It is five to six times cheaper to keep a customer than to go and find a new one, yet most companies pour their energy into acquisition and let retention drift. Email is the channel hiding in plain sight, and the customers worth focusing on aren't all the same: some are vampires who drain you, some are ghosts who drifted away, and some are zombies, the churned and lapsed customers who once paid and could be brought back.
Val Geisler shows how to grow MRR without chasing new logos. She walks through winning back zombie customers with messaging tailored to why they left, following up when a requested feature finally ships, segmenting annual-plan and re-engagement emails instead of blasting everyone, and using cancellation and post-trial moments to ask real questions. Underpinning the tactics are three underused retention strategies: treat support as a cross-team effort, be genuinely human, and help customers build the habits that keep them choosing you.
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Welcome back for our final keynote of the day. And for this one, we're on the run the grow track. It's hard to keep track of which stages which one they're all video. But this one is, it's about a problem that so many companies pretty much every company I think I know has, which is how do you after you've acquired your customers, how do you retain them, and particularly around the idea of how you retain them through through communicating with them, with email being a prime channel.
So without further ado, over to Val Geisler to talk us through how to do that. Today, we're going to talk about how to keep the customers you've already attracted with better email marketing. You are in the right place if you want to uncover the hidden gaps in customer acquisition, who doesn't?
You feel completely overwhelmed by the idea of building complex email marketing game plans. And if you've been tasked with using email to impact your MRR, but you don't have a clue how to get started. Hi, I'm Val. I am an email marketing conversion copywriter and strategist.
I worked in house as the number one, the first marketer at an ESP. So I know email inside and out. Onboarding and customer retention are my jam. Ask anybody. I'm kind of obsessed with churn reduction to the point that I started a business called fix my churn.
Here's what you'll learn by hanging around with me today. We're gonna talk about how to grow how to use your emails to grow your MRR without looking for new customers. So we're not talking acquisition, we're talking email. A game plan for winning back canceled customers, and how three underutilized retention strategies map to email that make a difference.
Here's one thing I know for sure. There is no one right answer when it comes to email marketing. What works for one business might not work for yours. Testing is everything, so why not try it? Now it is five times cheaper to keep a customer than to go get a new one.
That is hard and fast data, and it is only getting cheaper and cheaper to keep new customers. So this is data from a couple years ago, and I believe it's now six times cheaper. So it's better to keep existing customers. Why would you not want to than to worry about going and getting new ones?
The thing is that there's different kinds of customers, and not all real customers are ideal customers. There's a lot of a lot of customers we don't want to keep around. So in the spirit of the fall holidays, I wanna talk to you about vampires, ghosts, and zombies.
So vampires are a type of customer that we don't want to worry about. They are the customers who suck the life out of your business. They are a drain on customer support. They are loud on social media. They are just exhausting. You do not want to go after vampire customers.
Ghost customers. Ghosts are interesting because they are customers who once showed interest in your brand, but they no longer do. So they they stopped in in engaging with your brand when at a certain point where they no longer are active, but they at one time showed interest.
So my friend Jimmy Daley at Animals, he said that he signed up for a service called TaskRabbit. And TaskRabbit is a service that helps busy people get things done. Now TaskRabbit, by nature, attracts very busy people. And he got partway through the sign up process and then had to go and do something.
And so he never came back, and TaskRabbit never reached out to him. So ghosts are really interesting because you can go and reach out to your ghost customers and say, you know, invite them back. Use email to drive them back into your brand.
But even more interesting than ghosts, remember, we don't want anything to do with vampires. We kind of like ghosts, but oh, well, let me give you an example of a ghost first. So this is a an email that I got from Rover. So Rover is a dog watching or a dog yeah.
Dog walk watching and walking service. And they sent an email to me after I had used Rover for a little while, and then and then I was into using it. So they're kind of I was a ghost at that point for a little bit, and they're bringing me back into the product.
And I also wanted to show you this example of a ghost. So I signed up for Earth Hero's email list and never bought anything. So that's a great example of a ghost, someone who signs up for your email list and never converts to a paid customer.
Earth Hero did a great job here of continuing to email me, and you can see I I never felt like I was getting a lot of emails from them, but you can see that for the most part, they were emailing me pretty much every other day, if not every day, in about a month's time.
Now, zombies. These are the ones that I really wanna talk about. I get excited about zombies, and I almost skipped over those examples to get to zombies, because zombies are really interesting customers. These are customers who engaged with your brand at one time.
