When we’re shopping, rich customer stories can really inform our purchase decisions.
When I’m looking to purchase something - especially a subscription, I want to know how other people have found it. Is it worth the investment? How much am I standing to gain? Will it do specifically x and y?
As consumers, we want to know how other people feel about their purchases.
Expectant mothers want to hear what others think of pregnancy pillows, gelato lovers want to hear what other people think of a gelato place in a town they’re visiting and music lovers want to hear people’s detailed experience with a sprecifi make and model of speaker.
Reviews are a real tenet to good marketing.
It’s social proof that the thing works/is useful which really affects people’s journey to purchase. (More about why this is in this Ninja Blog: What are useful testimonials and why do I need them?).
We’d love to share some of our customer stories
Practice what you preach, right? We thought that a blog post would be a great way to present some testimonials from the lovely members of our Marketing Automation Academy.
Earlier this year we sent out a simple Typeform survey to our members. We wanted to gather both qualitative and quantitative data from our members on their experience of the Academy. We wanted to see what’s working well for them, what might not be so hot, and how much they’re learning about marketing automation as a result of being a member.
So many of our lovely members took the time to submit their surveys and it was SO INTERESTING to read how they’re getting on. We noticed some common themes and quickly made some tweaks to our training to make it a little less time-pressured (I’ve included an example of a specific thing we changed, keep reading).
We found the survey process hugely useful and wanted to share some of the stories from our members with you today.
Let’s dive in.
Louise is learning tonnes
Louise from Alimenti Food Schences Ltd has been a member of ours from the very beginning. She joined the academy to improve her own knowledge as an entrepreneur growing her own business.
She’s a ‘solopreneur’ and has a lot on her plate running the biz. When we asked how useful Louise is finding the Academy, she gave it a glowing 10/10 for usefulness. Woop! This makes us very happy!
Louise has increased her knowledge about building a solid list and how to strategise her marketing automation, and she has learnt ‘tonnes’ about email marketing and creating lead magnets specifically.
Louise really makes the most of the Academy, she’s a frequent attendee of the weekly calls and takes part in most of the challenges.
Side note - we introduced an ‘accountability call’ into the rolling 3-week challenges we run - this made it into a 4-week challenge. This was a change we made because of the member survey...
Several of our cohort found the challenge timescales a little tight and introducing these accountability calls have made the challenges that little bit more realistic to achieve. (Here’s one example of one - The Nurture Challenge! Three weeks to strategise and write your nurture emails.)
After all, we want to be motivating people to get their marketing automation polished, rather than panic them with all the things to get done. I don’t think we wouldn’t have gained such valuable insight without sending this survey out.
Sarah is delighted!
Next up, we have Sarah Silva from Chemical Translator. As the owner of the company, Sarah joined the academy because her business didn’t have the right marketing systems in place and the marketing side of things felt a little messy.
Sarah’s on a mission to tidy things up and gain more confidence in strategising her customer journey. This is what we love to help people with!
Sarah is one of our more recent members and to quote her own words; “I'm delighted to be part of the academy!” Well we’re delighted to have you Sarah!
She’s levelling up her business by taking part in our challenges and working her way through ‘The Vault’ content - which is the cornerstone content of the membership.
The chapters within the vault cover all areas of the Customer Journey:
- Attract: In depth training on how understanding awareness is vital to getting attention.
- Engage: Everything you need to build relationships and engage your audience.
- Sell: All about the power of framing and how brains make purchase decisions.
- Wow: Diving deep into the post purchase process, and the nitty gritty of customer lifetime value.
Alongside a couple of extra chapters:
- The Foundations: Here is where we get the right marketing automation foundations in place
- The Tech: Lots of implementation guides for various marketing automation platforms
Annnnnnd… The chapters, training and resources are growing all the time.
Sarah says that she has learnt a hell of a lot about marketing automation strategy and email marketing and is finding the Academy extremely useful for her biz.
