144% Increase In Lifetime Value Of A Customer By Building A Relationship

Tim: Welcome to ConversionCast, the only podcast that gets to the heart of the metrics. Now here’s another data driven case study.

What’s up fellow marketer? Thanks for listening. Now on today’s episode, you’ll discover a clever way to build a better relationship with your customers, improve your retention and hopefully see an increase in the lifetime value of your customers like what today’s guest got. She saw a 144% increase in the lifetime value of her customers. That’s insane. But before we get into that, I want to invite you to a webinar that I’ll be conducting this Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern time , which is going to show you how you can quickly generate more leads for your business while spending less time on marketing and who doesn’t want that?

So to join me, all you need to do is text LeadPages that’s all one word LeadPages to the 38470. One more time to receive an invite to join me on this free webinar, Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern time, just send a text right now that says LeadPages to 38470.

With that said, today’s guest is Lisa MacQueen, an InfusionSoft small business icon award winner. She is an automation rock star who helps businesses become more scalable and grow to higher levels than ever before. As if that weren’t enough, the reason that I found out about Lisa was when I was talking to InfusionSoft about having them on the show, they said great we’d love to be on but you also need to interview Lisa. She’s that brilliant. Today’s case study however, is something she did in her own business. She owns a company called Clean Corp with her husband and although they were successful they were struggling to break beyond a certain barrier primarily due to their customer return.

So Lisa stepped in with a fantastic idea , which ended up getting the results I mentioned earlier, that 144% increase in lifetime value of her customers. The beautiful thing is that this tactic could work for just about anything, bloggers, podcasters, ecommerce stores, coaches, consultants or really any kind of business.

If you want to connect on a higher level than most of your competitors, create crazy levels of loyalty and generate higher profits in the meantime this is the episode for you. Don’t forget to register for the free webinar that’s this Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern time. You just need to text LeadPages all one word to 38470 and I’ll see you there. Then and only then can you listen to this episode.

No, you know, I’m only kidding. You can listen either way but I hope to see you on that webinar. I’m Tim Page the conversation educator here at LeadPages, this is ConversionCast and here’s Lisa MacQueen.

Hi, Lisa. Thanks so much for coming on ConversionCast. I’m excited to have you here today.

Lisa: Great. I’m excited to be here with you today, Tim. It’s fantastic. I can’t wait for our chat.

Tim: Yeah I can’t either. So I guess let’s just kind of dive in. The first thing that I want to hear is you know what were the specific results that you were able to get using the strategy we’re going to talk about today?

Lisa: Well the strategy that we’re going to cover of today the results have been absolutely been phenomenal. And the reason for that is because we were able to totally humanize the interaction between our cleaning technicians and our clients. And it stopped us having that customer churn. It stopped us losing clients all the time because they didn’t, the clients didn’t know who the client was so they didn’t care. You know, if the [0:03:41] [Indiscernible] well that was a good enough reason in some cases to find another cleaning company.

So once we figured that out, all of a sudden our churn rate dropped significantly. Our retention rate went up significantly and our customer lifetime value went up by I think it was about 144%.

Tim: Wow.

Lisa: So pretty, pretty impressive results.

Tim: That’s incredible, yeah. I love that and that is – that’s a stat that a lot of people are either in the middle of measuring or you know, don’t know that they need to focus on. So clearly that’s an important stat. So before we dive into you know, how you did that and how you humanized that process, I would love to hear a little bit about kind of what you do and you know, kind of how you got into this the opportunity to implement this strategy.

Lisa: Sure. Well my husband started Clean Corp about 20 years ago and he was running that business. It was a one man show based in Sydney Australia and he was pretty much doing everything. He’d be up cleaning at night and then he’d be working all day on trying to build the business. He’d be doing the quotes, everything. About sort of ten years in, he hadn’t really made a massive jump. He hadn’t been able to take the business past that 700,000, 800,000 revenue figure.

[0:05:07]

And that was okay of course he was doing everything but he was also burning out. It was just too much. So I’ve spent the previous 20 years working for international hotels all over the world in sales and marketing and he said to me look, you’re making millions of dollars for other people, why don’t you bring those sales and marketing skills that you have. Bring them into Clean Corp and let’s see where we can take this business.

So I joined and immediately recognized that the business just it didn’t have a single system or process for anything. Absolutely every single thing that the business did was manual and so there was no leverage there. So I started to work with the business coach and she was really organized and I said to her one day, how do you get, how do you keep all these balls in here. She said to me well look I use InfusionSoft.

Once I looked at what InfusionSoft would do I was totally sold. I knew that that was going to be the solution to that chaotic problem that Clean Corp had. So I started really slowly implementing it and it – I’m not going to lie. It took me quite a long time to press the button on the first campaign. Actually it was a sequence campaign, it was so long ago. And but once I did it you know, I was using email templates out of the InfusionSoft library so it wasn’t even my own content. But once I started using it all of a sudden things started to change and we started the fix that follow-up failure because we were getting back to people.

