By Jan Young
We all have those stubborn, silent accounts. They’re still customers - for now. But we don’t know for how long. We don’t know if they are receiving value and achieving their goals, or if they are looking at other options. We send them emails, notifications for webinars, we try calling, nothing works.
Have you tried delivering value, no strings attached?
Here is something you can try, and it works if you’re doing it manually or if you have automation to help you.
Tuesday Tips.
What is “Tuesday Tips”? I’ll show you.
Start by identifying the key customers you are trying to reach. Look at their data, and pull together a list:
What are they doing well?
What could they be doing better?
Each Tuesday, send an email with the subject: Tuesday Tips
Share one thing they are doing well and how it helps them achieve their outcomes.
Share one thing they aren't doing, how it could help them achieve their outcomes, and how to do it.
Tell them you're available for questions and how to reach you.
Make the emails short, and easy to read. Use bullets. If you can connect it back to their original goal and purchase reasons, so much the better. If you have examples of other customers’ successes that’s another great option. But make sure it is connected to something they actually need to do and would benefit from. This is not the time for a marketing email, it should sound personalized. It should be personalized.
If you hear from them, great! You can discuss that topic and others when you connect. If you don’t hear from them, track what you’ve sent to whom and the cadence. Track which email types and subjects get responses. And send them a Tuesday Tip again, and again.
Each Tuesday, look at your customer list. Use the same structure each time:
What the customer is doing well
What the customer could improve: Why & How
How to contact me - the sender
You can add in information like upcoming office hours or webinars on the topic. If they are truly stubborn, any engagement is better than no engagement. And the message that value can be achieved and help in achieving their objectives is available to them is valuable in itself.
You can use Tuesday Tips in a variety of ways, depending on your pain points or goals. Use them to reach your most valuable dark accounts or for your quiet accounts that are renewing next quarter. If data is hard to come by and all efforts are manual, use Tuesday Tips for focused campaigns targeting a few high value quiet accounts.
If you have data about your customers and just a few tools like automated emails, you can proactively build Tuesday Tips campaigns for targeted groups of customers such as:
Accounts who need and could upsell or cross-sell for specific products
Accounts who need help with taking the next step in their journey towards adoption or achieving outcomes
Specific personas across accounts or within large enterprise accounts that could get more from your product and achieve their goals
You can use Tuesday Tips for any account, groups of accounts, or types of individuals that you want to proactively reach out to. Track what you’ve tried and what works so you can iterate and improve their effectiveness.
Got Tuesday Tips working? Great! Take it further.
When you have a Tuesday Tip customer who takes your tip and improves, be sure to feature them. Highlight that they once received this tip, how they used it, and the results they achieved.
Connect Tuesday Tips to other events. Take popular Tuesday Tip topics and turn them into a webinar or office hours topic. Target customers who have been successful, who are on the journey, and your non-responders who could benefit from the topic so it is relevant information. They will get used to seeing only relevant emails from you and your open rates will be higher.
Get testimonials. Share those testimonials in your follow up mails or next generation Tuesday Tips for those who still haven’t changed their ways. Highlight the testimonials and success stories in future office hours and webinars. Turn them into short, inventive case studies as videos or short, actionable blog articles. Have more than one example? Great! Showcase more of them. Show the non-responders that they are the outliers: Everyone is getting these results but them. No one likes to be left out.
If email isn’t the best way to reach these customers, find them where they are. Text them. Use in-app pop-ups targeted to the people you are trying to reach. Leave them a voice mail and let them know “this is the information I tried to send via email to you”.
You may be thinking: “Ugh! This is so much work!”
If you're doing it manually, it is a lot of work. So prioritize, and track your results. Then show those results to your leadership - whether that’s your manager or your executive team counterparts. Then use the data and systems you have in-house to automate what you can, and continue to prioritize and track your results. When you have a track record of results, make the ROI case for tools. Most CS platforms have capabilities around this, and there are tools like Matik and Cast.app that were specifically built to automate these types of activities.
Most importantly, make the switch from reactive to proactive and deliver value. Connect with your Customers. It is worth the effort. It will get results for your customers, for you, and for your company.
This information was first shared in the CS Office Hours community and as a post on LinkedIn. If you try this, or if you’ve done something similar, I’d love to hear about it. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.
The Success League is a global customer success consulting firm. We offer leadership coaching as well as our robust and popular certification training programs for both CSMs and CS Leaders. Please visit TheSuccessLeague.io for more. And don’t
Jan Young - Jan is passionate about optimizing teams, processes, and systems, and building effective relationships and communities. She has worked in Enterprise companies and Startups of various stages, and she has advised several founders and startups. Jan is very involved in the CS community including as a Founding Community Lead for CS Insider, and has been recognized for work as a 2022 Top 25, Top 50 CS Influencer, and Top 50 Women in CS, and 2021 Top 100 Customer Success Strategist for her work in the community. She holds a BA from UC Berkeley, and an MBA from Columbia University. In her free time, she enjoys hikes and Pickleball.