How do you earn a call with your users?
At OneBar.io we're getting a steady stream of signups then, some percentage of signed up users do start actively using the app for several days, invite teammates, etc. Then the usage drops and decays over some time. Then most of them go away. Pretty typical situation for an early stage product I'd assume.
Here's my question: what do you do to establish a connection with these users before they're gone?
What we want to learn from them is:
- How did they find us?
- Why did they signup?
- What were they trying to achieve during these early days of active usage?
- WHAT WENT WRONG?
We have a live chat in the app, we send a welcome email to every admin with an invitation to book a video call, we do follow-up with the most active users but most of the time we're getting no-replies. What are we missing? Also, any tips on how can we answer these questions without pushing users for a video call?
Thanks, IH community!
One thing that worked for us, was to offer an incentive in exchange. Offering an Amazon Gift Card helped a lot in having those users reply.
Of course, it will cost you (we offer a 25$ card), but see this as investment in your company like paying your servers, because you will get valuable feedback that will help you more in the long run.
And you can always stop this when you reach a certain threshold ("no more than 250$ per month spent in this" for instance).
Then, with the calls, what we did was build a Google Form with all the questions we wanted to ask, but we never sent it to our users (they will rarely fill it). We used this form ourselves when on the call, to ask questions via voice, hear the response and write it down.
This is helpful because having the form helps to ask all the questions we need and by asking them in a call rather than sending the link to the form, we bond with the user and it helps even more with retention. The gift card is the little bonus :)
Thanks for the answer, @cnicodeme! We're starting to experiment with gift-cards, though I think we should increase the value, and we already have a list of questions we want to ask. Let's see if we can score any calls. Hopefully we're on the right track.
At what point were you suggesting your users to hop on the call? Right after the signup? Later? After they stopped doing anything?
It is right after they subscribe to a paid plan. It's to know more about my customers and ideal customer type.
I'd try to show more value by way of drips. You're on the right track with a welcome email, but after that you could be sending a daily email with tips to achieve success with your platform.
After people drop off, you can always throw them on a product updates drip to make sure they are being reminded regularly of the improvements being made.
Regarding answering questions, have you thought about having a chat bot with some answers to common questions loaded?
Thanks for the tips, @joshtronic!
How do you find a balance between "daily tips + monthly updates + follow-ups + app notifications itself" and just being too annoying? We've started sending monthly updates to our admins and I can see that every month a few people unsubscribe.
Do you mean some sort of a user-survey built into the app? Or maybe I'm just not fully following what you're saying..
Ya know, that's definitely the eternal question.
Speaking from the perspective of a user, if you're providing me value, I can stomach a 5-10 days of daily emails but after that will start to grow numb to it.
Assuming I was given some insightful messaging and not just "here's some spam, please upgrade", I'm more than happy to continue to receive monthly / bi-monthly product updates.
Most larger services offer a way to downgrade the frequency as opposed to have a one-click unsubscribe.
You're always going to get a few unsubscribes with every send, but if you're sending regularly to your list, at least your list hasn't grown stale.
Re: the chat bot, I may not be explaining it that well, mainly because I can't remember what the heck it's called.
So there are chat services out there (like your little intercom deal or whatever you're using) that when you're away and not actively live chatting, a bot will take over and try to find answers to questions from a knowledge base, based on what the user is asking.
Then they are asked if it's what they are looking for, and if not, a message will be left (or it could be wired up to an external support system).
Just a way to get your users answers faster instead of waiting for a human to respond.
can't agree more :D
I see what you're saying. I think the "questions" that I meant are our questions about our users that we're trying to find answers for in order to build a better product :)
OHHH... gotcha. Think you're doing the right things there. Getting users to talk to you is terribly hard at the beginning.
I've been getting pretty decent responses lately from just including a survey link in my welcome emails (my questions look similar to yours). Get 2-3 responses a day, but even then, the responses tend to be from students using the service and not companies, so their feedback tends to be pretty shallow.
Have you thought about dangling a carrot? Offer up a month of premium service, or something for responses. Could go a bit bigger with offering a few months to 1 person pulled at random. Add that contest element and you may spark more responses.
This is actually a variation of the idea we were discussing today. I think we should try something like that, I've seen it being used in onboarding scenarios: you try more product features - you get an extended trial or smth.
I also like the idea of including the survey link in the welcome email, have to explore that option.