So they were a they were a customer, a paying customer, who have left the product. So they are canceled customers. They are people if you happen to be in, like, an ecommerce situation, they're someone who bought your product once and then never came back, never bought again.
Zombies are really interesting because they showed interest in your brand at one time. They were active. They were they were alive. And now they're gone, they're dead. And but they are not actually dead. They're out there, they're searching for the right product, they're wandering around, and you can actually bring them back.
So the first thing you need to know is your turn metric. So your turn metric is the number of people who left in a set period divided by the number of people who were around in that period of time. So your turn metric is going to let you know who your zombies are.
Okay? Now, here's some ways we can get those zombies back. So we're gonna talk about those three strategies we mentioned at the beginning. Support is more than just the customer success team. I want to make that really really clear that we should be working across teams.
And customer support does not live in a bubble. Now imagine if you oh, excuse me. Imagine if you were on a these receiving end of a ticket, and you sent in a support ticket, and the support person said, hey, I solved your problem.
Or you request something that a feature, for example, you request you ask about a feature that doesn't exist. The support person says, oh, that feature doesn't exist. We will I'll make a note that you're asking for it, and you know, I'll put it in the file.
Sorry about that. And that's it. And that's what happens a lot of times is customer support says, yep, we'll we'll make a note that you're interested in this feature. We'll add it to our list. And and that's kind of the last time you hear about it.
But what if the people who asked for a feature actually got a dedicated email when that feature was released? So this is a an email I gave you a long version on the left hand side and then another shorter version here. It's actually it's just pulled out and made big for you.
So the the long version of the email is saying, hey, here's all these new features that we built. We recently launched Form Builder two point o, our new form feature. And this email is a really great feature release email. However, there's an opportunity here where this email could have gone out to people who requested, made these requests of always eWig editor or create forms multiple fields.
So all the all those requests for features, the people who made those requests, if customer success is tagging them appropriately in their tool, then we can send marketing can send a dedicated email to those customers saying you specifically requested this and we brought it to the product.
And we'd love to have you come back and give it a try. Here's an example of what that looks like. I worked with a team who was deciding between a couple of different ESPs, and one was customer IO. And Customer. Io and it in the process of us deciding where which email service provider they were going to use, this email came through to them, which was actually from Customer.
Io. It said, when we previously spoke, there was overall interest, but the accessibility of a visual workflow builder was a blocker. Feedback heard. And guess what? We built it. Here it is. And I'd love to hear from you. Now this is from an account executive, but this could very easily become a marketing email.
This is a feature that was requested and was a blocker to getting this potential customer over the hurdle of joining. And so then we actually ended up choosing Customer. Io because of this email. So imagine what kind of impact your brand could have on customers who either churned because of a missing feature or are inactive or never converted because of a feature.
If you tag them appropriately in your in your support system, then marketing can pull those email addresses out and put them into a dedicated email about a new feature when it's feature launch time. Here's another example of the ways that you can be very creative with your emails.
This is customer IO again. They are recognizing that zombies are people who once they come back, they're people who have already used the product. So they don't necessarily need to learn everything all over again. They don't need the same onboarding that a brand new customer might need who's never experienced the product before.
So what they do is they send a hey, do you want this onboarding sequence? Do want us to teach you how to launch your first campaign? If you do, great. Click this button. Here's a little preview of what it is. And if you don't, don't do anything and we won't send it to you.
That's a really great way to honor your zombies and know that let them know that you recognize that they've might have already done this. So your zombies, you know, they they want special messaging. And this time of year, you wanna start to think about your annual plans.
So this is something that a lot of brands don't dive too deeply into, mostly because it does impact your MRR in a negative way, but it increases your ARR. So the the gross to your ARR is worth a slight decrease in MRR, and you can show that the decrease came from annual plans.
So annual plan messaging is really important to be custom with. So your zombies, people who just came back, are not people who are going to want a a messaging about jumping on annual plan. So this is an email here about a annual plan.
And the issue I have with it is that it went out to every single person who ever used this product. What I would love to see here is customized messaging. So somebody who has used the product for more than six months and is on a monthly plan, you can send messaging to them that says, hey, you've been using our product for six months or more.
You can even break it down into monthly segments. And do the math for them. Say, if you continue on a monthly plan, you'll pay this much. If you upgrade to an annual plan, you'll pay this much. And you can show them that kind of quick back of the napkin math.
