If you (or your clients) are selling products online, are you taking the time to simply thank your customers?
Boyink Interactive was not something I started by choice, not really. In 2002 I graduated out of corporate America. Oh - they called it downsizing, but I prefer to think that it affected only the people most capable of being successful once released from the fabric covered walls. However you want to spin it, I was unemployed and in searching for a job came up with a few projects and no full time employment. At the time stringing together the project work was the safest alternative - other options required completely uprooting the family and moving to find work, so Boyink Interactive was born.
Six years later I’m still here so can call Boyink Interactive a success - but I’ve never really felt like a true “business person” in the sense that I didn’t have this great product idea that I researched, did marketing and business cases for, produced, priced, and placed on the market. I’d always been a bit envious of people who had done that - they really seemed like true “entrepreneurs” whereas I could hardly spell the word without help.
This has changed some this year with the launch of Train-ee.com.
For those not familiar with Train-ee, it’s a site where I’m attempting to help other web professionals get over the learning curve of ExpressionEngine by providing high quality, reasonably priced training materials. If Boyink Interactive can be termed a success in any way, it’s entirely due to using ExpressionEngine for client work - it’s made me more efficient, more capable, and clients have been really happy with how EE lets them take on the finished site and not have to pay someone to make content changes. Train-ee is all about helping other web professionals enjoy that same success using EE.
From a business perspective Train-ee has been much closer to what I would call a true “entrepreneurial endeavor”. I knew there was a demand for the content, but I still had to do all the traditional business development steps of picking a name, getting the domain name, building the site and figuring out how the purchase process was going to work. I also had to develop the products - getting the eBook polished up and ready, figuring out how to produce screencasts and getting a couple of those produced and edited. I also had to pony up some money for some software and hardware purchases - nothing incredibly expensive, but these costs came during some of the slowest months since being in business.
All this to say - when the time came to pull the sheet off the site and open for business, it was with no small sense of anticipation. Would people buy this stuff? Would we recoup our investment? Would the pricing make sense? And if they bought anything - would they be happy with it? Or would I get follow-up emails a few hours later with requests for their money back?
So - it only seemed natural that, when some sales started coming in, I took the time to follow up each sale with a thank you email. Nothing fancy - just a few words of heartfelt thanks as each sale was chipping away at the fear that this thing wouldn’t fly and we’d have to eat the time and money we had invested.
The responses I’ve gotten to those simple emailed thank-yous has been nothing short of overwhelming.
Here are a few snippets from the responses I’ve gotten after sending the thank-you emails:
You’re are welcomed Twice! I ran a google search and found your site! An awesome resource!
Thank you for taking the time to write the guide. I’ve had a quick scan through it and it looks awesome. Looking forward to reading it in more depth later on. Cheers Mike!
Hey Mike, Just wanted to thank you for a very informative tutorial. Being brand new to EE, I was completely lost when first seeing the EE architecture. It was hard to see the power that everyone was referring too. After watching your tutorial everything fell into place. Until now I have been creating websites using coldfusion and mysql, building my admin panels from scratch. EE seems like a great solution and a great time saver.
And from Twitter:
Just purchased some ebooks on EE from Mike Boyink. Got a nice reply from Mike saying “Thanks guys!”. Not sure if it’s canned but it’s nice.
To which I responded:
Canned response? Perish the thought! Those simple thank you emails have generated most of the testimonials on Train-ee.
And it’s true - many of the customer testimonials on the Train-ee product pages came from these email interchanges, all I had to do was respond and ask for permission to quote them on the site.
At some level—this just seems crazy. The members of the target audience for Train-ee products are techhies who are highly likely to be inundated with messages—email, twitter, IM, blog comments, discussion forum responses, etc—just fighting to achieve and maintain “zero inbox”. Yet, a simple emailed thanks somehow cuts through the noise, gets noticed, and even commented on.
From a business perspective it’s awesome that a little action that takes little time and costs nothing can get noticed. I know now I’ll be sending these little thank yous as long as I can realistically keep up.
At the same time I’m troubled by the fact that such a simple thing stands out - it must mean that others aren’t doing it. And it’s true - when I think about the purchases I’ve made online I can’t think of any where I got a personal, non-automated thank you note. I did once unsubscribe from a business-related mailing list and got a personal note from the author of the list. He didn’t beat me up to stay on, or try to refer me to any other of his web properties, he just simply thanked me for my time on the list and wished me well. At least three years and thousands of emails later I still remember that.
So I have to turn this around as a challenge. Are you or your customers selling products online? If so, are you just simply thanking the people buying the products? And I know - if the volume of sales is high it’d would be difficult to send a personal note to everyone. But how about a percentage then? Or just choose 10 at random each day?
And yes - by sending a thank you note you have opened up a conversation and you will get a few questions/issues coming back in response to your note of thanks But - these are your customers. Thanking them, talking with them, responding personally to their questions - even if your response is to direct them to the “proper channels” - it’s all time well spent. The more you can come out from behind the curtain of your website and create a personal interaction the more comfortable they’ll be about buying from you and referring you to others.
Or, don’t do it and send them my way….
Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.
Sean on May 22, 2008
Juliano Dasilva on May 23, 2008
Boyink (Author) on May 23, 2008
Erwin Heiser on May 26, 2008