The Right Way to Reduce Your Churn Rate

Some customers are past saving. They’ve made their decision to leave, and they’ll be out just as soon as they can find the “cancel” button.

Of course you don’t want them to leave – nor do you want more customers following suit. 

To prevent more customers from leaving, you need to ask yourself tough questions: How did your churned customer get to that point? And once they’re at that point, is there anything you can do to save the account?

Let’s Not Play “Hide the Cancel Button”

Recently, I was on the other end of the churn process – and it got me thinking about those tough questions. I decided to cancel my subscription service to a local CSA. It delivered fresh fruits and vegetables to my door twice a month from local farms, but neither the prices nor the quality of the produce impressed me compared to the local supermarket.

I went onto my online account and spent 20 minutes trying to find a way to cancel … and came up with nothing.

Finally, I just emailed them. “Hi, how do I cancel?”

The CSA's response:

Thank you for your recent inquiry. You may close your account at any time by calling or emailing us with a clearly stated request to cancel your account and a reason for cancellation. We will process this request as soon as possible.

When your account is canceled, we invite you to return at any time. You can always resume your services by logging on to your account online and clicking the link to reactivate, or by giving us a call and asking to have your account reactivated.”

Besides the fact that I was clearly speaking with a robot, the CSA's customer retention strategy was transparent: Force customers to have a difficult conversation before they go as a deterrent to leaving.

As retaining technique, hiding the cancel button doesn’t work at all. You’re just delaying the inevitable. As any number of ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends can tell you, when you’re out, you’re out. Having to go through a hard talk to get there isn’t going to keep anyone around. 

The CSA could have handled this much better and perhaps even have kept my account. Here’s what the cancel process should have looked like.

How to Set Up a Cancellation Process the Right Way

When a customer is jumping ship, you have a few opportunities that can turn one loss into long-term gain.

1) Have an easily accessible “Cancel” button.

2) This cancel button should auto-trigger an exit survey to find out:

a) What the customer expected to get.

b) What the customer thinks they’ve actually received (or not).

c) If there’s anything that might get them to stay.

3) Look for patterns in the responses.

People leave a service when there is a mismatch between what they hoped to achieve and what they were actually able to do.

Once you have this information, you can look for patterns that can tell you how well your company tells its story and targets the right customers. Then, you can use that information to build better policies and procedures for customer success.

(Hint: If they say “lower the price,” that doesn’t mean you should lower the price – but rather that you have failed to impart the value of your service).

4) After the survey, include another page with succinct (yet friendly) copy that reminds them of why they signed up in the first place – and what they’ll lose by cancelling.

This is where the CSA also took a misstep. I was welcome back any time with no penalty (not that there should be penalties – that’s no way to make friends!).

But if there had been a loyalty rewards program – maybe when you buy 10 boxes, you get the 11th one free – it could have had returning customers forfeit their pre-cancellation points. For another SaaS business, what departing customers lose could be saved data or the investment in the product up to this point. Weight the decision to cancel with consequences that exiting customers have to consider carefully – but also give them the cancellation button. Don’t hide it.

Besides highlighting what I was giving up, the CSA could have:

• Reminded me why I joined – which was to support local farms and receive fresher (closer) produce.
• Created an email campaign introducing me to local farmers, telling me which seasonal fruits and vegetables were ripening, and upselling me to fresh-made jams.
• Helped me feel like part of a close community of farm-to-table supporters in my local area by hosing a lively Facebook group or even a Meetup group.

In other words, it needed to remind me that price wasn’t the point of the CSA – being an integral part of the local food community was.

Once a customer’s decision is made, it’s frankly very hard to change. They’ve already sold themselves on the idea that your service isn’t worth the money.

But remember – your customers don’t want to leave. They want to love you! So instead of trying to make cancellation harder, use entrance and exit surveys to get smarter about acquiring new customers and keeping the ones you already have happy.

from HubSpot Marketing Blog http://bit.ly/1jnq8Cc

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Online Reviews: How to Respond to Fraudulent Reviews

Do people review your business online? Ever receive negative or fraudulent reviews? To discover what to do when you receive a review that’s not what you were expecting, I interview Dan Lemin. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help […]

This post Online Reviews: How to Respond to Fraudulent Reviews first appeared on Social Media Examiner.
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How to Generate More Leads With Content Marketing [Free Online Course]

According to research, 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing, but only 42% are actually effective at it. 

Why such a big gap? As with most things, it comes down to a lack of education on what actually works and how to plan and execute on your campaign in the most effective way.

