Essential Tips For Success And Growth

Our view at Stack - ClickFunnels was founded by an online marketing legend Russell Brunson and it offers several benefits for online businesses and marketers:

Time and Cost Savings: Efficiently create sales funnels without extensive development efforts.

Maximized Conversions: Test offers, copy, and images to enhance conversions.

Specific Landing Pages: Generate highly targeted landing pages.

Predictable Pipeline: Create consistent, predictable sales paths.

Increased Sales: On average, it boosts sales of lesser products by 15%

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Customer service is extremely important regardless of what business stage you are in.

However, if your business is new, there’s very little margin for error. Acquiring your first customers is an uphill battle so every single one of them matters.

Moreover, your brand reputation is so fragile at that point that even a few bad reviews might be enough to tank your company.

That’s why you can’t afford to let anyone down. So how can you keep your customers happy in those early days?

Table of Contents:

Make Customer Service Your Top Priority
Set Clear Expectations Right From the Start
Personally Welcome New Customers
Create a Great Onboarding Experience
Set Everything Up Yourself if You Have to
Respond to Customer Support Queries in a Timely Manner
Solicit and Implement Customer Feedback
Send Hand-Written Thank You Notes to Your Customers

Make Customer Service Your Top Priority

A man leans on a large pile of assorted shoes while looking at the camera. — *As the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh was known for his relentless focus on customer service. He even wrote a book about it called “Delivering Happiness”. Image source: Harvard Business Review*

It’s way too common for entrepreneurs to see customer service as an afterthought that isn’t worth pouring resources into.

Often, they aren’t even aware of this mindset because it tends to be implicit rather than explicit.

You may genuinely believe that you care about your customers but your true priorities are shown by how you allocate your resources.

So if customer service only gets scraps, you are not giving it the attention it deserves.

We recommend reading “How I Did It: Zappos’s CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers”.

In this case study, Tony Hsieh explains why they prioritized customer service at Zappos:

“Our philosophy has been that most of the money we might ordinarily have spent on advertising should be invested in customer service, so that our customers will do the marketing for us through word of mouth.”

He details the lengths that they went to in order to provide excellent customer service, including relocating the entire company from San Fransico to Las Vegas, a drastic move that cost half a million dollars.

And in case you are wondering why they couldn’t simply outsource it:

“We were reluctant to outsource the call center, because we’d had bad experiences with outsourcing in the past. In fact, one of the big lessons of Zappos’s first few years was that it never makes sense to outsource your core competency, especially if your aim is to be maniacal about customer service.”

The quote above reveals something important about the company’s attitude towards customer service: their aim was to be “maniacal” about it. We believe that this should be the main takeaway from the case study.

After all, if you have a new business, your resources are probably limited, so you won’t be able to implement most of what Hsieh talks about. But what you can do is make customer service your top priority, just like Zappos did!

Set Clear Expectations Right From the Start

New business owners sometimes make the mistake of overselling their products and services.

They do that in their marketing materials, during sales calls, and when interacting with potential customers face-to-face. Anything to get a sale.

That is shortsighted because it inevitably leads to having a bunch of unhappy customers who are angry at you because they feel that you misled them.

That’s why it’s so important to set clear expectations right from the start:

Make sure that you are accurately representing your product or service. Avoid using clickbait headlines, making bombastic claims, and telling wild tales. Yes, you want your copy to be persuasive, but it also needs to be realistic.
Be honest about the current state of your product. If it’s still in development, be upfront about it. What features are currently available? Not “soon”, but right now?
Put the interests of potential customers first. If you talk to someone who is interested in your product or service and realize that it’s not the right fit for them, be honest about it and recommend a better solution if you are aware of one, even if that means sending them to a competitor.

Doing these three things can help you protect your brand’s reputation, reduce churn and build goodwill!

Personally Welcome New Customers

Personally send every new customer an email where you introduce yourself, thank them for their purchase, and encourage them to reach out to you if they need any help.

Just make sure to differentiate this email from the automated onboarding emails. You can do that with a casual subject line, something like “Hey there – just wanted to say hi!”.

Create a Great Onboarding Experience

Here are three things that you can do to improve your onboarding experience:

Make the setup process as simple as possible and only include the steps that are absolutely necessary. Everything else can wait.
Keep the customer updated at each step. This is especially important for service and ecommerce businesses. If someone places an order and doesn’t hear back from you, they might start getting antsy and request a refund!
Guide the customer towards their first win. You should aim to get them their first result as quickly as possible.

