Any advice for inviting customers to new community?

bmaue
bmaue Vanilla Seedling
edited June 2023 in Talk Community #1

Hey all,

We recently launched our new community, Woohoo! We're thinking of ways to remind our customers of the new change. Has anyone had success with creative ways to re-invite customers to your new community? Thanks for all of your help!

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Answers

  • Adrian
    Adrian HLV Staff Alumni
    edited December 2022 #2

    Congrats @bmaue !!!!

    One key is to make sure it's part of as many touchpoints. Onboarding with new customers, reminders by CSMS when possible, adding it to signatures, part of the hold message when people call, in product messaging, "included" in search results on your main website - to "ask our community" and finally part of the monthly customer newsletter.

  • bmaue
    bmaue Vanilla Seedling
    #3

    Hey @Adrian!

    Thanks for the advice!

  • Kara
    Kara Vanilla Ice Cream
    #4

    @bmaue We did it a little backwards when launching our new community. We manually uploaded about 500 customers, and then sent them an email welcoming them to the new community with 2 short calls to action: update your profile, invite a colleague/friend to join.

  • bmaue
    bmaue Vanilla Seedling
    #5

    Thanks for the reply, @Kara. Out of the 500 invited, how many completed the CTA?

  • Kara
    Kara Vanilla Ice Cream
    #6

    Fantastic question, and I wish I knew. Aside from manually going through each of those 500 member's profiles to see if a change had been made, I wouldn't know who updated their profile. I don't have a way of knowing if someone refers someone else either, unless that someone else says "__ referred me". All I had was the open/click rate on the email from the marketing stats, which I don't have handy, sorry!

    What was nice was being able to tell those members "You're already a member of this fantastic community...go check it out." Those 500 were customers that had 9's and 10's for client health scores, and were already engaged or software "super users", so more likely to participate. About half of my top members are still from that initial upload.

  • Alex Dunne
    Alex Dunne Vanilla Ice Cream
    #7

    Hi @bmaue ,

    We relaunched our Community in mid-2021 and we did a few different things:

    1. Had a sunset/transition period where the old Community was still open but we responded to every post letting users know the date it would close and how they can join our new community
    2. Email campaign - spread awareness with an email campaign emphasizing the value of the new tool (for us, it allowed us to go beyond just an Ideas Board which was what the old community was). If you have a new/additional use case with your new community it's worth emphasizing that in your campaign
    3. Community exclusives - having something that only Community users can access to incentivize them to join. For example, we started hosting exclusive previews to our product's upcoming features/enhancements in the Community, allowing Community members to get an earlier picture of what's coming down the pipeline and allowing them to have questions.
    4. Ensuring our customer facing teams were armed with new assets and speaking points so that they're directing customers to the new Community and advocating for it in their discussions.

    That's all that comes to mind right now but if anything else comes to me I'll update here!

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