I think that’s what it really clicked in my mind that if I’ve figured out how to use these I could really get some commercial advantage over all of my competitors in Sydney. So you know, I started to do that and pretty soon we’d hit the  million mark and then we hit the two million mark and it just, it happened really quickly for us and really quickly I mean you know, over the space of that two years I was… Well I doubled the business more than doubled the business actually over that two-year period.

But we got to that point that 2M and that’s quite a magic point in a lot of small business is you can get yourself up there and then once you get there it’s really hard to bring yourself beyond it. Because you get a whole new different set of problems and that’s where we were at.

And that’s when we started to see customer churn increase and that’s when I knew I had to figure that out. I had to figure out why all of a sudden we were losing these customers. So naturally I spoke to our clients. They were the first people I spoke to but there wasn’t, there wasn’t really a problem with the cleaning as such. So that said, I didn’t really give me the results of all the answers that I was looking for. So then I spoke to the cleaners that were working for us. What I’ve found from those conversations was phenomenal. Because they were telling me independently they were telling me that when they go into a client’s worksite, people wouldn’t make eye contact with them. No one would speak to them and they were almost like nonpeople in those organizations and yet they perform this incredibly important job every single night.

So I sort of thought well I think that’s a problem. I think one of the reasons that our clients can you know, instantly fire out Clean Corp is because they don’t really have any care for who the cleaner is. And that’s when I came up with the idea to personalize the experience much more and start sending out cards using Send Out Cards and InfusionSoft.

Tim: Interesting.

Lisa: It was a phenomenal, phenomenal turnaround.

Tim: Yes. So how did you know, tell us a little bit about what was in the cards, how did you implement this process? I want to hear about this because this is really unique.

Lisa: Yeah. Well I mean wearing one of those businesses that is quite low touch in some aspects and quite high tough in others. So with the cut I wanted to be able to reach out from the cleaner’s perspective and so I approached each one of our cleaners and I said, I explained the idea behind it and I asked each of them to give me a photo of themselves but not a photo of them in their work uniform. I wanted a photo either with their family or may be when they went on the last holiday something. A photo that was representative of them in their life.

Then I asked them to tell me three things about themselves that I could share with our clients. And so I developed the card in Send Out Cards and it said more or less it said hi, I’m Michael and I’m your new cleaner and although our paths may or may not cross in the future I thought you might like to know a little bit about me. I’m a father, I have two beautiful daughters as you’ll see in that photo and my wife’s name is Maria. You know, I love this sporting team or this type of car and on the weekend I love taking my girls out for picnics.

[0:10:36]

I want to be the best cleaner that you’ve ever had. So if there’s anything that I can do to improve your customer experience here’s my number please let me know. So that’s all it was. But once people started and I designed the card too Tim, I designed it so that it looked like it should be put up on a notice board. So it looked like it had come off the notice board. It was quite cool.

So what we found was that people were taking those cards that they were receiving and they were putting them on the company notice board. Pretty soon, when the cleaners showed up, people would say hey Marco how are the kids. Like all of a sudden that nonperson problem had become like no problem at all because they knew who they were, they knew a little bit about them and they –you know, the clients would chat and call them by name. It was just incredible.

Tim: It is this – I know better than to ask but I’m just going to ask anyway. This wasn’t some manual process that you came up with.

Lisa: Oh hell no. [Laughs]

Tim: [Laughs]

Lisa: [Laughs] We do not. InfusionSoft users do not do manual processes very well. No, this was completely automated through InfusionSoft with the help of a little API internet automator is what I use and that’s what I highly recommend to your audience. It’s [0:12:01] [Indiscernible] a month worth every penny. I think it’s really inexpensive anyway and it’s super, super simple to use and set up.

Tim: So somebody signs off to hire your cleaning service, and —

Lisa: Uh-hum.

Tim: –once that happens something is triggered in Infusion Soft that says hey send out this card and it basically takes the card that you’ve already designed with you know, whatever program you design the card with and it sends that out in the mail?

Lisa: That’s right. I mean it’s as simple as when we have a client, a new client start up with us, we have a –you know, a campaign obviously set around that and it’s just triggered straight away through a web form and then it sends an email to internet automator to trigger the card to go out and that’s how it all works. I’ve got the eat the cards or present in Send Out Cards and it’s you know, I can decide what day it goes out. I mean we get new client cards from the cleaners that goes out immediately. But all the other cards that I have scheduled through the campaign, I just time them out. I time them out so that I’m going to get the most value as a business owner but I also time them out so that the client can feel that you know, we are staying in touch and they’re getting a lot of interaction between clean call, between their cleanup. It works really well.

Tim: And is this something that you could set up? Because the one question I have here and again I mentioned this to you before and I’m not sure if I’ve said in this on the show but most times on the show I’m just like the really excited person that just wants to do whatever we’re talking about. So you know, the one thing that I’m kind of confused on is where does the card come from? Is there just – do you just use the service like this to print or something to —

Lisa: Oh no, no.

Tim: Okay.

Lisa: The card comes from Send Out Cards.

Tim: Oh that’s an actual company.

