“Mama Said Be Grateful For What You’ve Got!”

At least, that's the line I got growing up!

A huge mistake I see marketers making, however, is focusing an indiscriminate amount of time on attracting new leads, driving traffic, and making that first-time (and often "last") sale to the detriment of all other retention, ascension, and "existing customer" programs and activities. I know folks who've made millions this way but it's taken a constant flow of tens of thousands of incoming customers.

You'd be better of taking mama's advice: "Be grateful for what you've got!"

And when you're grateful for what you've got, you'll spend some time figuring out how to increase or fix your retention, consumption, lifecycle, upward mobility, and attrition.

As a marketer, I always have my learning cap on so I want to share a recent experience from Headsprout, the site we use to help our first-grader with her reading. They do a great job of checking in to make sure you're consuming the product. And if you're not, they're quick to let you know. Check out some of these screenshots:

Here, they have automatically noticed that we haven't logged in for a couple months and triggered an e-mail checking in with us.

Here, they are congratulating Jadyn on her progress.

And any legitimate reason to be in constant contact with your customers is a good one. Have they finished your video training? Congratulate them. Have they clicked the last 10 of 10 e-mails? Let em know. Have they been in your membership program for a year? That's something worth noting!

Here's an e-mail we got after being missing in action just a few days and a reminder that "consistent use of Headsprout Reading produces the best results."

(Sure, consistent use may produce the best results for Jadyn but what they aren't telling me is consistent use produces the best results for their bottom line because a happy customer is a returning customer and they provide upper level reading programs, math, and a host of other resources for us to potentially consume).

In this e-mail, they not only bring to my attention that it's been almost two weeks, but they've merged my last login date in the message.

Then they make a concession with the statement: "Your young reader may be taking a break, and that's fine." It's simple but that's a good line because you never want your customers to feel guilty. You're walking a fine line of keeping them moving forward but not doing it in an annoying way. Notice how Headsprout changes up the language in each e-mail. (I should also note, they do give up at some point and start contacting me less frequently. But the minute we log in and get active again, the reminders start back up like clockwork. That's marketing automation at its best).

So you may be thinking: "Yeah Jermaine, the big companies and venture-backed startups can do this kind of stuff. They've got all the resources and talent. But I can't."

That's not true. Every single thing I've shared here is doable with Infusionsoft. In fact, I'm doing majority of it myself and picked up a few more ideas while writing this. For example, we've got a date script that every time someone logs into our membership site, it places today's date in a custom field called "Last Login." Another feature of that script can figure out the number of days between any date in a custom field and today's date.

Bam! That takes care of the personalization: "Your last login was DD-MM-YY." And using the second calculation, "days since last login," we can have certain steps in a [contentblock id=17 img=html.png] that only go out if this value is greater than 3 (e.g. - "it's been a few days since..."), or greater than 7 (e.g. - "it's been a week since..." or even 90 (e.g. - it's been a few months since..."). Then you just have this sequence repeat itself every 7 days checking to see how many days its been and sending out new reminders each time they pass a certain threshold. On the other hand, if they end up logging in today, the "Last Login" field will reflect today's date, the calculation between days will then reset to 0, and they should fail any rules or conditions that would send a reminder e-mail until they once again pass a threshold of inactivity.

Yeah I know... a little advanced but that's what consulting is for. Feel free.

At the end of the day, it costs up to 5 times more to get a new customer versus nurturing and keeping a current customer happy. Yet, Pareto's Principle tells us a very small group of customers (~20%) will be responsible for a huge percentage of profits (~80%). That's the key to explosive profit growth and many folks just don't get it. If you were one of them, hopefully you do now. 🙂

Until next time.