Retention, Part 21: Follow Up

By Sanya Weathers

You hear it at meetings a lot – someone who looks good in khaki and collared shirts bragging about eyeball acquisition. I’m not making light of the ability to acquire viewers and drive traffic to products, mind you. I often wish I had that ability. The results are easy to quantify, allowing the practitioners of this arcane art to set goals and meet them.

Community, despite the great strides in metrics in the last few years, is still a little fuzzier around the edges. We specialize in user retention, and short of time travel, there is no way to determine how much more  money an individual customer gave our companies (as opposed to how much they’d have spent without a community specialist). The best we can do is group players according to who and who does not take advantage of the features we design, and compare the aggregate spending rates. But I digress.

At any rate, driving high numbers of users to a product or a registration form is a crucial step in any growth plan. But what happens after the users get there?

If your plan is “build a great product that people can’t help but want to use,” that’s great. Since you won’t know if you’ve done that until after your acquisitions team has worked their magic, you should put a plan in place to do some follow up.

–    Make new arrivals feel welcome. A short (really short) note explaining a few basic FAQs that will help them get right into the swing of things. A no-tolerance policy when it comes to existing customers mocking newcomers. Provide contact information for feedback.

–    Offer a survey, both at your site and at the site where users originated, stressing the value of their first impressions. Offer a reward for filling out that survey.

–    Fast response to feedback. If you must use form letters, be sure to include a personal line at the top of the canned response.

–    “Tours.” Invite new users to join a daily live chat where you answer questions and make suggestions.

–    Run through the new user experience yourself. Listen to what the true new users are saying.

–    Follow up on the phone with the most influential new users (bloggers, people with large social networks, etc) – nothing says “you’re valuable” like physical-world contact.