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Social Media Marketing Podcast
Improving Customer Experience: How to Increase Revenue and Profitability
00:44:09
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- [00:01]
A
Over 3000 marketers are gathering in Anaheim this April for Social media Marketing World 2026. They're not coming because it's trendy. They're coming because it works. Martha Cromer told us quote I've been to conferences where I've only heard things I already knew. I learned so many new concepts at Social Media Marketing World. I definitely got my money's worth. Unquote. Year after year, marketers credit Social Media Marketing World with career advancements, business breakthroughs and and strategies their competitors haven't yet discovered. Maddie Young Shared quote this year was my first time at Social Media Marketing World. It exceeded every expectation I had. The value of the sessions and networking experiences cannot be overstated. Unquote. While you're deciding whether to attend, thousands of marketers have already secured their spots. Get your tickets now@social mediamarketingworld.info that social media marketing world.info. Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads, and more sales. Today, we're going to explore how to improve your customer experience, which ultimately will improve your customer retention, profitability and revenue. If you have any kind of product where people buy it more than once or they're on a recurring revenue kind of model, this is going to be a show that is an absolute game changer for you. Going to be joined by Shannon Lynn Bresnahan, and she is absolute rock star. Also, if you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow this show on whatever podcasting app you're listening to so you do not miss any of our future content. Let's now transition over to this week's interview with Shannalyn Bresnahan, helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Shanna Lynn Bresnahan. If you don't know who Shanna is, she is a retention strategist who specializes in helping small businesses scale their courses, memberships and coaching programs. Her courses Cultivate. Her group coaching program is called Retain. Her podcast is Community Creators. Shanna, welcome to the show.
- [02:38]
B
Hey, thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.
- [02:40]
A
Super excited that you're here Today. Shannon and I are going to explore how to improve customer experience so that you can increase your revenue and your profitability by. Before we go there, I'd love to hear a little bit of your story. How'd you get into this whole customer experience thing?
- [02:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think so much of it was timing. I was in college and I was in this honors program and they're like, you have to do this big senior thesis, right. And at the time, social media was just getting big. It was around like 2006, 2007. So I wrote this whole paper on building community and marketing in virtual reality worlds, like 7 Second Life, which most people are not going to remember, but like I remember, yeah, way back in the day. So that catapulted me. I was speaking in college and that led to internships, which led to a full time marketing job right out of college at Vanderbilt University Medical center here in Nashville, where we were the first medical center to start like a social media policy. Start doing Google Ads, meta ads, back when they would like send you a proposal back in the day.
- [03:42]
A
Wow.
- [03:42]
B
Yeah. So really took off there, Started full time consulting in 201012 and worked with a lot of traditional businesses, helping them take what they had done in traditional marketing with their brand and move it online. And then I just kept getting more niche and more niche and more niche. Worked with Stu McLaren, who's a membership expert for three years as his director of community and started teaching in person workshops. And that's really where we really just started to narrow down on how do we create amazing experiences after the sale that keep people coming back for more. And Covid shut down those in person experiences and that launched me into courses and group programs and private consulting.
- [04:23]
A
Wow. So tell me a little bit more about what you're doing now.
- [04:26]
B
Yeah. So my focus is primarily helping membership and subscription businesses, but we do kind of support other businesses as well on creating incredible customer experiences that keep people coming back for more. Because at the end of the day, that's ultimately how we increase profitability. So we have a course that teaches the community aspect of that. And then we have a group consulting program called Retain, which is all about the after the experience we call what building member journey maps from the sale to getting people onboarded. What happens if they're not engaging with our product? Even creating great cancellation experiences. I believe that's super important. And we work privately with a select few clients as well.
- [05:08]
A
Love it. Okay, so let's talk about what's the benefit or the upside for everyone listening, whether they be a marketer or entrepreneur, when it comes to improving the customer experience. Because so many of us marketers, I think I speak for a lot of us when I say this, we think our job is to bring the customer in and then that's somebody else's job after we bring them in. But in many small businesses, that somebody else kind of maybe falls on us as well. So talk to us a little bit about why this is so important.
