Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the gile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: Today, we are going to talk about how you can retain more customers. I was actually just talking with Neil over lunch about this, but if you're a services-based business, simple way to retain customers, people like dealing with people at the end of the day, so just visit them. Visit them and build a relationship. It seems like to do something human is difficult sometimes, especially when I think about myself. I just want to sit at home and work in my boxers and leave me alone, but-

Neil Patel: That sounds nice.

Eric Siu: It is really nice. I think we both actually, that that's something we both enjoy, but at the end of the day, going out there, these people are paying you a retainer every month. They're paying you to help them with marketing. Whatever more you can do to help them, you can establish a relationship. In some cases, I'm having one of our clients speak at a conference. You make these other introductions. Just add as much value as you can. Meet them in person. Ultimately, if you're working with somebody that's a marketing manager or a director, your job is to make them look like a superstar so they'll remember you forever, or if you're working with a founder, for example, become their friend and then just figure out how you can continue to help their business. It's not just one ... Don't be a one-trick pony.

Neil Patel: A lot of people think retention has to do with how you deal with a customer over time, and that is part of it, but from all the tests and studies that I've seen, it's an onboarding experience that affects retention more than anything else. What I mean by that is, how do you onboard them? What's the first call like? If it's a web app, what's the first experience? Look at the metrics of the onboarding. Look at the metrics of the onboarding that people, for the customers who have the highest LTB take, and then go and change your experience, so that way, more people go throughout that flow.
You can also do something if you're a service-based business because the first example I gave was more so for a software company or even a eCommerce company, but let's say if you're a service-based business. A company called Conversion Rate Experts used to do this one, [inaudible 00:02:21]. At the end of each month, they used to ask us, "How was the experience? Are you happy? Are you dissatisfied? What can we do to improve?" They would then continually take that data from all the customers, use it to improve the onboarding experience, as well as their regular monthly or biweekly calls, and this helped them retain customers for a much longer period of time.

Eric Siu: The other thing seems just having ... I know there's some of my friends use Intercom from a support perspective. You can use a Zendesk. There's all these support tools out there, but just having really good customer service that actually responds, because there's some SaS tools that I use right now where they just don't respond. I try to get back to them, and then I end up turning out pretty quickly because they're not helping me out. They're not doing their job. Customer service, good customer service, at least in today's world, seems to be [inaudible 00:03:12], so if you can't get that going, you need to figure out how to make that happen because it's part of the experience.
Like Neil mentioned, Neil's mentioned onboarding experience, but also, at the same time, when people need help, what kind of experience are you giving them because it's not just you sitting in your boxers all day and that's it and work. You have to figure out how you can make their life easier overall.

Neil Patel: Also, doing what's right for the customer plays a big role in today's market. Putting the customer first, although that sounds obvious, it doesn't happen that often in today's market. I pay a software company a monthly fee, and I've been with them for three years, and the software just sucks, and I call up the founder, and he wouldn't let me cancel even though my first contract was yearly, and he was like, "Oh, it automatically renews each year after that. We'll bill you till the end of the cycle." He's like, "You can deal with finance." I'm like, "You're the one who sold me. Why would I want to deal with your financing? That just doesn't logically make sense." He's not thinking about the experience he's providing. Because his software's in the marketing space, probably not something that you should be doing considering I'm decently known in the marketing space. I wouldn't bad mouth him. I wouldn't be writing bad blog posts about him, but the experience, how you treat people really matters.
The other day, Amazon, I made an order with them. I was traveling. It didn't come in on time. I called their support. I'm like, "What the heck? I'm a Prime customer. It says it's going to arrive in two days. It's been four or five days, and it hasn't arrived," and Amazon sent me a new product. They overnighted it, and they gave me a huge rebate. It was pretty much almost free for me. I was like, "Wow, this is an amazing experience." They really did right for me.
My sister was saying something the other day, too, because she works within the organization. She was like, "I love Slack." I'm like, "Why?" She's like, "Well, we've used other messaging companies, and you know what? They've all improved and they're very similar to Slack, but Slack doesn't charge us for the inactive users, so I don't have to keep going in there and deleting people who have left or no longer using Slack." She's like, "That's an amazing experience." She's like, "For that reason, I don't ever wanna leave Slack," but Slack's doing what's best for the customers, and if you have that same attitude, eventually, in the short run, yes, you may not make as much money, but in the long run, I do believe customers are going to start coming through word of mouth, and they're going to stay much longer because there's so much positive reinforcement around your [crosstalk 00:05:33].

Eric Siu: To give another quote here, people ultimately don't remember a lot of details about what you did exactly, just over the long period of time, but they do remember how you made them feel. Even if you go the extra mile, like Neil saying that story, reminds me of Amazon. I've never really had a negative customer experience with them because every single time I complain, they say, "Hey, you can just keep it. We'll ship you another one," or they'll overnight something to me, so it's always been good, and that pays dividends because if I say something negative, I'm going to tell multiple people, "Don't use Amazon. They suck. Blah, blah, blah," but it's been good, and I tell other people about it. For them, they retain me, but they gain more [inaudible 00:06:14] at the same time.
That's it for today. We'll see you tomorrow.

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