The reason why I love to send these kinds of emails before the end of the year is because brands can especially if you're b to c, brands can write off people can write off the cost of your product on their taxes. So if I'm a small business owner and my email service provider reaches out to me and says, do you wanna go on annual plan?
Then if I do that before the end of the year, I get to write off that entire cost on my taxes for this year. So you can also make that case in your annual plan emails. Zombies, however, you wanna give them again, you wanna pull those segments out.
You wanna say, hey, you're you know, they are unique. They have just come back. We don't wanna push an annual plan on them. But we can use segmenting to acknowledge where people are. Now, you wanna make sure that in your emails, you are being very specific to what they need.
Now, zombies give you a unique opportunity to talk about their individual needs. So there might be cases where you have zombies who have made it through a certain portion of the onboarding and then canceled, or who never took action at all, had a paid account and canceled.
You also have zombies who maybe were very active users and ended up canceling. So you can segment them out based on what they need. So what should I do next is a very compelling topic for an email because it helps them understand what they need to get done.
This is an example of an email that might be challenging to see. It's definitely challenging to see the whole long email which is on the left hand side. I pulled out the very beginning of this email for you and blew it up on the other side.
Because this email went out to every single customer who again, whoever used this product. It is it's very product driven. Know, a major update to how floating bars look. I don't even remember what floating bars are. I used this product so long ago.
This is all very much about what we've done, what we've built, the features that we've been working on. And I don't care about anything else that comes in the rest of that super long email, because it's all about you as the brand. What if you are writing these feature release emails, make sure that you make it about your customers.
Flip the script on your copy. You know, the first three months of the year, you can talk about everything that's happened for them or what an exciting first quarter it's been as a business owner. We heard from you and we wanna address the, were able to address the problems that you're facing and here they are.
Again, you can break out this email based on what people have asked for. You don't need to give them this whole long list, laundry list and all these gifts and images of what the emails are. You can actually just break it out by segments of what people have asked for.
So this is just reiterating the fact that you know, I want to remind you, it is cheaper to keep an existing customer than to go get a new customer. And one of the ways you can do that is by talking to customers whose trial has ended.
So a lot of times, we'll have people just signed up for a free trial. And in that free trial, they will they'll find that the you know, it's not working for them, or maybe they didn't use it at all. But their trial ends and they never convert to a paid account.
What happens for most brands is that we stop talking to them entirely. They stay on our email list, they get product updates maybe, but we don't have any kind of special messaging for them. Just because they didn't convert that one time does not mean that they won't convert again in the future.
So you want to continue the conversation. This is an email that I wrote for a client where we contacted the customer. I think this is a seven days after their trial ended, but they are invited to come back. You know, this says like, hey, even though your account isn't fully functional, you can unlock the the power of our product today.
All the reasons why they should do that. So it's a very simple message, but continuing those messages and just saying acknowledging, I mean, you can do it with extending a free trial. You can do it in lots of different ways through email. But I wanna encourage you to continue to reach out to customers even after their trial has ended, even if they didn't convert.
They might convert down the line. You don't wanna badger them about it, but you wanna remind them that you exist. So here's another example of a way you can keep in touch with them is the subscription has canceled. Right? So this is a this is great for either an end of a free trial or an actual cancellation, where you can ask them questions.
Now this language, I get a lot of questions about this particular email. Because with GDPR, we wanna be careful about doing sales in emails to people who have who have canceled. But you know, if they if they've unsubscribed, you can't contact them. But if they've canceled their account, you can always ask them questions.
Ask them why, you know, why they chose to cancel. Ask them if there was a feature that they're missing. Ask them if a different pricing plan was what they were looking for. You can ask them questions without doing sales and and gather that information.
You can use those questions, the answers that they get give you as a jumping off point. A lot of brands don't ask questions in emails because they worry about inbound. They think inbound is, you know, it's gonna overwhelm our CS team and we, you know, we just wanna avoid inbound emails.
But I would encourage you to think about what impact inbound emails can actually have. You can take as a as a marketer, you can take all of and salesperson for that matter. All of that inbound reply copy and put it into, know, into your emails, into on your marketing site, into your sales materials.
So everything that your customers reply and talk about why they canceled, that's really valuable information. So encourage your teams to give it a try and see how it works. This is one of my favorites that and the subject line I believe is hello from the other side.
