How do you reach your customers in a way that *ISNT* email?

Heather, look at a tool like Zipwhip - which can text enable your existing work phone numbers and has a number of business tools like templates, group messaging (texting multiple numbers in individual threads) keywords, and auto-replies.

We offer various paid support plans and those included a private Slack channel with CS. Since we are in the security and DevOps side of the company, the typical user love it.

Once our system is capable of doing it, I'm also going to create an ideation thread (where people can upvote and submit ideas) around topics for our discussion meetups. That way, we know we're hosting discussions that have an interested audience.

One thing we have been doing with our partners and larger/strategic customers is building a Slack workflow. This has been a great way to do both high level communication and also troubleshoot on the go.

We either have a channel within our workspace or even a workspace dedicated to the partnership.

Love this Alissa! I remember doing something similar to kick-start our user community. We had the support team nominate the most collaborative customers and invited them to online sessions. I like your approach to having them prep questions! It definitely drives engagement and it is also a non-stop source of customer topics.

Focusing on the technology part I always try to go for the customer preferred communication method. If they use MS-TEams as their official communication tool I ask to be added as a "guest user" to their Microsoft tenant so I can reach out to stakeholders and users through MSTeams. If they use Skype? The same. Slack? Same approach. And so on. 
Firing personalized text messages through their preferred, daily use, communication tool is the best. Also great for getting spot-on feedback. But be aware that it is a 2-way channel. Easier to reach them out, easier to be reached out  

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Paulo Botura
Cognite AS
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Original Message:
Sent: 11-06-2020 07:55
From: Jeff Breunsbach
Subject: How do you reach your customers in a way that *ISNT* email?

Our friend @Bodin Pollard posed this question in our CS Leadership Office Hours APAC...

How do you reach your customers in a way that *ISNT* email?

@Mark Latham
@Rachel Jennings





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Jeff Breunsbach
Founder, Gain Grow Retain
Director of CX at Higher Logic
Top 25 Influencer 2020
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Oh and I should have added that it was to college students. They would respond pretty quickly too. College professors (other customer group) would be contacted in a different way. So that's the big difference - the WHO. With our personas, the WHO made a really big difference.

Nothing beats what you are doing, Heather. I.e., human-to-human short personalized messages. 

We get 85% open rates for automated text messages (with links to hyper personalized videos) when sent from a 10-digit phone number (versus as a generic number) to opted-in users.  We encourage them to save the contact information before sending them messages. The best we have been able to do is 27.5% for email.  The cadence, content, message, and CTA varies by role (executive, champion, buyer persona, product user persona) of the receiver. 

Consider piggy backing on transactional notifications (like e-commerce order push notifications / texts / DMs) with at most one link to dynamic and personalized content. 

(This is my first message to GGR)

I would send personalized text messages. We didn't have the tools to do more, so I would just copy and paste and then tweak as needed. It definitely took more time, but the personal touch was noticed enough that people would even ask if I were real or a bot. I get how it's a pain on a mass scale, but it was the only choice at the time and it worked.

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Heather Rosefsky
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-------------------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 11-06-2020 07:55
From: Jeff Breunsbach
Subject: How do you reach your customers in a way that *ISNT* email?

Our friend @Bodin Pollard posed this question in our CS Leadership Office Hours APAC...

How do you reach your customers in a way that *ISNT* email?

@Mark Latham
@Rachel Jennings





------------------------------
Jeff Breunsbach
Founder, Gain Grow Retain
Director of CX at Higher Logic
Top 25 Influencer 2020
------------------------------

You can use in-app communication (we're implementing this now). Webinars, social media, local networking events (pre-COVID) are all other ways of interaction and reaching customers. We also, at certain major milestones, have sent hand written letters in the past as well.

Call them? Mail a handwritten letter?

This is more to learn from customers, not to message to them:
My company recently started small group discussions (probably like the GGR office hours, though I haven't attended). The goal is to get people together who want to discuss a particular topic, then let them engage. When we launched this idea, customers would show up and expect a webinar and sit by silently. So we've modified our invitation process to require that a customer submit a question or volunteer their expertise in a particular area as their requirement to get in. Haven't tried this out yet, but we're optimistic.