- [05:37]
B
I'm going to speak just to the heart of it. First. I always think like there's always like a heart aspect and a head aspect. And depending on who you are, I'm always driven more to like the head. But there's many people who are heart driven and who are very mission driven in their business. And they started because they wanted to help people achieve some sort of outcome or feel a certain way or get a certain result, right? And if we only focus on marketing, then we are missing the point. We're not fulfilling our mission just by getting sales. We fulfill our mission when people get results. But most businesses put way more effort on getting the sale than they do on actually helping people achieve the mission and fulfill the outcome that we sold them on. So there's that heart piece. Like, if we really care about this mission, if we really want to serve and help people like we so often say we do, then we need to put just as much, if not more energy on after the sale. And then secondly, there's the headpiece, which is, you know, where I tend to focus, which is our job is to create a profit at the end of the day. And the way we create a profit in a business is super simple. We increase the customer lifetime value and we decrease the cost per acquisition. And so often as marketers, we are so focused on getting that cac, that customer acquisition costs down. We're not thinking about the other side, which is increasing the lifetime value. And not with upsells and downsells and all of those sorts of things on the checkout cart, but by actually creating loyal customers who want to buy from us again and again, but also who want to tell other people about our program or product. Which is the most affordable way to get new customers is by word of mouth. So that's why I am incredibly passionate. Passionate about retention, about keeping customers happy, about creating amazing customer experiences because it's the best way to increase profitability in your business, Whether that be through just the fact that you're getting repeat buyers, that you don't have to pay to acquire new buyers, or because those buyers are getting incredible results and so they're Free marketing for you down the line.
- [07:40]
A
I love that and I just want to like double down on that a little bit. The job of marketing is, yes, to get the word out there so that we can acquire a customer. But if we can't keep a customer, then we're going to have refunds. And many of us have business models where we have products that have recurring billing courses, software products, events where you want people to come back year after year. All these kind of experiences are exceptionally challenging. And it's getting harder and harder now to acquire customers. And that's the really critical part. Emails are getting stuck in spam and promotion filters. Organic posts aren't getting seen. The cost for paid ads is going up. All these kind of things are very expensive. And when we calculate the true cost of acquiring a customer, it's exceptionally high. So if we can keep that customer, then all of a sudden we can keep our jobs. Right? Because our job as a marketer is to justify our existence by generating enough revenue in the company that we are profitable for the business. And if those customers have a great experience, like you said, they're going to turn into evangelists. And when they turn into evangelists, that is free market, old fashioned word of marketing. That's why I think what we're talking about here today is exceptionally important. So I'm just doubling down on that. Um, you want to add anything to that?
- [09:01]
B
Let me just give you a little stat. Okay? So I get really nerdy in the details on this because I think it's so important for marketers to understand what we're talking about when it comes to retention and churn. So many businesses are moving to a subscription model in some way, shape or fashion. So let's just pretend like we have a $47 a month subscription, whether that be a digital membership, some kind of spa discount membership, I don't know. But $47 a month, if your monthly retention rate is 80%, okay, so you retain 80% of customers, you lose 20% every single month. You'd have a $235 lifetime value per customer. So every customer's worth $235, which means you can, as a marketer always be thinking, now how much can I actually spend to acquire a customer if I know I'm only going to make $235 and you know, maybe it takes me eight months to make that amount of money. If we can increase that to a 90% retention rate, which is not impossible to do, when we create a great experience, we double that lifetime value. To $470. If I tell a marketer that you don't have to do anything, you don't have to run meta ad, you don't have to switch to YouTube ads, you don't have to redo your ad suite. All you have to do is get better at actually keeping customers happy and getting them results so that they stick around. And you can double your lifetime value, which allows you to essentially double your marketing budget. You would do it, but it gets even better because let's say it's 90% retention, and we just went from 80 to 90. That's a 10% retention rate improvement. We doubled our lifetime value. We go from 90 to 95%, which is a 5% retention rate improvement, and we double again. It gets exponential, the better we get at it.
- [10:45]
A
Okay, help those of us that are math challenged and how in the world you're doing the math on that. Because some people are going to be like, I don't understand the math.
- [10:51]
B
Yeah. Okay, so I have calculators for this because it really isn't something like super simple. But at the end of the day, your lifetime value is determined by one over your churn. And their churn is actually easy to calculate. But I won't go into the details on that formula. I'll give you access to a free guide later which has all of the calculations for everything like this that you could ever want. And they're actually pretty simple, you can do on the back of a napkin. But the way that it works exponentially basically means that going from 80 to 90 doubles your lifetime value, 90 to 95 doubles that lifetime value again. And then you have the opportunity to continue to double again. It's almost like compound interest at the end of the day.
- [11:29]
A
Yeah. I think the easiest way to understand this is that every customer that sticks and is paying you X amount per month, and that actually can add up a lot because the average value of a customer goes up and the percentage of customers that have that average value goes up. And somehow that's how the math works. Does that sound about right?
