The Anita Siek Blog

Photo Credit: @vanessamckeown

Podcast Shownotes:

• How you offboard your customers, your clients matter as much as how you onboard them.
• How you’re able to leave them thinking and feeling matters as much as how you made them feel when they first purchased your product. 
• There are three core thought starters as to how you can start thinking about your offboarding experience. 
• The second core thought-starter is do you have a way to measure the outcome from your customer or your clients? 
• Number three core thought-starter is how are you turning your fans into superfans?
• The market is a conversation. What do you want your customers your audience and your clients to be saying about you? 

Podcast Timestamps:

01:21 – 01:40: How you offboard your customers, your clients matter as much as how you onboard them.

02:33 – 02:58: How you handle the situation, and how you’re able to leave them thinking and feeling matters just as much as how you made them feel when they first started with you when they first purchased your product. 

03:03 –  04:06: There are three core thought starters as to how you can start thinking about your offboarding experience. 

04:07 – 05:11: The second core thought-starter is do you have a way to measure the outcome from your customer?

05:12 – 06:42: Number three core thought-starter is how are you turning your fans into superfans?

07:15 – 07:33: Marketing is a conversation.

So, here’s the thing.

We see so much chatter about the importance of a great onboarding experience and we can’t deny that an onboarding experience is uuuuber important. But here is something you don’t hear every day: how you offboard your customers or your clients matters just as much as how you onboard them. 

Why? Cause marketing is a conversation. 

I mean, think about it. Why is it that we as businesses and brands spend all this time creating such a killer onboarding experience, and then when the real climax happens: when the project is finished, or when they actually receive the product in the post, it’s meh.

This goes for those red flag clients too.

For example, if you have a red flag client, a customer who was unsatisfied about your product, or maybe there was a delay in postage. I believe how you handle that matters as much as what happens when they first purchase your product.

Now, let’s get practical eh?

To help you, here are 3 thought starters to help you start thinking about your offboarding experience with your customers and clients.

A workflow or system to collate feedback

Business and brand building is a long game.  Therefore a question you should always be asking is this: How can you make your business even better? 

This shouldn’t be a question that’s ONLY asked when things go belly up. No fam. 

This should be something that’s incorporated into your customer journey and workflow.

Here are a few ideas to consider:

• One way to do this? Email sequences to check in with your customers and clients, and get feedback (as well as a testimonial and/or review).
  
  Need some help? We’ve got a set of email sequences to do just that for e-commerce businesses and service based businesses in our Wordfetti Wordshop.
  
• Exploring internal procedures and workflows. Whether it be a tech mishap or something didn’t go as planned that resulted in an unhappy client. Taking the time to debrief and spend time to pause, reflect and review too, lessons learned and what extra precautions can be taken in the future.
  
• Bonus one? Ask them open-ended questions and give them guiding questions as to how to best provide feedback. This goes for the service and product-based folk. Giving them space to share their thoughts, ideas, and feedback with you to the question of “how can we have made this even better for you?!”

Touch points to measure transformation

Collating feedback shouldn’t just be reserved for the end. In fact, whether or not you’re in the service or product based industry, touch points months beyond the date of the completed project or product delivery should be added in too – cause ya know why? 

Ability to measure transformation and impact, over a period of time. 

For example, if you are in the product-based industry,  send an email or follow up not only once a product has been purchased, but sporadically over the course of a few weeks or months to actually check-in and see how people have used the product or how they felt or whether they’ve seen any transformations from using it over X amount of months.

For example, if you’re a service based brand, say you’re a graphic designer or copywriter? Incorporating a touch in a couple of months after a project is completed to see e.g. how a client’s website has done conversion wise following engaging your services 6 months ago!

From fans to superfans

Your market is a conversation, right?

So expanding on this, it should come as no heckin’ surprise that the best form of marketing is (WOM) word of mouth. So how are you leaning in on that? 

Again, it doesn’t end just because someone has converted and it doesn’t mean that it’s always just about awareness and putting your brand out there in front of their eyeballs. 

Imagine if you focused on turning the ONE fan who have already invested in your product and or your service into a superfan and having them literally become walking advocates for your business. 

In this culture of “more”, where we spend all this time trying to get out there to get more clients, more audience, etc, I’d love to challenge you to see the true power of one and explore how you can better support your existing clients and ask: How can you better serve them? How can we actually turn this person into our superfan? 

There you have it fam. 

The three thought starters for you to continue the conversation with your customers or with your clients because, at the end of the day, we are HUMANS. We don’t want to be treated as just another project number or another transaction.  

So how can you continue the conversation? How can you actually make them feel seen and heard? What do you want your customers, your audience, and your clients to be saying about you after the project is done or after they have made that purchase? What do we want them to say? 

Want to get more copy, brand and content tips? Listen in on Brandfetti and follow me here and the team here.