gaining traction, but SMMA churn is starting to eat away at your progress! Client churn acts as an anchor for your growth but it can be difficult to find ways to put a stop to it. Here are some things we’ve learned at CloseBot to drastically reduce our customer churn that you can apply to your SMMA.
Sales Expectations Effects on SMMA Churn
Imagine you saw an advertisement for a beautiful Corvette, priced aggressively in the local newspaper. The ad claimed that the car was in mint condition and had upgrades to the engine to improve power! The power improvement is something that’s important to you since you’re into racing, so you decide to go check it out. You show up and everything looks good so you throw down the cash and head on home with your new toy. Now here’s where disappointment hits… you inspect the engine to find that the upgrades done wouldn’t affect power at all, just fuel efficiency. The improved fuel efficiency is nice, but it’s not why you bought the car.
When you’re selling your product, it’s important to be clear about what the product is and what it does. This can be difficult in the beginning when you’re doing anything possible to get clients. You may be tempted to make tall claims just to seal a deal… then you plan on finding a way to fulfill promises later. This is a trap that you don’t want to fall into because of reputation issues and system fatigue.
Reputation
If word spreads that you make tall claims and fail to deliver, the rest of the audience may find out and be deterred from your product down the road when you eventually get your systems figured out. Be transparent about what your business does and what it doesn’t do. Don’t be afraid to turn customers away if their needs don’t align with what you’re offering. At CloseBot we do this all the time. CloseBot is built specifically for lead qualification and booking automation. If someone wants an AI support bot alone, there are other tools out there that are better suited for that.
Systems Fatigue
if you tell each customer what they want to hear to close them, it’s likely that you’ll be agreeing to different tasks that don’t fit well with what you’re already doing… when this happens you grow horizontally instead of vertically. You’ll be doing so much different stuff that you won’t be able to build enough systems to manage it well and you’ll eventually drop the ball. In the beginning, we got in the habit of implementing almost every new requested feature that our customers requested. Our feature list grew so wide that our site became more complicated for our users and it was much more difficult for our support team to provide support. We found a way to simplify what we do and focus on the core value offering. That focus has allowed us to put more energy into growth because our systems are dialed in!
Customer Onboarding
This is the area that usually comes to mind when Agencies think about SMMA churn, but it’s more important than you know. When you get paid, that customer is making a deposit of trust in your company. That trust starts to diminish immediately and it’s up to you to continue to replenish it in the form of onboarding and support. Different customers have different rates of diminishing trust, so it’s important to act as quickly as possible or you risk losing the customer. Set up systems to streamline your deposits to the trust bank. Here’s a look at our onboarding process:
onboarding journey
Virtual Onboarding with a Person
We offer virtual onboarding via Zoom. Upon checkout, users are presented with a calendar where they can book their onboarding call. We monitor our onboarding calendar to make sure we always have availability within the next few days so we can get the user into their setup call while they’re still excited about the product! If you offer virtual onboarding, have a calendar presented immediately after checkout that allows them to pick an onboarding time. Make sure there are enough open slots on the calendar to get them booked as soon as possible. Customers are most excited about your product right after they purchase, so get them in that onboarding call before the excitement fades. Follow up with emails if they’ve purchased and have failed to book an onboarding call. This onboarding process is your opportunity to set them up for long-term success, so your systems around getting that customer to book their onboarding are very important. We even have CloseBot integrated into our text message follow ups so AI will respond if they need help booking their onboarding call, rescheduling or have other questions.
Hello Video
We use a system called Bonjoro to send a personal video to every new user. This personal touch lets our users know we truly care. It’s important to let your users know that they aren’t just a number and that your team will step up to make sure they find success with your product. Little touches like this can set you apart from your competition!
Email Drip
We start an email drip within our CRM as soon as a customer signs up that walks them through some of our plans and features. These emails are set up to come from different team members like support, billing, and the founder (me) so they are introduced to the team as they receive the material.
email campaign
Check Ins and Activation Tracking
Life happens, and sometimes your users get distracted. This happens more often than you’d think. It’s up to you to track the features your users are starting to use and check in with them if they aren’t progressing through the features at the rate you’d expect. For example, at CloseBot we’ve noticed almost no one cancels after they’ve seen their bot conversationally book an appointment for them. It’s up to us to make sure we get the customer to this point as quickly as possible. So if a user has connected their bot to an account, but they haven’t yet booked an appointment we will trigger messages and tasks to our team to check in with them to see if they need help!
Badges
It’s helpful to have on-screen prompts to let users know how well they are doing. Gamification is a relatively new concept, but it works wonders for reducing churn and it can help you reduce your own SMMA churn as well. Reward your customers for doing things that you want them to do. At CloseBot we reward customers with badges when they do things that we know secures their seat with our product (number of appointments booked, messages sent, etc.). If you don’t have a way to do badges, you can trigger reward emails or text messages to congratulate your users on milestones 👏
badges
Summary
It’s easy to fall into the trap of getting so focused on your product that you forget about your user, but you’ll find that shifting your focus to your customer will start a chain reaction that positively shapes the rest of your business. If you want to experience our awesome onboarding for yourself, go create your free account now!
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