- [11:49]
B
Exactly. That's right. And the cool part is, is like if you. Many people have many products that they're layering into this. So you might have, let's say you have a subscription, but then you have upsells. So you have private fitness packages on top of the subscription base. Right. Or you have private coaching on top of the subscription base. The longer somebody is in your base membership, the more likely they are to buy more from you on top of that. So we're just talking about like the base membership price and how that lifetime value can increase the longer you keep them as a member. But you also have way more opportunity to ascend them to your higher level programs or other products the longer they're in that base membership. So that's why I'm extremely passionate about it because there's so much profit, profitability to be had. And also getting back to that heart piece, like, do we really care about the customer? Do we really care about getting them a result? Well, then we need to be really thinking about how to do that. Not just because it increases profitability, but that's actually what fulfills the mission that we started this business for in the first place.
- [12:51]
A
We're talking about customer experience and we're talking about how to improve that customer experience so that we can have all the benefits we just talked about. Now, for those that are listening, before we even kind of get into customer experience, is there anything we need to consider? Is there any groundwork that's really important before we get into the how side of things?
- [13:11]
B
100% there always is. And I feel like this is the conversation that I have with people who want to work with us as clients. I'm always asking them these three questions. Do you know your product? Do you know your numbers? And do you know your people? And by know your product, I'm really saying, is your product good? Because no amount of customer experience, great customer support, you know, shiny retention efforts is going to fix the fact that the core product that they bought doesn't work. So if you're getting a lot of refunds, if you're not getting repeat customers, that's the first question you need to ask yourself is like, does my product actually kind of suck? Do I actually need to build a better product? Do I need to do some improvements here? And that's where you're going to start.
- [13:55]
A
How do you know if you have a good product? What are the symptoms we're looking for here?
- [13:58]
B
Yeah, so if you have a great product, if it's a subscription base, then you're usually going to have good repeat customers, which means a lower churn rate. You're going to have people who are coming back. If, let's say, if it's a consumable product, they're going to be repeat buyers. Typically you're getting referrals, so you're getting that word of mouth customer. And then also just look at your customer support. So we're talking about, you know, marketing here, we're talking about retention. But one of the best things you can do in your business is break down the department silos, where marketing thinks they're on their own, customer experience thinks they're on their own, and customer supports over here by themselves. Talk to your customer support department. They're going to be the first people who know if you have a defective product that needs to be fixed. And they will also know exactly the problems that you need to solve to improve your product.
- [14:45]
A
Yeah. And then who are my customers? Talk to us about that a little bit.
- [14:48]
B
Yeah. So this is really important for us to understand as marketers. I think we kind of in our industry, we do ourselves a disservice because we listen to one podcast or we download one worksheet that says, fill out your ideal customer avatar. And we complete that worksheet. We spend 15 minutes on it. We go, oh, I know my customer now. And then we put all of our marketing and all of our product creation effort around this 15 minute exercise that we did in traditional marketing. If any of you listening right now are coming from a corporate marketing background or you're still in corporate marketing, you understand all of the money and investment that actually goes in to understanding who your current customers are and who your future customers are, because they're always changing. And the more that we understand their demographics, their buying behaviors, what their wants and needs are, the better we can cater the experience and personalize the experience and also take good direction with our products, especially for people who have to invest a lot. Like, I think about franchise businesses, you have to, you know, determine they're going to open up a facility and invest a whole bunch of money in a facility. Or people who are creating new physical products, they would never do that without knowing the customer, without doing this kind of research. But for those of you who are in the digital space, you may fall victim to not having to invest a lot of money upfront in your business. And so you skip right over this piece or you might just do that 15 minute worksheet. I want you to invest way more time in knowing your people so that you can make sure you really understand their language and that you really understand their wants and needs.
- [16:24]
A
On the numbers. I also want to know, like, what numbers should marketers be paying attention to?
- [16:28]
B
Yeah, so we kind of talked about that. LTV lifetime value is really important. CAC cost to acquire, your customer, your churn slash retention rate. Those are just the opposite of each other. We need to pay attention to those. But depending on our business, there's other numbers that we can be paying attention to. So for example, if you have an online community, what's our community engagement numbers? If you have onboarding, you know, what percentage of people complete onboarding? How long are our members participating before they fall off and stop opening emails and stop engaging? What is our AOV average order value so that we can really understand how that impacts lifetime value? And the biggest question I get asked all the time is like, well, what is good? What's a good number? And I really encourage you to benchmark against yourself, which is why I'm saying before you even start trying to improve customer experience, you need to know your own numbers and not start comparing them to industry averages, but just know them so that you have your baseline benchmark, so that as you start to test and play, which is what we do as marketers and customer experience people, we, we test and play. We have metrics to look at to see are we improving our numbers or are we not? Otherwise you're going to have a hard time justifying your efforts to, you know, the department head or whoever you need to justify your efforts for to make sure that things are aligning with profit. We need to have that benchmark in place.
