How to invite your first customers

The most important part of getting started with Experify, inviting customers. Before you have some customers onboarded, you'll have nothing to show on your website, and you've really only got a couple of opportunities to invite your existing customers before you start sounding spammy and desperate, so it is really important you get this right.

Who are you going to invite?

The first step is determining who you are going to invite. Firstly you should keep it to customers who have purchased the products you will be showcasing on Experify. However how you go about contacting that segment of customers may differ.

You'll likely have customers fall into two groups.

Group 1: Those who are huge customer advocates, you see them tagging you in social posts all the time, they are always emailing you with info on how they use your products, they are giving you feedback on how to improve your product. This might account for 10% of your customer base.

Group 2: These are customers who have purchased but you have never heard from again. You assume they are happy with your product as they haven't said otherwise, but they're just not the type of people to be active advocates. This is the other 90% of your customers.

You should expect to convert 40-50% of group 1 to Experify and 5-10% of group 2 to Experify.

Some other things you should consider are:

How long has the customer had your product? Customers who more recently purchased are more likely to be bigger advocates. If someone purchased many years ago they may not even own your product any more.
Is there anyone you really don't want on Experify? Difficult customers, those you know have modified your product, etc.

Creating your outreach groups

We recommend segmenting your customers into Group 1 and Group 2 as outlined above. Your outreach will differ to each audience. If you need to create a spreadsheet to help you with this it is a useful exercise. Export your sales data from Shopify and get categorising.

Create an outreach strategy

Your group 1 audience deserves more personalised outreach. This is the group that you really want to sign up to Experify. So consider a phone call or personalised email to this group. Your group 2 audience can do with more generic invites. We recommend a strategy something like below:

Week 1: Personalised invites to Group 1 audience.
Week 2: Generic email invite to Group 1 and Group 2 audience.
Week 2: Targeted social ads to Group 1 and Group 2 audience.
Week 3: Reminder email invite to Group 1 and Group 2 Audience.

You'll see that email is doing most of the heavy lifting here. If you use SMS to communicate with your audience, feel free to add this into the mix. We also recommend a short social media ad campaign to this group. You should only need to spend a few dollars on it as the audience is small, but this helps remind those people who planned to sign up but never got around to it to do so.

Consider incentives to sign up

Even your best advocates can be apathetic to signing up for another platform. This is where incentives can really help get them over the line. At Tribe Bikes we offered all customers who purchased a bike in the last 12 months a bonus year's warranty, and anyone beyond 12 months a niche specific book we could easily dropship from Amazon. Here's a few ideas for sign up incentives you can offer:

Bonus Reward points: As Experify is a rewards platform, creating a 'signup bonus' of say 50 reward points can help familiarise them with the platform. Once your customer is signed up you can add the bonus rewards to their account from within the admin dashboard.
Brand swag: You've probably got a box full of branded hats or water bottles shoved away in a corner of your warehouse from a previous promotional event.
Bonus warranty or subscription: If you've got a product where warranty is important, consider extending this as a no cost way to incentivise customers, or if your product incurs a regular subscription cost, perhaps offer an extended free period of the subscription.
Something you can dropship: Is there something like a book that focuses on your Niche? For example a cook book if you are selling cooking equipment. Drop ship this from Amazon and avoid the effort of having to dispatch orders.

Craft your email invites

You might not be sure where to start with your email invite, that's ok, we've created some outreach templates for you. Feel free to adjust these for your product or niche, and include details of any incentives you plan to offer with signup.

Remember to include a link to the signup form, which you can find on Invite Customers page of the Shopify App or the Invite Customers page for non Shopify users.