I recently ran an extensive user survey at WooThemes to get some validation for ideas that we were toying with for a new marketing strategy. One of the aims of the new strategy is to increase customer lifetime value (and related metrics such as user engagement & user retention), and so we set out to gauge how happy our customers were at the moment (happier customers are more likely to spend more money with us).

To our satisfaction, almost 10% of our users actually completed the 5-minute survey and of those that completed the survey, 92% said that they were very happy with our products, technical support & customer service. 92% obviously means we're doing something right.

But I wanted to delve in deeper and I've slowly been getting in touch with every single user from the 8% that said they weren't very happy with us at the moment. I wanted too figure out what exactly we did to make them feel that way in the first place & how we could potentially rectify their situation or at least improve it for other customers in future.

In addition to speaking to the customers that actually responded, I also "investigated" the customers' records and the history of their interactions to get a holistic view of what happened in the past. From this, one thing stood out for me: most customers don't give you a second chance.

To elaborate, I found that most of the unhappy customers had one bad experience via our ticketing system / helpdesk and then just left. They didn't keep hammering on the ticket where they had the bad experience, heck they didn't even respond again. Neither did they e-mail us to "escalate" the matter.

This means that, that one shitty experience for the customer was never highlighted on our radar and we thus didn't know that the customer was unhappy. It also means that we never had the opportunity to prioritize that customer and fix the situation (in which case we possibly had a chance to keep them as a customer).

I know that we shouldn't have created an unhappy customer in the first place, but no company is perfect 24-7. Things slip through the cracks and off the radar every now & again...

What I know now though is that there is a small percentage of customers that will never give you an opportunity to rectify their situation and they will likely never be your customer again. 8% may not seem significant, but that's 8% that I'm not happy to lose.

I'm the business guy over at WooThemes and a big part of my "job" is making sure that our marketing is firing on all cylinders. Taking care of the marketing for such a big business takes it toll, especially when you consider the amount of time it takes to interact with customers on a one-on-one basis (as most of you would agree that these interactions often provide the most value).

It is with that in mind, that I believe that marketing within a startup should be the whole team's responsibility, both as individuals and as a team. Here's a couple of ways in which I think the individuals on a team can contribute to the marketing effort of the mothership:

1. Blogging. If you have a company / team blog, get the whole team to blog and add their voice / opinion to the mix. I know there are many people that hate blogging and they should probably not be forced. But getting the odd blog post out of a team member is really valuable!
2. Interactions across social channels. Every member on your team obviously has their own following of friends, contacts and other interested parties. Having them tweet a link or publish a Facebook status about the company helps spread the marketing message to audiences to which you - as a company - would not necessarily have access.
3. Interacting with your community. I think there's a lot of value in having the whole team interacting with users via the comments on your blog, your forum or any other support structure. Having the team visible to your users increases their perception of how in touch your team is with user problems. Massive marketing win here.
4. Expert Profiles. In a way that almost combines the above three points, I truly believe that individuals should continue to build their individual social profiles, CV's and reputations online. They should be regarded as experts, which holds a significant advantage for your company. Users love to work with experts! So encourage team members to keep up their own graphic portfolio's or maintain a profile on GitHub if they're a developer. Don't try to own them; you employed every team member as an individual.

Before going to bed last night, I noticed quite a bit of chatter & linking to this beautifully crafted landing page (also pictured above). Most of the chatter centered around what this could be, yet that seemingly quickly faded in favour of how sexy the design (erm, lady) was. This reminded me of another little project called Hipster that got 10k+ user signups in 2 days without revealing what it actually does.

Everyone hates spam and sensitivity about online privacy is probably at an all-time high, so if you are given a company your personal details (even if it is just your e-mail address), I can only assume that you are afraid to miss out. That in my opinion draws similarities with how sheep blindly follow each other, without question the validity of the group's decision.

In both these cases, I think their marketing campaigns are superbly executed and they've managed to generate loads of hype without revealing what they do. I don't have a problem with this at all. This does however give us a bit on insight on how we interact online and how we'd rather follow like sheep in fear of missing out.

Am I being harsh in my opinion? Have you given your personal details away like this before?

I stumbled onto PunchTab yesterday and was immediately intrigued by the product. So as an entrepreneur interested in learning as much as I can, it's an obvious decision to click through the blog where I find a cool-sounding article: "Hacking PR: How we got PunchTab on TechCrunch 3 times in 3 Months".

Having just now read through the article (good read with solid advice btw), I was reminded why I despise mainstream tech media (TechCrunch & the likes) so much. The author of the article basically suggests these 3 ways of getting onto TechCrunch (as this is what worked for PunchTab):

1. Founder of X starts Y. Even better if the band gets back together. (This doesn’t work if nobody ever cared about X.) 2. Y’s product can be used by bloggers. (Not a slam dunk for two reasons: you need to build a good product and the individual writer needs to see his way to becoming a user. There’s no cheating here, just good old value creation.) 3. Y raises money. (’nuff said.)

1. Where does this leave new entrepreneurs or new founders? I'm not denying that this makes a good story, but past reputation & success shouldn't be such a big determining factor in getting coverage. I'm all for entrepreneurs using (leveraging) their experience & contacts to get a leg up, but media is supposed to be objective and should look past this.
2. This is the only approach which I can't blame tech media for; it is just incredibly difficult to be unique enough to stand out from all the other hundred stories that got pitched to that writer on any given day. The approach is flimsy and there's a massive amount of luck involved, yet for most online businesses this is the only shot they have.
3. This is the easiest way to get covered in mainstream tech media: doesn't matter how shit your product or business is, raise funding from whoever (it can be your gran) and you're guaranteed coverage. The sheer amount of TechCrunch posts that reads "X raises $x million in funding for Y" proves that the mainstream tech media is loving itself some funding. Getting funded is not the same as succeeding & I think media can do a helluva lot better if they start celebrating the real successes, instead of those who's claim to fame is their funding round.

This isn't sour grapes and most definitely isn't me having a shot at TechCrunch. Yet I don't find myself agreeing with most of the supposed news that is covered by mainstream tech media (and as a result I prefer not to read it). I instead use my carefully crafted Twitter followers and Hacker News to filter out the shitty content (read: fundraising stories).

Beyond that, I have loads of sympathy for those businesses that are trying their utmost to be covered by mainstream tech media. WooThemes has been covered by TC once, even though we are almost 4 years old, have a user base that exceeds 50k, have proven, sustainable revenues and are still growing really well. My advice would just be to focus on building your business and doing cool shit; if that means you get covered, then awesome for you. :)

I just finished answering a handful of WooThemes support e-mails and realized that one of the reasons for WooThemes' significant growth & success has been our focus on the minor victories.

See, I could've left those e-mails unanswered for a couple of answers and then Ryan (our Community Manager) would wake up and attend to those e-mails. But instead of making the customers in question wait for another 4 / 5 hours, they received a response much, much quicker and hopefully I was able to resolve their query. That's a minor victory.

In the big / significant victory is just the culmination of these minor victories. Every single time that we manage to help an user with a turnaround time of 30 minutes, instead of 6 hours (which is more than acceptable), we have a minor victory. Plus, we put that user in the position to tell the whole Twitterverse how awesome WooThemes is.

Now imagine what happens when 40 000 users experience these minor wins...