- [17:53]
A
Okay, so we've talked about three critical things we need to be thinking about before we begin improving customer experience. Number one, ensure that we have a really good product. Number two, know our numbers. And number three, understand deeply who our customers are. So let's assume we have that. Many of us do. What's next? Like, where do we begin with improving our customer experience?
- [18:11]
B
There's really three things that you need to focus on. And I call this my retention accelerator formula. But also, you know, just generally, it's the foundations of a great customer experience. And the first one should be no surprise based on what I've been saying so far. It's results. We have to make sure that our customer is getting results with our product or service or doesn't matter what we do, they're not going to be coming back.
- [18:36]
A
Okay, so let's spend some time digging in on this. So when we say the customer gets results, talk to me about what that actually means and let's unravel that in detail.
- [18:46]
B
I see this all the time, but the kiss of death in a business is over promising and under delivering. And this is where marketing and customer experience have to be aligned. Because I meet so many people who are really, really great salesmen. They're wonderful marketers. They know how to get the sale on the call. They know how to position the product to make sure that people buy, but they aren't making sure that what they're selling people on is actually aligning with what they're going to be experiencing once they get inside of program. And so we never want to put ourselves in a position where we've over promised and under delivered, which means we need to make sure that either our marketing and our selling is aligning with the delivery experience or that we're up leveling the delivery experience to meet this beautiful offer, this beautiful promise that we've given to people who are buying into our products and services. Because if people don't get results, they're not going to come back for more and they're not going to have a story to tell. And that doesn't mean the end result, that doesn't mean, you know, the perfect testimonial. It just means that they need to see themselves making progress. You know, I, I was talking to somebody today about giving them an example of going to a store and going to shop for a dress. And you go to shop for a dress and you buy the dress, but you don't actually have the accessories. You don't have the shoes, the jewelry, all the other things you need to make that dress really shine and to feel good in that dress. So what happens, you buy the dress, you go home, you maybe try it on in front of your mirror. You can't get it to look the way you think it's supposed to look, so you ultimately return it or you never wear it right at the end of the day. But I was sold this idea of how amazing I was going to look in this dress. It's a very different experience if I go home with the accessories, with the shoes and I know exactly what to do. My chances of wearing that dress have just gone up, which means I'm likely to come back because I had an amazing experience. They made sure I didn't just buy something, but I knew how to wear it, I knew how to use it, I which increased the likelihood of me using it, which increases the likelihood of me wearing it out with my girlfriends to dinner, telling all my girlfriends about how awesome my experience was and getting compliments on this dress. So we've got to make sure that what we're doing is really creating the desired result for our customer.
- [21:00]
A
Wish you could experience social media Marketing World 2026 without having to leave your home or office. Our virtual ticket includes both live streaming and on demand recordings in one powerful package. Here's what makes this special. You can watch all the marketing sessions and keynotes live as they happen in Anaheim. Yet you also get recordings of everything to study and implement at your own pace, access exclusive AI training not available anywhere else, and learn Instagram and Facebook strategies from practitioners that get real results. The very people you've heard on this podcast, Julie Dougherty told us, quote, my eyes are sore as I've watched way too many sessions today. All awesome stuff. It's like Netflix, just one more unquote. Unlike the in person experience, you can also pause, rewind and rewatch every session while you implement. Plus, you'll save thousands on travel and hotels while getting the same expert insights. Secure your virtual ticket right now at social media marketing world.info that's social media marketing world.info okay, so how do we know what the desired result is for the customer? Let's talk about that a little bit
- [22:14]
B
that goes back to knowing our people. At the end of the day, we're always selling people on some type of outcome. Now, if people have listened to your podcast for any amount of time, they know that they're not selling the widget, they're selling what the widget makes possible. That's what we need to focus in on. What does the widget make possible? Am I selling somebody a dress or am I selling somebody confidence? Am I selling somebody the feeling that they're going to get inside of that dress? Am I selling somebody this idea that they can launch their online course, or am I selling them progress towards financial freedom, towards time freedom in their life? And so when we get really clear on what it is, then we not only make sure that we remove as much friction as possible, which is really the thing you need to be asking yourself, where is the friction? What is getting in the way of this person utilizing my product or service, actually showing up to my coaching calls and getting the results that they need? Which sometimes it's mindset, that's the friction. Sometimes the friction is actual physical friction getting in the way, sometimes it's technology friction. But what we need to do whatever we can to make sure that they're getting better results easier and faster.