HubSpot recently teamed up with online learning platform Dot Native to create a master class in lead generation. This course is designed to cover the techniques required to plan, create, promote, and measure your content marketing campaigns to ensure their success. 

The difference between a good content campaign and a great one can be hundreds of leads. So to make sure yours is the best it can be, this free course will touch on 50 actionable lead generation tips, including:

• How to ensure your campaign is aligned with your business strategy
• How to hit all your deadlines
• How and where to promote your content
• What free tools to use to amplify your reach
• How to optimise your email marketing campaigns
• Advice on measuring success

By signing up for this master class you’ll also receive unlimited access to all Dot Native courses and master classes completely free for seven days. Click here to sign up for the class today.

 Click to Tweet: 

“Learn how to generate leads from your content marketing in just 40 minutes with this awesome master class”

 

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Why Gratitude Is the Secret to Good Health & Happiness [Infographic]

“Gratitude means thankfulness, counting your blessings, noticing simple pleasures, and acknowledging everything you receive," wrote Marelisa Fabrega in her book How Gratitude Can Change Your Life.

Practicing gratitude doesn’t just make you a more likeable person, but it can also benefit your health. In a study of character strengths, gratitude was found to be the best predictor of wellbeing. Another study found that men and women with heart disease who practiced gratitude showed significant improvement in heart health.

Not to mention, it can also make you happier. Research shows gratitude trumps optimism, spirituality, and emotional self-awareness when it comes to bringing greater positivity and satisfaction into our lives. 

Need more reasons to practice gratitude during the season of giving thanks? Check out the infographic below from Happify to learn how else gratitude can increase health and happiness.

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How to Export Leads With Facebook Search

Do you use Facebook to find prospects? Ever wish you could export your lead lists? The new Facebook Search browser extension for Chrome makes it easy to search Facebook for prospects and download the results. In this article you’ll discover how to export prospect details from Facebook. Why the Facebook Search Extension Facebook has huge […]

This post How to Export Leads With Facebook Search first appeared on Social Media Examiner.
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4 Strategies to Help Maintain Lead Quality in Your Database

When you first implemented inbound marketing for your business, you knew that you were building a system that utilized high quality content to help generate high quality leads from your website. Flashes of the film Field of Dreams probably kept running through your head as you optimized your website for conversions and started pumping out blogs and offers at a regular basis.

If you build it, they will come.

And boy did they! Inbound marketing has proven time and time again to be an extremely successful philosophy that can help generate leads for businesses through online sources. Sadly, though, few people will tell you that not all of those leads are quality.

Alongside your actual business prospects who will fill out forms on your website are vendors looking to sell you something, competitors looking to read your content and foreign marketers just looking to read what you have to offer, among others. None of these people will ever become customers yet they will take up as much, if not more space in your database doing absolutely nothing for you, and that might be more of a problem than you think.

The Cost of Bad Leads

Depending on what type of marketing database, sales CRM or email marketing tools you’re using, you could be paying a premium to house and market to these contacts. Database limits and cost-per-send rates aren’t to be taken lightly, as they can lead to a business throwing away thousands of dollars a year.

Outside of cost, a database filled with suspect leads can also skew marketing metrics and negatively affect sales follow up to actual qualified leads. With that in mind, I’ve put together a list of 4 different tricks I continue to use in my campaigns to help maintain a clean database filled with only qualified leads.

1) Have Your Forms be the First Line of Defense

The first and probably best way to ensure a clean database is to establish rules and triggers connected to your forms to help you either keep low quality leads out altogether or sort them after the fact. Email form field rules and additional form fields asking for qualifying information are some great options.

Email Form Fields

Often times in B2B campaigns, you can tell if a lead is legitimate or not based on what kind of email address they provide. Competitors may use their personal email addresses to mask their true identity while vendors and others might use blacklisted addresses linked heavily with spam. If you face this regularly, block them from submitting your forms by comparing their email domains against a list of free, spammy email providers alongside your own list of providers. Not only will this help collect relevant email addresses from qualified leads for your sales team but it will also keep out the unqualified people who may be unwilling or unable to provide their real email addresses.

Additional Form Fields

Not all forms can be set up to automatically determine if a lead is qualified and has the right intentions on the same page and that’s ok. People are smart and will often times do whatever it takes to submit a form on your website for one reason or another.

When it comes to dealing with these people, don’t fight them too hard with multiple safeguards like CAPTCHA fields (not always a bad idea though) and other filtering mechanisms, but instead looks to collect seemingly generic information that only you know to be a qualifier or disqualifier for your business.

