This is post 2 of 6 recapping Reforge’s recent webinars on Leading Growth in Turbulent Times. You can watch all the webinars here.
For reference, here’s the table of contents for the series.
Your Rapid Response Checklist (this post)
The most enthusiastic audience response across all three webinars occurred when Elena Verna (Reforge EIR and ex-SVP of Product & Growth at MalwareBytes) offered the playbook she recommending to her clients. The fastest thing a company can do to adapt is change is the marketing strategy. Here's Elena's checklist for quick wins right now. (You should really watch the entire segment. Elena starts at 44:21 of this webinar.)
Create a tiger team that can tackle all realtime changes to messaging throughout the entire experience. Make sure they have executive support (up to the CEO) to move quickly with limited bureaucracy.
Remove any unnecessary projects that aren't extremely focused on responding and adapting to the current situation.
Scrub all inappropriate messages and images from all marketing, sales, product, and retention touch points. Double check automated emails, sales scripts, and edge cases you might not be thinking about. Don't be insensitive during a crisis.
DON'T MENTION COVID-19 in your core messaging. You'll come off as exploiting the situation and early test results from Social Fulcrum indicate the mention COVID in acquisition flows tanks conversion rates.
Cash Is King so watch leading indicators of churn like platform engagement.
Look for users whose behavior has increased or decreased significantly. Find out why engagement has changed.
For users with major decreases, can you do anything to prevent churn before it happens?
When churn happens ask why they churned and if they plan to come back when things improve. Can you win them back now with a promotion?
Try to fix mechanical churn ASAP. Mechanical churn is when automated payments don't process, usually because a user hasn't updated their credit card. According to Patrick Campbell (Founder & CEO of Profitwell), you can usually win-back about 75% of those users with good follow-up. That's cash you should be trying to save right now
Collect customer feedback
Read every auto-renew cancellation
Listen to sales call recordings
Look at the support tickets
Interview your best customers, your new customers, your prospects, and any customers with dramatic changes in user behavior.
Watch for new personas researching your product. Do qualitative interviews to find why they are now coming to you and what problems they are trying to solve.
Watch google for shifts in keywords for your categories
If you think you can reposition your value prop as a solution to new problems then...
Test new positioning on social (either organic or small paid tests)
Test new positioning to a segment of your email list
Once validated, update your core user flows and product experience
If you think you can reposition for new audiences, then develop new targeting lists and try some sample campaigns to those audiences.
Remove friction from your acquisition flows and demonstrate empathy.
Consider longer trial periods or different bundles to build up a larger pool unpaid users that you can monetize later as things return to normal.
Understand that your user's lives are impacted and try to build goodwill by helping them during this stressful timeframe.
It is difficult to pivot your product development cycle and deploy new products or features in the near term. Do as much as you can with marketing before making pivots or shifting your product development. (More Product Development suggestions in Post 3)
Some businesses are booming right now. If your business is doing well, pay it forward by offering free product to educational providers, non-profits, or others in need. It's good for your brand, but more importantly, it's good for your team's morale and it's the right thing to do for the world.
Overall, the game is now about speed and profitability. Collect data rapidly, make smart decisions quickly, and evolve every 24 hours.
Other posts about Leading Growth in Turbulent Times:
Your Rapid Response Checklist (this post)
If you have more questions or suggestions, please let us know on Twitter or connect with us on LinkedIn.