- [23:27]
A
Any tips on how to determine where the friction is? Because I think this is really something like I will say, folks that are listening to this podcast may know that we have a new software product that we've not revealed to the world yet. But we are dealing with all the friction that comes with software. There's like a lot of steps. You have to first open the message, then you have to click on the message, then you have to read the sales page, then you have to create an account, then you have to activate a Chrome extension, and then you have to actually create something with that Chrome extension. This is the journey, right? And I'm tracking every single step of the journey and making sure it's clear and like finding where it's not clear and it's complicated. So I know where my friction points are with the software product we've created, but it's not intuitive right out of the gate sometimes to know where the friction points are.
- [24:11]
B
Exactly. Exactly. I have two fun little examples to share with you. Just from today, I was meeting with a client that is a SaaS customer. So they have a SaaS membership for 10 teachers. And they were talking today about what they need to do. They their retention has improved drastically, but they've got a launch coming up, they want to improve it even more. And we were talking about how we could get teachers to utilize this massive library of lesson plans even more than they already have. They just removed some friction for them. So they used to have to download lesson plan by lesson plan. Now they can download in bulk. So that was one thing that they did. But I said, let's come up with a dream scenario. What's the dream world? Well, the dream world is I as a teacher, come in, you ask me a few questions via an AI bot. And this AI bot then designs the lesson plans for me, gets my approval. Yes, this is what I want to do. Builds out my lesson plan for the whole year, and then it all prints out and it's good to go. And it checks in and it answers any questions that I might have about the lesson plans. I was like, they would spend way less time on your platform, but they would never leak. And so what we did is we came up with what is the dream scenario that removes every little bit of friction and it makes using the product just as easy as the snap of a finger. And then we started working our way back based on our own technical financial limitations, to figure out what could we do today to get closer to that. And we realized what we could do today was actually upload all of their video training into an AI bot and get it to where they can ask for questions to improve upon their training, to get the training videos linked in the answer in that AI bot. And so can we do the lesson planning thing? No, but at least we know what we're working towards and we can start getting rid of the friction that gets in the way. And my thing that I read today, which I thought was so funny, the sheriff here in Nashville was getting complaints, which again, we're listening to customer service. He was getting complaints that prisoners in the local jail here were getting cold at night, that the jail was not adequately heated. And so he is getting this complaint and he's like, well, okay, do you know what he did? He put on the same gear that they wear give to all the prisoners. And he spent the night in a jail cell on one of the coldest nights that we've had in Nashville in the last week, which is like 2 degrees or something. And he was like, I mean, it was kind of chilly, but I slept and it was fine. I had my blanket, I had my hat, had my things. He's like, we have adequate heating in our jail. So I think about that kind of experience of how often do we put ourselves in the shoes of the customer? I have a friend who has a whole membership on mystery shopping. That's all they do is mystery shop. Movie theaters and gas stations. They are the customer for the owner so that they can figure out where's the friction. But we can be that for ourselves, right? We can go through, as a customer, go through our own experience and keep asking ourselves the question, how can I make this easier? How can we do this faster?
- [27:11]
A
Love it. Okay, so step one of this three step process is focusing on results. And what we've talked about is what is that really desired outcome that your ideal customer wants to achieve? And where are those friction points? And when you can determine where those friction points are that are preventing them from having that ideal outcome, you can greatly improve the likelihood that they will get where you want to get, which is ultimately recurring revenue referring to other people. That's the first part of the process. What's next?
- [27:42]
B
Well, next is focusing on recognition. And recognition may seem like, oh, wait, what I need to give them a gold star. Most people's brains go to this idea of gamification. But more than ever, the foundation of recognition is seeing them as an individual. It's humanizing the experience. In a world where people are using AI to alienate, we want to use AI to automate, not to alienate, but to create space for more human to human connection whenever we can. And if that allows us to personalize this experience, then we can personalize the engagement. So instead of just getting a normal customer support or new customer email, they may actually get like a personalized video or something that feels like a personalized video. Instead of just getting generic guidance, they get specific guidance. So think of it again like a shopping experience. So if you go into a generic shopping store, they might ignore you. Or they might say, hey, if you need anything, please let me know. But then some higher end shopping experiences, you go in, they greet you kindly and they say, hey, what are you looking for? How can I help you today? And that's what we're looking for inside of our businesses, is getting to know, why did this person join? So that I can then customize the experience. And here's the reality. It's expected because when I sign on to Netflix, my experience is personalized. And that's going to happen more and more and more in business. People are going to expect a personalized, a customized experience that you recognize that I am a unique individual, not just a number, not just any other buyer. And I have unique preferences and needs and I want an experience customized for that. So that recognition piece on that personalization is really important, but also recognizing their progress and their wins as they make progress, as they're contributing as a member inside of your community, as they're a repeat customer. Right. There's so many opportunities for us to celebrate the progress that they're making, celebrate them as a customer so that they are recognizing who they are as an individual, but also that they're seeing the progress that they don't see for themselves. We're going to call it out for them because we all know, we don't look back, we don't look back and go, oh man, I started out wanting to start an online course and here I am. I have a hundred thousand dollar course, like, how did I get here? We don't pause to recognize that we're always thinking about the next thing. So taking a moment to recognize that progress and those contributions for our customers is another really great thing we can do. Think about it like Spotify wrapped. That's a recognition of the customer.