She’s been a star pupil in our content plan challenge, and says that she "actually understood keywords and have loved researching those to start creating the right kind of content". Sarah's also ran with our lead magnet training and feels more confident about creating guides etc. for her customers. We love to hear it!
We blushed a little when reading through her feedback. How lovely is this: “Thank you for all your hard work in creating this community and the high level of training you provide”. Memberships require constant and consistent input and it’s so touching when the hard work is acknowledged like this.
Prolific Ian
Onwards to Ian, who is PROLIFIC! Ian is a regular bum-on-seat during the weekly calls. It’s been amazing to see him taking part in pretty much all the challenges and really making the most of the academy.
Ian is a Keap Max Classic user and a lot of what he was looking for from the Academy is learning how to build out his marketing automation strategy in the tech. He’s also really interested in being time effective and wants to use marketing automation more to free up time on customer management, administrative work, marketing, fulfillment, and tracking interest for focused messaging. Go Ian!
Ian has been a member since the very start of the Academy and he says he’s seen consistent improvement to the business since joining. He’s an active and engaged member of the community and makes good use of the Academy’s Slack channels to engage with others (it’s a real melting pot of entrepreneurs, marketers and interesting peeps).
We asked Ian what successes he’s had as a result of being a member and he responded with this:
“I have a blueprint outlined for our handful of staple subscription products. And I, with a bit of help from my business partner, have been chipping away, building it out (in Keap).I LOVE that I have the big picture overview of how to really take care of our clients as well as campaign processes for each tiny piece throughout the whole customer journey.”
Wow! It’s safe to say that being a member of the academy has been extremely valuable for Ian. We asked him if he would recommend the Academy and he responded with this AMAZING testimonial. Thank you so much Ian!
Ian is the main spearhead, writer, content creator and main person to build out the customer journey in Keap Max Classic. This is only one of the ‘part time’ jobs Ian has in the business. His main job is teaching classes, so he only has a handful of hours most weeks to work on the marketing side of the biz. To say he’s busy is an understatement - something a lot of business owners can likely relate to!
Much like Sarah, Ian has been making amazing use of the Vault training and revisits it to review the learnings there. He’s also such a star pupil and told us that whenever he can’t participate in one of the weekly live calls, he watches those videos back at a later date. We love your diligence Ian!
Catie is the ‘entire marketing department’
Next up is Catie from Emphasis. She is also very busy! She is single-handedly the ‘entire marketing department’ at the company, and she’s self-taught. Catie said that she can feel the pressure of how much there is to be done and how much she *could* do. And given the breadth that marketing covers, it’s a lot!
In her words: “Making decisions and judgments at every level can be challenging. Having access to expert minds to consult with and get feedback from is amazing!”. We’re so happy to help and despite Catie not being a member for long, she’s making great strides.
Recently, in the content plan challenge, Catie felt quite overwhelmed by the large range of products the business offers and therefore the broad range of potential audiences. "Should it be possible to define one audience when there are so many possible personas?" was the question she kept coming back to.
Kenda gave her take on that issue and Catie said she felt reassured – she said that having that expert opinion “removed the distracting niggle that you should be doing something different. Now I can get on with doing the work, actually feeling like I’m on the right track!”
Catie went on to win Kenda’s ‘Gold Star’ on the content plan challenge. Go Catie!
Thank you to our fabulous Marketing Automation Academy members
So many of you were willing to spare some time in feeding back to us about your experience. As a business, and especially if you are running a membership, it’s super important to check in with your members and get some feedback. Make it simple and time-effective for them - lots of rating scales and one-click answers, aside optional qualitative responses.
Your membership will be all the better for it, - you’ll know what needs to be tweaked and no doubt you’ll gather some pretty impressive testimonials to shout about.
Interested in the whole testimonial process?
We wrote this blog on the nitty gritty behind asking your clients / customers for rich testimonials like the ones I’ve shared above. Practice what you preach, right? Kenda also created a podcast episode called ‘Finding Love and Customer Reviews’ on this testimonials topic too, if you prefer some aural inspiration.
Cheers to awesome memberships!
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