Items such as geographic information, company size and industry can help you quickly understand if the person submitting the form is qualified as a potential sales prospect quickly based on where and who your company is looking to work with.

2) Corral the Ones That Slip Through

As I alluded to above, people are smart and are sooner or later going to successfully submit a form on your website to read your content and that’s ok. You haven’t lost just because someone was able to provide a real email and select the right form field.

In fact, they have played straight into your hands! Now that you’ve collected their information and have stored it (temporarily) in your database, it will be easy to quickly review if they are or are not meant to take up your precious storage space both using automated and manual techniques.

List Creation

When it comes to keeping a clean database, establishing smart lists to uncover and track unqualified leads in your database is key. Based on who your business is targeting and where you are looking to do business, there are a number of simple rules you can establish to quickly pull in a list of potentially unqualified leads currently in your database.

If you are an American business looking to only work within the states, establishing a list that tracks any and all leads with known IP addresses outside the US can quickly show you foreign contacts who you will never do business with.

If you collected qualifying information in your forms, you can create lists to track any answers that disqualify a lead as well. Once you’ve established a list or lists that track all of these disqualifying factors, you can easily clean your database with a simple click (after reviewing the list thoroughly, of course).

Manual Trimming

While smart lists will help you quickly wrangle and delete any contacts with measurable values, there are others still that may require more of a manual process when it comes to keeping a clean database. Form submissions with names (Test Test) and phone numbers (123456789) are solid indicators that a lead in unqualified and not work the space to house their obviously fake information.

While you may be able to set up rules to catch some of this, there are too many different ways that people can submit false information to effectively automate the review process so instead, rely on your experience and eye for these submissions as they come into your database. Set yourself up to receive email notifications once a form is submitted and spend time daily or weekly reviewing them to see if any are clearly fake. From there, you can manually delete them from your database without much effort.

3) Monitor Engagement

While it can be very easy to tell the difference between a potential business opportunity and a vendor or competitor, it can be much more difficult to tell whether or not a seemingly qualified lead is actively engaged with your content in a positive manner. Whether through engagement with your emails or through specific, negative actions on your website, there are signs that can be monitored to tell if leads are truly qualified.

Email Marketing Review

While marketers always crave engagement with their emails, not all actions are always a good thing. Contacts looking to unsubscribe from your lists still must open and click through the original email, so keeping an eye on what links are being clicked on a regular basis is always a good idea. Identify those that are unsubscribing from your communications, placing your emails in their junk folders, or are having your emails bounce on a regular basis. This information can be used to establish a list of people no longer engaging with your content.

After reviewing this list (potentially with your sales team), delete those who you believe are no longer qualified to be in your database before then establishing a plan of attack to legally target those who your sales team still believes to be opportunities.

Negative Website Activities

While normally connected with an unqualified or fake submission, there are some cases where a seemingly qualified lead can perform specific actions on your website that may raise some red flags. Multiple conversions on any and all offers on your website, while not always a bad thing, can often point to a contact trying to collect anything and everything you’ve written for less than noble purposes.

Tracking people who convert on multiple forms via a smart list or keeping an eye on any large amounts of conversions at one time via notification emails should allow you to see when someone is going on a “download spree” and give you the opportunity to remove them from your system once they’ve stopped.

4) Stay Connected with Your Sales Team’s Funnel

Even truly qualified leads will need to leave your marketing database at one point or another. Either they go through the entire sales process and become a customer (and are added to the CRM), speak with your sales team but decide to go elsewhere (and are then sent to the CRM for future contact) or they “go dark.”

For those who do go dark, it can be tough to know where to put them within your marketing database and sales CRM. On one hand, your sales team can’t be wasting their time trying to continually contact people who won’t respond, but on the other hand you can’t necessarily market to these people in the same way you would a new prospect.

When faced with this dilemma, work with your sales team to create a custom nurturing campaign that can take these “recycled” leads who have gone dark and slowly send them customized content to bring them back into the sales cycle. If successful, you can bring back old prospects who may have just needed more time. If unsuccessful, you have a list of people who have shown to be disengaged and not worth keeping as a contact.

Now of course, this strategy can differ depending on your sales team’s philosophy on when to give up on leads, but it still allows you to at least start the conversation around how long is too long for a disengaged lead to stay in a full database.

The Bottom Line

Whether you’re a mature inbound campaign or just implementing your first blog post and offer, a clean and consistently scrubbed database is paramount to the overall success of a campaign when it comes to providing ROI. The benefits of keeping that database clean go far beyond keeping your superior sane– they can help your campaign save money on software and storage while improving overall lead to customer conversion rates.