- [30:22]
A
Okay, talk to me a little bit about how we can personalize this because sounds really complicated for those of us that have lots of customers. Any tips on how to pull something like this off?
- [30:33]
B
Yeah. So as we're going through this member experience, I always think of it like a member journey map. People say customer journey map, but so often marketers stop at the sale with their customer journey map. It should extend way beyond that. So as I'm going through that, I'm thinking about where is there an opportunity for personalization or praise? Now if you have any type of tech involved with your service or with your program, then this can be actually rather easy to do because I can identify and tag people based on what they are doing or not doing. So I should know if somebody's actually logging into my site, I should know if they're watching my videos or completing my onboarding or they haven't been on the site in 45 days. I can reach out with them with a customized experience, right? I should know if they are completing something and I can send them sort of a praise for the progress that they're making. So if you have tech involved, it gets easier. But I think about traditional businesses like for example, staying at the Four Seasons, they know my preferences, they've saved them, they took the time to ask. Now asking didn't look like somebody on the phone with me asking me these preferences. It looked like a form that I filled out. Very simple, right? Do you want like a fluffy pillow or a. Not a flat pillow, a hard pillow, a soft pillow? They ask all of these sorts of questions and then they just save those with my customers profile. So then every time I check into a Four Seasons, I have the exact same experience. I'm going to have my gluten free toaster in there, literally truly labeled gluten free. I'm going to have the pillow that I want, et cetera. So it's the same sort of thing when I go to my hairstylist. My hairstylist has zero tech, zero tech. But you know what she does? She listens to me and she takes notes. And so then when I come back, she's got that note tied to my customer profile. So we pick up a conversation right where we left off. So. So at the end of the day, I encourage people before they think I can't do this because I have too many customers. First off, I have clients with 15,000 members that do this. They have 15,000 members. They track the data, they do assessment questions, they do small group onboarding, coaching calls to remove friction. And they can pay for that because of the retention results that increase their profitability. It's worth it to them to make that investment. But before we think about all the things we can't do, we need to create that dream experience and look for all of those opportunities to personalize or to recognize and praise the progress that people are making or to meet their needs because they're not utilizing the product or they're having trouble with the service and say, how could I do this? What would I want it to look like? Then we can start figuring out where the tech limitations are. Then we can start asking ourselves the question of like, well, what is the easiest way for me to meet this need to create this kind of personalization? Because if you can't do it today. With the way technology is going, maybe you're six months or a year away to creating the kind of experience that you want for way more affordable than you ever could have five years ago.
- [33:31]
A
Okay, so let's give an example. Let's assume that the people that are listening have technology platforms that are smart enough to know when a certain goal is achieved or a transaction or upgrade or action or whatever. Give us an example of how we can give praise in such a way that because praise seems to be the obvious one, we could all do. So help people that are more mind focused, like you and me, understand what praise might look like in this context.
- [33:57]
B
Yeah, well, to back it up even more, I think of it like a stoplight system. Green, yellow, red. Okay. Green is a praiseworthy action. You logged into the site. Woo. Praiseworthy. You completed onboarding. Right. You watched your first video, you achieved your first milestone, you got your first referral. Right. These are all praiseworthy actions. Yellow are things that are warning signs for me. They haven't logged in in 45 days. Oh, no. They haven't completed their onboarding within 10 days of joining. Ugh, that's not good. So my green actions are like my praiseworthy. I want to just send them a little Hey, I see you. Congratulations. You just completed onboarding. We've just unlocked this special bonus for you. Or now you can get this private podcast. Or hey, now you can actually access the community. That's awesome. Keep going. Your next step is to do XYZ or Congrats on reaching that milestone. That's really hard for you to get your email list set up and get your first subscriber. Subscriber. We're so proud of you for getting that done. Your next step is to, you know, create a landing page or whatever it might be. And then the same thing, like with your yellow stuff. Like, what if somebody hasn't logged in for 45 days? Or if I have, let's say I'm a gym and I have a gym member who hasn't shown up at the gym in two or three weeks. It doesn't take anything to have somebody send them a note or get an email automated out to them. That's like, hey, we just wanted to check in. How are you feeling? Are you sick? Are you injured? How can we support and help you? And then, you know, the red is just people who are canceling or aren't having a great experience and they're in customer support asking for help or asking to cancel. And we still want to win. These people over, even if they don't ever come back as a customer because our reputation is our best marketing. And if our reputation is soured because we don't treat people well when they have a bad experience, we don't treat people well when they go to cancel, then that's going to impact us over the long run. So that's how I think about it, is like in these buckets. And then I just ask myself, like, what can I do to praise? What can I do to activate the people in the yellow bucket who need to be activated? And what can I do to rescue the people who are in the red bucket or send them away feeling really good about their experience with us?