We also recommend reading “The Elements of User Onboarding” by Samuel Hulick.

This book focuses on customer onboarding in the SaaS context, but some of the general principles can be applied to other types of businesses as well.

A yellow sticky note with a 9-step list of actions in black text. Steps 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 are crossed out, and the corrected steps are written next to them. Steps 5, 7, and 9 are not crossed out. — *An example of how to simplify onboarding to get the new user their first win as quickly as possible. Image source: “The Elements of User Onboarding”*

Set Everything Up Yourself if You Have to

Y-Combinator is one of the best-known startup accelerators in the world.

One of the techniques that they are teaching their founders is the so-called “Collinson Installation”.

It’s named after the Collinson brothers who would ask people at Y-Combinator events if they’d be interested in trying Stripe. Whenever someone said yes, the brothers would respond with “Right then, give me your laptop” and set them up on the spot.

Keep in mind that people who are interested in your product or service don’t always have the mental bandwidth to set everything up themselves. They might start procrastinating on it or simply forget about it.

That’s why it often makes more sense to just do it for them. Of course, you won’t be able to keep this up forever, but this approach can work well in the early stages!

Respond to Customer Support Queries in a Timely Manner

People are used to dealing with large companies that offer customer support 24/7/365.

However, new businesses typically don’t have the resources to provide customer support around the clock. So how can you meet the customers’ expectations?

That is going to depend on how critical your product or service is.

If your customers are relying on you to help them with something that is absolutely essential, you will need to set notifications on your phone and be on call until you can afford to start hiring customer support agents. There’s just no way around it.

However, if your product or service isn’t essential, then you should be able to maintain a more sane work schedule.

Make it clear on your website what your office hours are and provide a timeframe within which the customers can expect to get a response (e.g. one business day).

Generally speaking, the reason people start freaking out when they don’t get an immediate response is not the lack of response itself, but the sense of uncertainty and feeling ignored.

For example, if someone submits a customer support ticket on a Friday evening and they don’t hear back from you for the entire weekend, they might start spamming you with increasingly angry messages.

However, if that same person knows that you finish work at 5 PM on Friday and start again at 9 AM on Monday, they probably won’t freak out because they will expect to get a response on Monday.

Solicit and Implement Customer Feedback

If your business is still in its early stages, you probably have some misconceptions about what matters the most to your customers.

That’s why it’s so important to proactively solicit customer feedback. You can do that in several ways:

Ask new customers what they are currently struggling with in your welcome email.
When you resolve a customer support request, assuming that the interaction was positive, ask that customer what they like the most about your product or service.
Conduct interviews with your most loyal customers in order to understand why they continue doing business with you.
Conduct interviews with customers who cancel in order to understand why they decided to leave.
Monitor brand mentions across the web and pay attention to customer reviews. What are people saying about your product or service?

You want to store all this data in some sort of a centralized database so that you can analyze it later. Notion can work well for this. Over time, patterns will begin to emerge!

Send Hand-Written Thank You Notes to Your Customers

Wufoo famously sends their customers hand-written thank you notes by mail.

At first, they would send a thank you note to each new user, which they did for as long as they could until eventually it became unsustainable.

Now, nearly two decades later, they still take time each week to write and send thank you notes to a handful of customers. It has become a company tradition!

*Hand-written thank you note from one of the developers at Wufoo. Image source:* *ZURB*

This proved to be an effective way to improve customer retention. Apparently, customers who received hand-written thank you notes were much less likely to churn than the ones who didn’t.

Considering that in the early stages, every single customer matters, taking a page from Wufoo’s playbook and experimenting with hand-written thank you notes might be a good idea!

Grow Your New Business FAST With ClickFunnels!

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ClickFunnels is an all-in-one marketing platform that has everything you need to launch, manage, and grow an online business, including:

A website builder that you can use to create a website that is optimized for lead generation.
An e-commerce functionality that you can use to launch an online store.
A sales funnel builder that you can use to build sales funnels for your business.
An email marketing functionality that you can use to grow your email list.
A CRM functionality that you can use to keep track of everything that is happening in your sales pipeline.
An online course functionality that you can use to create and sell online courses.
A membership site functionality that you can use to create an exclusive online community.
An A/B testing functionality that you can use to optimize your sales funnels for conversions.
A business analytics functionality that you can use to collect data, analyze it and make future predictions based on it.