Quick Fix #1: You Can Talk To Your Customers! with Rand Fishkin - MicroConf Remote

0:00[Music] howdy i'm ryan fishkin co-founder and ceo of sparktoro previously the founder of moz and author of boston founder and i want to help you folks at microcomp remote with one thing that you can do today that can potentially have a transformative impact on your business tomorrow and in the future so i'll show you something that's been working really well for us here at sparktoro which is uh so we have this this free tool well we have a free version and a paid version it's a software as a subscription like like probably a lot of you with at microconf and um one of the things that we do that

0:39works really well is when someone starts running their free search right so they say like oh well my audience whatever uses these words in their profile uh software engineer right and they they run that first search they're asked to um sign up and put in their email i'm logged into my account but you get the idea they they lo they uh have to create an account with us and give us their email and uh that email address and that registration process means that we can shoot them a quick message and i send them a message from my email account right rand at spartaro.com like it comes from me

1:19uh that says can i help you with your sparturo account and it's just a super short uh email message in fact it literally says um can i can i help with your spark torah account is the title this we found works really well high open rate uh and it says you know hi first name saw your spark sign up wanted to offer these suggestions for your free searches we give people 10 free searches this is my personal email so if you have questions or a minute to tell me what you'd like to accomplish with the tool i'm happy to help that's trent fishkin so it looks and feels like a real email

1:52because it really is if they send a reply it comes right to me i get a dozen two dozen sometimes three dozen of these replies uh every day it's it's pretty awesome it's a fantastic way to connect with the customers and potential customers of our product and people are using it get a sense for who's struggling how what they're trying to do and accomplish i love this when when you're at a small scale right when you have a few dozen to a few hundred people signing up every month for your product offering something for free and then getting in touch with those folks and building those

2:28relationships just incredibly powerful if you can find a way to do this in your software business i think you can really move the needle on getting a deep understanding of who your potential buyers are and then taking the messaging that works that that's helping people uh at a one-to-one level and translating that into what you put on pages like you know your home page which we've done with spark toro right this instantly discover what your audience reads watches listens to and follows that comes from those conversations the whole how it works page the the video uh the the graphics and explanation it all comes from these conversations

3:05and i i find that uh incredibly helpful so i encourage you to do it with your software business as well all right thanks everyone take care good luck [Music]

3:24you