Tuesday Tips: How to Make Elusive Customers Reach Out to You
We all have those stubborn, silent accounts. They’re still customers - for now.
But we don’t know for how long. We don’t know if they are receiving value and achieving their goals or if they are looking at other options. We send them emails, notifications for webinars, we try calling, nothing works.
Have you tried delivering value with no strings attached?
Here is something you can try, and it works if you’re doing it manually or if you have automation to help you.
What are “Tuesday Tips”? Tuesday Tips is a strategic outreach and value delivery process that you can measure. It works for high-touch and low-touch CS Programs. This is how it works:
Make a list of the customers you are trying to reach. Now, look at their data:
What are they doing well?
What could they be doing better?
Group your customers into “buckets”.
Which ones need to improve by doing the same things?
Do you have an example of a successful customer who did that thing?
How did that change things for them?
Or… maybe EVERYONE but this group of customers does this and succeeds? And those that don’t are on the track towards failure and churn?
Whether you consult psychology or neuroscience, everyone wants to succeed and to belong.
Succeed: Tuesday Tips gives you the vehicle to praise your customers for what they are doing well and lets them know they could be doing better.
Belong: Tuesday Tips calls out that they don’t belong now, but they could belong to an elite group.
Tuesday Tips shows your customer how they can be successful at using your product, successful in business, and successful in their career.
Each Tuesday, send an email with the subject: Tuesday Tips: (+ catch topic)
Share one thing they are doing well and how it helps them achieve their outcomes.
Share one thing they aren't doing, how it could help them achieve their outcomes, and how to do it.
Call to Action:
High Touch CSM: Tell them you're available for questions and how to reach you.
Low Touch CSM or Pooled CSM: Provide a link to self-serve information or a link to connect with a Pooled CSM.
Make the emails short and easy to read. Use bullets. If you can connect it back to their original goal and purchase reasons, so much the better. If you have examples of other customers' successes, that’s another great option. But make sure it is connected to something they actually need to do and would benefit from. This is not the time for a marketing email; it should sound personalized. It should be personalized.
If you hear from them, great! You can discuss that topic with others when you connect. If you don’t hear from them, track what you’ve sent to whom and the cadence. Track which email types and subjects get responses. And send them a Tuesday Tip again and again.
Each Tuesday, look at your customer list. Use the same structure each time:
What the customer is doing well
What the customer could improve: Why & How
How to contact me - the sender
You can add information like upcoming office hours or webinars on the topic. If they are truly stubborn, any engagement is better than no engagement. And the message that value can be achieved and help in achieving their objectives is available to them is valuable in itself.
You can use Tuesday Tips in a variety of ways, depending on your pain points or goals. Use them to reach your most valuable dark accounts or for your quiet accounts that are renewing next quarter. If data is hard to come by and all efforts are manual, use Tuesday Tips for focused campaigns targeting a few high-value quiet accounts.
If you have data about your customers and just a few tools like automated emails, you can proactively build Tuesday Tips campaigns for targeted groups of customers, such as:
Expansion: Target accounts that could benefit from specific products. Be sure the email is informative, not a hard sell, and has a CTA.
Adoption: Target accounts that are slow to adopt and remind them of the outcomes they can achieve by sharing an example of how another account is using it successfully. (Provides their Why and prompts them to Succeed & Belong)
Persona Specific: Target specific personas across accounts or within large enterprise accounts that could get more from your product and achieve their goals.
You can use Tuesday Tips for any account, groups of accounts, or types of individuals that you want to proactively reach out to. Track what you’ve tried and what works so you can iterate and improve their effectiveness.
Got Tuesday Tips working? Great! Take it further.
Highlight Success:
When you have a Tuesday Tip customer who takes your tip and improves, be sure to feature them. Highlight that they once received this tip, how they used it, and the results they achieved.
Webinars & Office Hours:
Connect Tuesday Tips to other events. Take popular Tuesday Tip topics and turn them into a webinar or office hours topic. Target customers who have been successful, who are on the journey, and your non-responders who could benefit from the topic so it is relevant information. They will get used to seeing only relevant emails from you, and your open rates will be higher.
Testimonials:
Get testimonials. Share those testimonials in your follow-up recording emails, next-generation Tuesday Tips for those who still haven’t changed their ways. Highlight the testimonials and success stories in future office hours and webinars. Turn them into short, inventive case studies as videos or short, actionable blog articles. Have more than one example? Great! Showcase more of them. Show the non-responders that they are the outliers: Everyone is getting these results but them. No one likes to be left out.
Alternatives to Email:
If email isn’t the best way to reach these customers, find them where they are. Text them. Use in-app pop-ups targeted to the people you are trying to reach. Leave them a voicemail and let them know, “This is the information I tried to send to you via email.”
You may be thinking: “Ugh! This is so much work!”
Manual Effort:
If you're doing it manually, it is a lot of work. So prioritize and track your results. Then, show those results to your leadership - whether that’s your manager or your executive team counterparts. Then, use the data and systems you have in-house to automate what you can and continue to prioritize and track your results. When you have a track record of results, make the ROI case for tools. Most CS platforms have capabilities around this, and there are tools like Matik.ai and Cast.app that were specifically built to automate these types of activities.
Most importantly, make the switch from reactive to strategically proactive, deliver value, and measure your results. Connect with your Customers. It is worth the effort. It will get results for your customers, for you, and for your company.
If you try this or have done something similar, I’d love to hear about it. This information was first shared in the CS Office Hours community and as a post on LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out to me here or on LinkedIn.