Remember? In my last blogpost I wrote about karma. In the book I recommended (Karmic Management) it says that you should even support your competitor to attract more positive “karma”. There are some impressive examples of this in the book. That this works, I see just again. Yesterday I received an extremely impressive e-mail from a customer.

A short side note: This article is another one from the category “The journey with my plugin“. The trigger for such blogposts was the book Traffic Secrets. In the book he wrote that it would be a good idea to share your story and what is happening around your product with your customers. I liked the idea so much that I now publish such an article twice a week.

By the way, I read the book because I want to attract more visitors to my sales page. Of course, to earn more in the end, because my sales have dropped a lot in the past. So there is only one way: More traffic or stop developing the plugin. But more about this is in the initial article about it: More traffic for my WordPress plugin.

Impersonal customer emails

Most of the support emails I receive start the same way. They get straight to the point. There’s no “hello” or “goodbye.” People also often don’t think it’s necessary to type their own name at the end. Accordingly, I then have to answer with “Hello there!”. Of course, this makes the whole thing very impersonal and also, in my opinion, a bit harsh.

Threats in customer e-mails

But you can also put the crown on the whole thing. Quite often I get a threat in the first email: “If you don’t help me, you’ll get a bad rating at CodeCanyon”.

Or even more extreme: “Either help me or give me my money back”.

How should one behave, especially with the latter statement? Because then I often think about whether I should help the customer at all. Last but not least, I spend hours dealing with a problem, write several e-mails and in the end the customer says: “I don’t think the solution is great after all. So give me my money back or I’ll only give you one star in my rating”.

Appeasement

What I’ve learned over the past few years is that many of the customers are simply often caught up in their own world. The world has become more hectic and ultimately so has the tone. On top of that, customer support is often grotty. Not only from “small” plugins. No… often also from large corporations. I remember the last blogpost, where it was also about Google and how such a large company sometimes deals with their customers in a negative way.

Just send a computer to Apple for repair. WTF! You don’t do that again so quickly if you don’t have to.

To bring it to the point: It just helps to smile. Yes! Really! Because I’ve found that most people are absolutely brilliant and even look forward to email exchanges when they’re good.

So I almost always start my email with a “Hi Fred, how are you today? I hope good.”

Then I come on to the problem and immediately mention that we’re sure to find a solution.

Marketing 1×1 from customers

In the end, this was also the case with the customer mentioned at the beginning. The start was a bit harsh. He mentioned that he bought my plugin in 2018, but then stopped using it. Because it was a plugin from CodeCanyon and somehow he doesn’t like CodeCanyon/Envato. His experience there was apparently pretty lousy. I can understand… with so many products and authors, there are unfortunately also very many cowboys.

Anyway. I stayed calm and helped him with his problem. In the end, it came out that he and his family just had to deal with a snowstorm. One of the worst snowstorms his city has ever seen. As we know, the climate is going crazy (because of us). And that’s where we’re all concerned.

This situation and his dislike of CodeCanyon ultimately led to the harsh email. What I found very great: He apparently felt that way himself and later apologized for it. We are all human, sometimes in a good and sometimes in bad mood. And that’s exactly what I love so much about dealing with other people from all over the world.

Insights from customer feedback

He ended up sending me a really long, intense email with ideas. Sure… the first point was already interesting: there are people who completely avoid Envato. That brings me to the first question:

What if many of my customers don’t buy the plugin (even though they want to) precisely because I offer it at CodeCanyon? Oh boy. That would really suck, of course.

Second, he recognized the value of the course I offer. Well… it’s actually only one. One German and one English. But his idea was to split the courses up. Offer one or two basic courses for free. Then charge money for the rest:

• What schema is and how to learn to master it.
• How to use SNIP.
• More courses for specific customer groups and constellations: WooCommerce, Learndash and so on.

This reflects about what I planned to do with my first Sales Funnel.

Other ideas:

• Charge $60 per year (instead of one time).
• Offer an affiliate program.

What’s next.

To increase traffic, I want to continue building my setup wizard, which will then go into not only the PRO version but also the free version. I already continued working on that yesterday.

In the last post I was still wondering if I shouldn’t focus on traffic first. Now I’m wondering, based on what the client said, if I shouldn’t start that earlier?

Let’s see. The decision is still to be made.