While not the easiest (or sexiest) job within digital marketing, if you use any or all of the four steps listed above, your “cleaning time” can be significantly shortened and made smarter. That’s a movement that you, your sales team and your company can get behind.

from HubSpot Marketing Blog http://bit.ly/1Ih19Hk

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How to Take Good Pictures With Your Phone: 17 Tips & Tricks to Try

In order to take a great photo, you used to have to buy a fancy camera and editing software for your desktop computer. Then, you had to invest some serious time and energy into learning how to use them.

Thanks to smartphones and editing apps, we can now take high quality photos and edit them without any bells and whistles.

But taking a great photo on your smartphone is not as simple as pointing and shooting. There are plenty of bad smartphone photos out there – I’m sure you’ve seen one or two of them.

So, what’s the secret to taking great pictures with your smartphone? Turns out there are a few of them. Check out these tips below to improve your smartphone photography game. (And once you have the photo-taking part down, read this post to see the best photo editing apps for mobile.)

17 Tips for Taking Pictures With Your Smartphone

1) Turn on gridlines to line up your shot.

One of the easiest and best ways to improve the photos you take on your mobile device is by turning on gridlines so you can properly set up your shot. It superimposes a series of lines on the screen of your smartphone’s camera app that are based on the “rule of thirds” – one of the most well-known principles of photographic composition.

The rule of thirds says to break an image down into thirds, both horizontally and vertically, so you have nine parts in total. The theory is that if you place points of interest in these intersections or along the lines, your photo will be more balanced and will enable your viewer to interact with the image more naturally.

Image Credit: Digital Photography School

To switch the grid on …

• iPhone: Go to “Settings,” choose “Photos & Camera,” and switch “Grid” on.
• Samsung Galaxy S5: Launch the camera app, go to “Settings,” scroll down and tap “Gridlines on.”

 

Image Credit: Lynda.com

2) Focus on one subject.

Many of the best photos include just one, interesting subject. Plus, it’s usually easier to get the composition right when your photo only has one subject. Spend some extra time setting up the photo, tap the screen of your smartphone to focus the camera on your subject, and capture away. Use negative space (i.e. empty space) to your advantage here to make your subject stands out even more.

Pro Tip: Once you’ve taken your photo, open it in the Snapseed photo editing app and use its “Selective Adjust” tool to make your subject even more vivid. Using that tool, you can pinpoint your subject and adjust the brightness, contrast, and saturation of that single point in the photo. 

 

Image Credit: Patrick Janelle

3) Embrace negative space.

Speaking of negative space … it looks good. Real good. “Negative space” simply means the area around and between the subjects of an image. When it comes to composing great photos, use simplicity to your advantage. When you include a lot of empty space, your subject will stand out more and evoke a stronger reaction from your viewer. Oftentimes, negative space is a large expanse of open sky, water, an empty field, or a large wall, as in the examples below.

 

Image Credit: Eric Christian

4) Find interesting perspectives.

One great way to make your photo memorable is to take it at a unique, unexpected angle. This can create a cool illusion with the subjects in your photo.

Most photos taken on mobile phones nowadays are taken either straight on or from a bird’s eye view. Try taking a photo straight up and playing with the sky as negative space, like in the first photo below. Or, you can try taking it at a slight downward angle.

Pro Tip: If you take a photo and find the perspective is a little askew or tilted, use the SKRWT photo editing app to adjust it so the lines look clean and square.

 

Image Credit: iPhone Photography School; Paul Octavious

5) Play with reflections.

Another cool idea for making your smartphone photos memorable? Look for opportunities to play with reflections. There are plenty of other sources for great reflection photos: puddles, larger bodies of water, mirrors, sunglasses, glass, metallic surfaces, and more.

 

Image Credit: Joshua Lott; Carlos Copertone

6) Use leading lines.

A leading line is any line in a photo that draws the viewer’s eye into the picture, from one part of the photo to another. Think staircases, building facades, train tracks, roads, even a path through the woods. They’re great for creating a sense of depth in an image, and they can make your photo look very well designed.

 

Image Credit: Carlos Copertone; Paul Octavious

7) Look for symmetry.

“Symmetry is a vague sense of harmonious and beautiful proportion and balance,” reads one definition. Symmetrical photos are incredibly pleasing to the eye, and they’re also one of the simplest and most compelling ways to compose a photo. In photography, symmetry usually means creating an image that can be divided into two equal parts that are mirror images of each other.