And this is an example of how you can be really fun with it. This is a downgrade kind of email where they've gone from either a higher paid level to a lower paid level or even a paid to a free. And those accounts are really valuable too.
You can ask questions. What helps you get the most out of our platform? And again, we're encouraging those inbound emails. This is another one that is an example of after the account has the trial has ended. So you can see there's a lot of different ways to engage with people post trial.
This is also someone who I noticed it's been a while since you used the app. You can use that for your paying customers who are inactive. A lot of times people say, well, don't wanna bother them because they're just gonna cancel if they realize they haven't been using the app.
But there is something to be said for some outreach from the brand and some offers of support. You would much rather have them cancel ahead of time before the charge happens than have them do a refund or a charge back. It's just a better experience overall.
Now, we have two more strategies I wanna go through really quickly. One is to be human. You can ask them questions about them. Talk to your customers, get on the phone with them, talk about the work that they do. What kind of problems keep them awake at night?
You can talk about your product. So you can find out, you can ask them what's happening in the world. What was happening that made them sign up? You can ask them what convinced them that your product was the right solution. You can also ask them what made them nervous about making a jump.
And especially if there's someone who never converted, definitely ask that question. But get on the phone with them, talk to them. I encourage everyone to talk to at least one customer every single week. And then building habits. So the best business book I've ever read is Atomic Habits by James Clear.
It's not a business book, but it's all about how we build habits as a brand. And ultimately, when we're onboarding new customers, that's what we're doing. We're helping them build new habits of choosing our brand over anything else they used to be using or an old way that they used to do things.
There is habits are built into a lot of different frameworks like jobs to be done. And, you know, there are all different use cases for why people come into your product. So you want to understand why they're coming in the, you know, their ultimate goal and help them build the habits that will reach that goal.
All of your emails can do that once you know who they are and what they need, and talk to them like they're human, and you are too. The dinner party strategy is a framework that I have that I'll share with you all afterwards that gets you through exactly how to do this.
And I'm all out of time for today, but I will share the dinner party strategy with you, and you'll be able to see exactly what it is, how you can onboard your customers in a more human way. So whatever brought you here today, maybe you wanted to get better at customer messaging, maybe you thought you'd pick up some new tricks, Or maybe you know the value of thinking outside of the traditional email marketing box.
I wanna make sure that you walk away with this. Einstein said that everything in life should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. But I think he was talking about email. So here's where you can get your copy of the dinner party strategy.
It's at fixmychurn dot com slash tdps. You can go there and download that strategy that I kind of blew through there because we ran out of time. But it's all there. And there's so much more in-depth on that downloadable for you. Thank you.
Okay, so that is a wrap for today. Unfortunately, Val can't join us for q and a today. She had a scheduling conflict. But she will be she'll be here next week to host one of our roundtable discussions. So we'll we'll let you know more about what's coming up in those next week.
Before we go a quick preview of what's happening later this week on Thursday. Firstly, thanks as always to our partners. We have platinum platinum partners are Mailchimp, Current Health, Deliveroo and Amazon Dev Centre Scotland, but also our gold partners, administrate and digital free agent and eyes ettle.
Speaking of eyes ettle, they've got something planned for us on Thursday, they're hosting an office pub quiz online on our platform two pm Thursday. So check that out. We'll we'll drop you a note an email with all details of everything upcoming over the next day or two.
We were not doing any roundtables this week, we thought instead, you know, this this Thursday is pretty much the halfway point of the conference. And so we're going to have a kind of an open floor halfway point check-in to see to hear from from you what you think is working, what's not how we could improve and give you the most value from the remaining four weeks of the conference.
This whole online multi week experience, it's as new to us as it is to you. So yeah, we're all ears on how to how to improve it. So keep an eye on your inboxes for details of that. And then the final event on Thursday, we'll be chatting with Ran Fishkin, who many of you will know, he's spoken at the conference a good few times now.
And always one of the most fascinating people in tech I find. Always enjoy chatting with him and hearing his sometimes controversial opinions, you know, which is, which is always interesting. But he's going to be talking about his his journey as an entrepreneur, from founding Mars way back in two thousand and seven, to his exit from Mars, and how and why he left, what he went on to do next his company spark Toro and how that's going, but also the future of entrepreneurialism in tech as he sees it.
So always great to hear from Rand. Keep an eye out for that one. That's at four pm on Thursday, UK time. Alright, that's it for today. Thanks for being with us, and we'll see you again soon.
