You need to be Talking to your Customers More! 🤝

The TL;DR:

• Let’s Chat D2C: Talk to Your Customers

• What I’m Thinking about this Week: Onboarding and Hiring

• The D2Z Podcast: In this week’s episode, I sat down with Parker Amoroso, Co-Founder of SCALIS, a fully integrated ATS and job board platform that leverages AI to democratize the hiring process.

• App Highlight - Lifetimely: Lifetime value and profit analytics for your Shopify storefront on autopilot.Upcoming Events: Take Action on Your Survey Data with Daasity and Fairing on June 6th, plus four more, including a private suite at Dodger Stadium!

This week’s newsletter is brought to you byGorgias, my go-to for customer service. When I saw thatBrumate made $9m through their CS channel, I knew Gorgias had to be onto something, and I needed to rethink how customer service fit into a retention marketing strategy. Historically, we’ve considered customer service a cost center, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Next week, I will dive into some ways you can shift your CX strategy into being a revenue-driving channel. Stay tuned!

Let’s Chat D2C - Talk to Your Customers

Being tone-deaf to your customer's wants and needs is not a sound retention strategy, so let’s dive into the easiest ways you can start engaging with your customers.

Post-Purchase Surveys

We implement Fairing on all of our client’s sites to get actionable insights on everything from how customers heard about us (i.e., Tiktok, Meta, etc.) to personalization questions (i.e., “Would you say you’re new to pickleball or a competitive player?”) to CRO (i.e., “Were there any issues with your website experience today?”).

Reviews

Okendo is my go-to here, because it’s SO easy to ask for more than just a 1-5 star rating. We can ask for product attributes, customer demographics, UGC, and more during the review request process. This allows us to segment our customers in Klaviyo and send them personalized content.  

Pick up the Phone

Something I see very few brands doing that is so powerful is simply scheduling 3-5 weekly interviews with your VIP customers. Create a segment in Klaviyo of your most valuable customers and reach out to them to schedule discovery sessions where you can learn from them what they enjoy most about the brand!

What I’m Thinking About This Week: Onboarding and Hiring.

The first iterations of our onboarding process were more about me spending one-on-one time with our new team members initially and helping walk them through what we did, our processes, and our goals and vision. And that worked at first, but eventually, it got to a point where two main things happened.

One, when you're at forty to fifty team members, and I'm doing all of these other things that I need to do to continue to grow and operate the business, I just didn't have the time to continue to onboard all of these new team members in this one to one fashion that's obviously not scalable. And also, as we brought on some other departments and started to specialize in more areas, I wasn't even the best person to give some of these onboarding training and sessions.

That started to come from the department heads once we brought those roles on. So the iteration for part one was a lot easier because I focused on how I could bring these team members up to speed in a one-to-one fashion.

But then it became, how do I empower our department heads to build out their onboarding process? It evolved to a point where now we have our general onboarding, but then we have our department-specific onboarding as well. It's set up to be so thorough that you could never talk to the new team member - but we don't do this because it wouldn't be optimal.

Use a solution like Loom to record everything you do, from workflow processes to your actual work product deliverables. Every team member at Electriq has a Loom account and is encouraged to “record anything that they think could be useful for another team member to have as a resource” and then share it with our internal agency operations team.

It’s to a point where we can hand new team members the onboarding documents, and they would be up to speed with the company culture and acquire all of the skills and knowledge to work at Electriq through our videos, resource guides, training, and certifications.

Part one is designed for every new team member, and part two is department specific. So again, more videos, more training, more certifications, and all of that took a lot of time to get to, but now that we're in this position, it's setting up our new team members for success and not causing us to reinvent the wheel on certain things that we know we don't need to.

This isn’t to say we nailed it right out of the gate. We had some bumps in the road, especially in that in-between phase between phase one iteration of onboarding versus phase two, where we had one or two team members leave because they didn't feel like they had any idea what was going on nor how they could be successful in the role.

That was my wake-up call to hone in on how I could evolve our onboarding process to accommodate our new scale.

Because just like with onboarding a new client, that first week is crucial to ensure the relationship is set up for long-term success.

This Week’s The D2Z Podcast

#61 – Making Hiring Not Suck

🎧Listen Now 🎧

In this week’s episode, I sat down with Parker Amoroso, Co-Founder of SCALIS, a fully integrated ATS and job board platform that leverages AI to democratize the hiring process. Specifically, we explored the following:

💰 The pressing issues surrounding hiring and the challenges of finding qualified candidates

📲 The limitations of traditional job boards

😎 What it’s like to be a first-time entrepreneur

🚀 How the SCALIS platform addresses inefficiencies in the hiring process

App Highlight - Lifetimely

It’s important to understand your baseline metrics to set clear and actionable goals against your marketing strategy. Lifetimely is my go-to for that.

❓ What is It: Lifetime value and profit analytics.

🏅 Differentiator: Lifetimely allows you to look at your customers' lifetime value and other behaviors. Their array of in-depth features, functionalities, and data allows you to make better-informed decisions across your business

💰 Starting Price: $19/month

🚀 How we use it: For cohort, retention, and LTV analysis. I put together a video that describes how we use it at Electriq and what actionable takeaways you can glean from the data.

Watch the walk-through video of Lifetimely here.

I also put together a Using Lifetimely for Shopify CLTV Reporting & Analysis video here.

Upcoming Events

A LOT is coming up, both virtual and in-person!

• Take Action on Your Survey Data: I’m hosting a webinar with Daasity and Fairing on June 6th. If you're interested in how to generate and leverage zero-party data, segmentation/personalization, or simply how to get more revenue out of your Email & SMS channel, this one is for you!

• Leveraging Rebuy Across the Customer Journey Master Class. I’m hosting an hour-long master class on June 8th, demonstrating how I leverage Rebuy across every aspect of the customer journey. From pre-purchase AOV increasing tactics to retention strategies deploying Rebuy’s AI recommendations tool, I’ll cover it all in this jam-packed session!

• Private Dodger Stadium Suite with Recharge on June 13 in LA. There is extremely limited space for merchants, so RSVP ASAP if you’d like to attend, but no guarantees that we’ll be able to accommodate you.

• DTCxRetain June 14-15, where I’ll host a retention marketing breakout session. If you’re a brand, use the code ELECTRIQBRAND for a free pass!

• Transactional Email & SMS Master Class on June 21st with Malomo, where I’ll dive into how Electriq creates personalized transactional journeys that improve retention and increase LTV.

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