How do you talk to your customers?

First, I try to 'prime the pump' by sending a post-registration email that is super friendly and informal:

Hey, glad you're checking out Buttondown :)

Please let me know if you need any help getting set up, or have any questions or feature requests! I'd be more than happy to help — I also offer concierge onboarding, so if you need any help migrating back issues or existing subscribers from Mailchimp/Tinyletter/whatever, I'd be happy to do that free of charge.

Have a great rest of your day, and don't hesitate to reach out!

(Seriously, replies go straight to my inbox, and I love getting email.)

This turns a lot of customer conversations from an outbound thing into an inbound thing, which helps a lot — folks feel comfortable and willing to reach out and give feedback.

When I'm looking for more focused and directed feedback ("how do I make life easier for folks who are sending emails that have to do with programming?", "what API features should I work on next?") I don't do anything particularly fancy: I have a Google sheet where each tab is a question that I ask. Keeping track of it this way has a couple advantages:

1. I get a good sense of who is willing to respond and who isn't;
2. I develop an understanding of response rates and timing;
3. I have an easy way of collating and synthesizing the responses.

I am still trying to figure this out too, but I'll share what I do today:

• I send all new email subscribers a survey (automatically) 2 weeks after they join, and then a follow-up a week later if they don't complete it.
  • In that survey I ask some specific questions and some general ones to figure out what they value and what features might resonate with them.
• I also send around surveys with requests to follow up to my most engaged subscribers from time to time (maybe once per quarter).
  • In these surveys I ask specific questions based on what I'm building or thinking of building.
  • I ask them to indicate if they would be willing to do a follow up call so I can get a little facetime.

The thing I like about this is that it's mostly asynchronous. Since I'm not working full-time on my project, I can't spend all day talking to customers, but I can send surveys and ask email questions anytime.

Will be interested to hear what others are doing!

chat functionality on the website / webapp / SPA and inside mobile apps. something like Drift or Crisp chat or Intercom

for mass, there's email newsletters and sms

for the beta groups there's a google group / fb group or a slack channel

@puoy