- [36:01]
A
Love it. When we were prepping for this, you had an example that you were going to share here. Do you mind sharing that?
- [36:06]
B
Of course, yeah. So with the Nonprofit Leadership Lab, which is a membership for nonprofit organizations, we work specifically with with them on their annual renewals. And this is just super simple. Their annual renewal rate was around 40%. And we were like, okay, what if we did two things differently? We're going to check in with them 60 days before their annual renewal. So the first time they hear from us is not going to be when they get billed for the year. We're actually going to check in with them 60 days out. Very simple email that just said, hey, we just wanted to check in. How are things going? How can we best support you right now? What do you need? Right.
- [36:43]
A
And is this just an email?
- [36:44]
B
This just basic email. That's all it was. It's an email 60 days out. They had the opportunity to reply and get support if they needed. But I'll tell you, we've done this study with a membership with over 14,000 people, and we offered private calls. Right. Majority of people did not take them. But retention rate increased for everybody who opened the email, even just reaching out, if nobody replies, if nobody takes you up on the opportunity for the call, if nobody takes advantage of that coupon code that you sent them for $5 off for being Loya customer, we have stats that prove that simply offering it and them seeing that personal outreach, that personal touch, will increase their retention rate. And this proved we sent that email. And then at their 14 days before their renewal, we sent a video, which was an iPhone video from the founder who was just walking around saying, hey, I get this is hard work. You're a nonprofit leader. This is exhausting work. This is what's going on in the government right now. This is so hard. We're here for you. Here's what we have planned for the next year to make sure that we can keep you going and help your organization go. And we increased their annual renewal rate from the 40% to 60s and 70% by doing those two things that were both automated took us a couple hours to implement.
- [37:58]
A
And that radically improved the lifetime value of those overall customers. Right?
- [38:02]
B
Of course it did. And their impact on all of these nonprofits that they want to serve.
- [38:06]
A
That's super cool. All right, so so far we've talked about the first two steps of the process. The first one was results. Right. What's that desired outcome that this customer wants and where are their friction points? The second thing is recognition. And under recognition, we talked about how we should praise people or congratulate progress. And we just gave a great example. I think that helps people really process this in their mind. There is a third part of the process. So talk to me, what's next?
- [38:34]
B
It's my favorite. It's relationships. It's relationships. And I think we cannot underestimate the power of trust and belonging. And trust is at an all time low in our industry right now. People are talking about it all the time. We have a trust recession. There's all sorts of buzzwords around it. This is nothing new. This is human nature, human biology. I'm really big into psychology. We have to have trust and belonging. So when we think about relationships, there's really three ways that people can build relationships within a business. And whether you're a corporate business, an in person, you can always think about a way to apply because we're talking about their connection to you as the owner, the founder, the face of the brand, their connection to your team. So your community people, your front desk worker, your customer support person. Right. Though there's connections that can be made there as well, and then their connection to each other. Right. So how are we showing up authentically as a brand? You can no longer hide behind a brand name anymore. And I'm sure you've talked about this a ton on the podcast, that even brands need to have this feeling of humanization, of authenticity within the brand itself. And then when we talk about the team so often, especially if you're a founder focused business, you think, oh, I can never have somebody in my community, I can never have somebody else take a sales call. I can never have somebody else do a coaching call because nobody can do it as good as me. But the reality is, is that when we empower our team, we don't hide our team, but we empower our team to represent Us and to build connections. It only strengthens our ties with our customers. It makes them even more sticky. It's why when old school advertising agencies and even agencies of now, when they walk into a room to pitch somebody, they bring a team. Not just one person, they bring a team because there's power in that team. We can build relationships and trust and connection. There's there and then with each other, which obviously I'm a huge proponent for online communities. I have a whole course on creating online communities and making those communities sticky. But this is true whether you have virtual products and communities or whether you have in person. People more than ever are craving community connection after what we experienced with the lockdown. But I feel like now even more too with AI, people don't know what to trust, they don't know who to trust. And, and they're craving. They're craving, whether they realize it or not, real community and connection with each other. And so if our business can be the place where that kind of connection is facilitated, then we 100% are going to build a loyal customer.