Lisa: Yes. SendOutCards.com. I think they’re the biggest greeting card company in the world. They are absolutely awesome and so you can design the card exactly the way you want. You can have like in our cards obviously I’m putting photos of our cleaners on them or what have you but you can have all types of different cards and all you need is a photo. You upload it and put it in. And it really is very, very easy to do but also Send Out Cards have fantastic resources on their website. If you’re new at this and you’re a little bit you know, unsure of how to set it up, they can literally take you through it just using their online videos.

Tim: I love it and you would just set it up so that InfusionSoft passes that information along to SendOutCards in places in order.

Lisa: That’s right and it just gets passed along via an email in your campaign.

[0:15:03]

Tim: All right.

Lisa: It really couldn’t be simpler. I’m you know, just looking at it now and it’s just a matter it’s just getting code and the code from internet automator you just pop that into the email so into the campaign email and when that gets sent it just triggers all the cards to come a little bit – well each card comes as per the preselected timings.

Tim: That’s great. I love it.

Lisa: Right.

Tim: And you know, this is such a good solution to a problem that so many companies have. You know, if you’re not a life coach or if the brand is not centered around you as the business owner, this is a problem that a lot of people have. It’s like how do we make this so that it’s you know, as Christ Tucker would say P2P you know, person to person instead of B2B or B2C. So how do we make it so that it’s a person interacting with a person? This is a really unique way to do that. You can take instead of making it about the CEO or about this or that, make it about the person you’re going to interact with and that’s a really great way to make people feel more comfortable and feel like they’re doing business with a person instead of some nameless, faceless company.

Lisa: Exactly and I mean let’s face it the number one question in every consumer’s mind is if who can I trust? So when they’re making a decision or a buying decision who can I trust and I think this is really a unique way and effective way to sort of bridge that threshold of trust with them. What on the beginning. The other thing I guess too is that when you’re working B2B, your prospect may not necessarily be the person who makes the final decision but they’re more than likely going to be the person who influences that final decision.

Tim: Uh-hum.

Lisa: So if you can be building that trust with the influencer that’s going to dramatically increase your opportunities and your chances to make the sale with the decision maker. And you know, sending things like this it’s high touch point and that’s everybody wants to be made to feel special. So you get a card in the mail and it’s really nice that like I’ve set up the –even the envelopes are set up to look personalized. I wrote out each letter of the alphabet and each number and set uploaded that to SendOutCards. So even the envelopes looked personalized and they always go out with a stamp, not you know, not just a [0:17:38] [Indiscernible] machine stamp.

So they’re going to get opened.

Tim: Yeah that’s great and I love – I was just thinking you know, what a great use for this. I have a lot of podcasters that ask me you know, how can I engage with my guests more, how can I make it so that it’s more of a conversation right in the beginning. What a great idea to when you book a guest on your show, ask them for their address and send them may be just a little card with a little bit of stuff about you and something like that. Because we get all these emails that are like here’s what we’re going to talk about, here’s a little bit about me that kind of stuff.

But if you sent them something like a card or may be a little gift or something like that you’ll stand out in their mind and especially if you’re reaching out to influencers in your space, there’s a great way to connect there. So I could see a lot of uses for this.

Lisa: Yeah. Well I mean we take it, we take it that the whole card idea because in the cleaning industry and in that trades services space, there’s not a lot of touch points there as far as getting engagement from your clients. Because it’s they’ve got a problem, they want it fixed and that’s it. We say in the cleaning industry you know, nobody really cares. They don’t care about buying a cleaning contract, they just want a clean office. So you need to sort of figure that out so that you can laser focus how you’re going to get through to them and what we’ve done with this card campaign, is we’ve taken it a lot wider than just that cleaner card.

So after we’ve had a client with us for I think it’s for 14 days I’ve triggered another card to go out and some cookies.

Tim: Oh love it.

Lisa: The cookies go out and they – I mean they’re beautiful cookies, beautifully packaged with the personal card from [0:19:25] [Indiscernible] who’s the managing director and also my husband. That is strategically positioned within our campaign to arrive on their desk on the exact same day that we ask them to give us a testimonial. So it and that’s why our testimonial rate is so high because they’re getting something from us. We’re on their mind and then we ask them for that testimonial. So you can use it in different ways as well to achieve things that you want to achieve.

Tim: Yeah that’s great I love it. This is such a cool idea and I hope to see more people implementing this. So Lisa thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing this. It’s been a blast.

[0:20:03]

Lisa: Thank you Tim. It’s been great to share this with you.

Tim: Thanks for listening to this episode of ConversionCast. If you liked what you heard here today, we have something awesome that we want to send you. Our amazing team has created a free reference guide for you with every single split test and piece of conversion data that we have access to here at ConversionCast. This free booklet is packed with incredible case studies and real metrics from real people to show you what’s really working across multiple industries right now. This is the kind of information you won’t find anywhere else. As one of our listeners, we want to give you a copy of this book absolutely free. You can get your copy right now by going to ConversionCastGift.com. Again that’s ConversionCastGift.com. Go there now and pick up your copy and we’ll see you next time.