You can find symmetry “in the wild” or set up your photo accordingly, like photographer Eric Christian did in the first photo below. Remember to use those gridlines from tip #1 to line everything up perfectly.

 

Image Credit: Eric Christian; Carlos Copertone

8) Keep an eye out for repetitive patterns.

Repetitive patterns are another pleasing subject to photograph. They appear whenever strong graphic elements are repeated over and over again, such as lines, geometric shapes, forms, and colors. These patterns can make a strong visual impact. Sometimes, simply photographing a beautiful, tiled floor can be enough to create a striking image. Other times, it’s more fun to keep an eye out for where they appear naturally.

 

Image Credit: Patrick Janelle

9) Avoid zooming in.

If you’re taking a photo from a distance, you may be tempted to zoom in. Actually, it’s better not to zoom in. Instead, either get closer to your subject or take the photo from the default distance away, and crop it later on. That way, you won’t compromise quality and you can play around with a larger image later on.

Image Credit: Obama Pacman

10) Capture small details.

You know the phrase “it’s the little things”? Close-up photos that capture small, intricate, delicate details can make for really compelling photographs. Keep an eye out for textures and patterns like peeling paint, a gravel road, or a tile tabletop.

Pro Tip: Use the “sharpen” tool in your favorite photo editing app to (conservatively) sharpen the details of your photo. You might also download the Camera+ app and use its Clarity filter, which is what The Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Sintumuang calls the app’s “secret sauce – it adds pro-camera crispness to almost any shot.”

 

Image Credit: Paul Octavious; Eric Christian

11) Keep the flash off.

Let’s face it: You’d be hard-pressed to find a great smartphone photo that was taken with a flash. Most of the time, they’re overexposed and make the colors in your photo go totally out of whack. Even the iPhone 6’s TrueTone duel LED flash isn’t perfect. Instead of using flash, take advantage of the sources of natural light you can find. You might even play with shadows, like in the second image below, or create a silhouette.

Once you’ve taken the photo, play with the “Exposure” tool in your favorite photo editing app to see if you can make the image slightly brighter without getting too grainy.

  

Image Credit: Patrick Janelle; Paul Octavious

12) Create abstracts.

Abstract photos are meant to capture the essence of your subject without revealing it as a whole. The point is to create unique, surprising images from ordinary subjects. Oftentimes, you can accomplish this by cropping an otherwise normal photo or taking close-up shots. Subjects with patterns or repetition are great candidates for abstract photography.

 

Image Credit: iPhone Photography School; Patrick Janelle

13) Take candids.

While posed photos can be great for memory’s sake, candid shots of people doing things, or people with people, are often far more interesting. Why? Because they more effectively capture the emotion and essence of the moment.

One of the best ways to capture an interesting candid shot is to take a lot of photos. You’ll have more to choose from, and often the best photos happen when the stars align in a single moment – everyone’s eyes are open, one person is tilting their head just so, you finally got a shot of Derek smiling with his teeth, etc.

 

Image Credit: Patrick Janelle

14) Think outside the box.

Composition is a huge part of what makes a photo great – but, then, so is the photo’s subject. Some of the most delightful photos come out of cool, unique ideas. Images are more effective than text at evoking emotion from your viewers, and that means getting your photos to say something. Try thinking outside of the box and surprising your viewers with a cool or unexpected subject.

 

Image Credit: Paul Octavious

15) Make your viewers laugh.

Speaking of evoking emotion, sometimes the most memorable photos are the ones that make us laugh. The first image below of the older woman wearing a brightly colored “Hi Hater” shirt is funny because it’s unexpected. The second image of the dog toy on a dinner plate is poking fun at the classic Instagram food shot from a dog’s perspective. If you can make your audience laugh, they’ll likely enjoy your photo.

 

Image Credit: Baddie Winkle; Jeremy Veach

16) Attach an external lens.

If you want to get real fancy, there are lenses out there you can buy and attach to the top of your smartphone’s native camera lens. From fish-eye lenses to wide-angle lenses, these add-ons can bring an entirely new quality and perspective to your photos. According to Wirecutter, the best camera lenses for iPhone photography are Moment mobile lenses. Start there or do some research to find the lens add-ons that fit your smartphone needs.

Image Credit: MobileFun.co.uk

17) Use the right photo editing apps.

Composing and taking your smartphone photo is just the first step to making it visually compelling. Editing your photos using the mobile editing apps is the next step – and a very critical one, at that. There are a lot of great photo and video editing apps out there for mobile device: Read this blog post to see our list of the best photo editing apps for mobile devices.

What tips do you have for taking photos with smartphones? Add to this list in the comment section.

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