- [41:20]
A
Do you have an example you can share with us?
- [41:21]
B
I love this because it's not a client. It was my husband's sweet aunt. She had a boutique business in North Dakota. Okay, small town North Dakota. She could have just sold clothes. That's what a lot of businesses do do. I'm here, my job is to sell clothes, make money selling clothes. But she said, I want to create community. And when businesses were shutting down left and right, her business was staying open. And here's what that looked like. Okay. She understood relationship building. So she knew her customers by name. She took notes on her customers preferences. But even more so, she started to create events. And her little boutique was the hub for these sip and shots events that would happen on Saturdays anytime. She'd have boxes come in with new releases, she would post online and she'd be like, I got all these new boxes. So what would be happening after store hours are closed right On Sunday afternoon or in the evenings where you unbox and you get everything out, put it on the racks. She invited her customers in, they helped with the unboxing. They were the first to see the new things that were coming out and they, they felt so special and they're all there together getting to experience it. She would do girls night out to create the shopping experience. And so when I went there and I went on one of those girls night out, sip and shop days, I left there knowing other customers names. I bought stuff that I probably would not have bought. But Janice, who I just met, who was shopping with her daughter, thought it looked fantastic on me and picked it up off of the rack and thought, oh, I need this necklace too. She created a place where the community was able to gather. And when her business shut down, not because it was failing, but because she wanted to be grandma and she shut down a successful business to be grandma. The community was sad. They mourned the loss of a clothing boutique because of what it created for them. From a community perspective.
- [43:14]
A
I love that. What about for those of us that do business online and not in person? Do you have any tips or examples of how we could pull something like this off?
- [43:22]
B
Yeah, a hundred percent. So if you don't have an online community platform, I highly encourage you to have one, even if you're a SaaS product. I was just talking to somebody who had a SaaS product last week and we were talking about how having an online community is actually going to help them improve their SaaS product over time because their community is going to be brainstorming together about what they need and how to improve it and that's going to help drive actually their development of their product and program. But so having an online community is so important. But at the end of the day, even if you don't have that, how can I create connection? Well, in the emails that I send, am I sending just a boring email or am I sending a short little video message? You know, we need to think about how people consume information now, how they create connection. We are living in a TikTok and Instagram reel culture in a YouTube shorts, right? So why can I not record a 30 second video greeting a first time customer and thanking them for buying my widget and have that go out in the email the day after their product arrives? Right? So instead of just just sending them a receipt and sending them an email from a founder that's like, hey, I just want you to know, here's who we are, here's our team. We're actually building this thing and packaging it for you right now. And we care about you and we care about your experience and I'm so grateful that you're supporting our small family business. If you need anything, we're here for you. That little touch point of humanization is a way to start creating more connection and build more relationship with your customer. Wow.
- [44:47]
A
Shanna Lynn Bresnahan, this has been really fascinating. I have all sorts of notes that I've taken for our own product that I'm thinking about right now. If people want to work with you or want to connect with you on the socials. Where exactly should they go?
- [45:02]
B
Yeah, you can just go to shannalynn.com so S H-A-N-A-L-Y-N-N.com I've got a guide that you can get that's going to go way deeper into what we talked about. And then honestly, my podcast community creators with Shannalynn and it's everywhere. You listen to podcasts and on YouTube and that's all I talk about is these sorts of topics day in and day out.
- [45:21]
A
Cool. And then what about on the social? Do you have a preferred social platform?
- [45:24]
B
Yeah, Instagram. It's usually where I hang out. Hannah speaks on Instagram and you can connect with me. It's really me. You can send me a dm. I'll send you a voice message back.
- [45:34]
A
Very cool. Shanna, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing your insights.
- [45:37]
B
Hey, thanks for having me. This is so fun.
- [45:40]
A
Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com 7 and if you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been listening for a little while, we would love a review on whatever app you're listening on and let your friends know about this show. You can tag me on Facebook, LinkedIn and or X and do check out my other show, the AI Explored podcast. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner. What if you could get year round AI training? That's exactly what's waiting for you with our AI Business Society. To learn more, visit social mediaexaminer.com AI.