Joshua Paul
5 Essential Online Community Management Tasks to Kick Off the Year
With the start of a new year, you probably have an extensive list of goals and to-dos to improve the health and functionality of your private online community. However, before you get too caught up in some of your loftier ambitions, there are a...
How to Improve Customer Lifetime Value Using Your Online Customer Community Platform
Most companies invest big bucks to build their customer base. Unfortunately, while spending large amounts to acquire new customers, many organizations often make the mistake of paying less attention to the customers they already have. Despite customers costing significantly more to acquire than retain—five to...
Why Online Customer Communities Need a Purpose Bigger Than Building Community
A few years ago, I penned what I believe is still one of the most concise and clear definitions of social business: While the original publication of the definition received a lot of positive feedback, a few readers of the Socious online community blog took...
The First Five Places to Look to Increase Online Community Engagement
By now, you’re well aware how important ongoing engagement is to the success of your online customer or member community. Without active conversations in your discussion forums or dedicated readers for your content, your entire online community management strategy falls flat. An active and engaged...
Steal This Simple Way to Cement Your Online Community’s Success Before You Launch It
Launching a private online community for customers, members, employees, or partners is a big undertaking and you want to make sure all your hard work pays off. However, in the excitement of the planning and launch process, it’s not uncommon for companies to get...
How to Improve Customer Satisfaction By Getting More Customers to Trust You
It’s no secret that Socious runs many of its marketing programs and blog on the HubSpot platform. We use their marketing and sales tools extensively and I’ve personally been using their platform for over four years. That’s why I was especially excited about some...
Why Creating an Online Customer Community is the Ultimate Post-Sale Inbound Strategy
At this point, you’re probably tired of hearing about inbound strategies. However, there’s a reason inbound marketing, sales, and customer communication has changed the way people do business. There’s a reason they’re so popular. Quite simply, they work. We’re guessing the majority of information you…
Creating a Customer Community: 5 Questions That Scare the Heck Out of People
In most cases, when businesses start down the path toward creating an online customer community, they’re doing it for the first time. Compared to other business strategies, relatively few people have developed online community strategies, managed a community, or actively tried to increase engagement...
How to Improve Customer Retention By Increasing the Value Customers Get From Your Products
A lot of factors go into keeping your customers. Especially in the case of B2B companies, customer retention can be a complex challenge. However, despite its intricacies, reducing your retention rates can have a significant effect on your profits. Research has shown that reducing customer...
Customer Experience: Are You Addressing These 12 Critical Points?
Customer experience. It’s the new buzzword on the tip of everyone’s tongue—and not without good reason. The Customers 2020 Report claims that by the year 2020, experience will expand its lead over price and product as the key brand differentiator. However, “creating a better customer...
8 Questions in Customers’ Heads That Impact Customer Retention
By now, you know how importantcustomer retention can be to the future of your business. You know that acquiring new customers costs five times as much as retaining the customers you currently have. You’ve probably seen research suggesting that improving your customer churn by...
How to Increase Online Community Engagement with Better Calls-to-Action
The foundation of your online customer community is value. It is the value of the information, discussions, and connections that turn an initial visit to the community into a habit. It is things that are important to your community members and worth their time...
How to Generate Compelling Content Ideas for Your Online Customer or Member Community [Infographic]
When your private online customer or member community is in its early stages, you have to rely heavily on content as the driving force that brings people in. Your online community is not just competing against other communities and social spaces, but other priorities as...
Why People Contribute in Private Online Communities [Engagement Tips]
People have lots of outlets and opportunities to “talk” online. There’s no shortage of large social networks out there to soak up their attention. Yet, despite having so many options, people still participate heavily in private online customer or member communities. Often, they simply need...
Don’t Let Bad Email Subject Lines Hurt Online Community Engagement
If your branded online community is like most others out there, the majority of your members probably don’t check it every day. Unlike their public social network accounts that they check multiple times a day, your branded online customer or member community is more...
How to Increase Engagement By Featuring Members in Your Private Online Community
There are a host of reasons why members join private online communities. They’re likely looking to capitalize on a specific value proposition that your community has to offer—unique content, access to resources, networking ability, etc. However, joining a community and participating in a community are...
How to Increase Customer Engagement in Your Online Community: 6 Lessons from the World...
It’s hard not to get caught up in an international event like the World Cup. There’s an innate sense of camaraderie that seems inevitable when, suddenly, we all have an entire country to root for. No longer are our sports allegiances divided by state,...
The Ultimate Guide to Public Social Networks vs. Private Online Communities
Social networks, social business, social media, social strategy, and social communities. After a while these terms become blended within an organization, especially for those people who don’t focus on these tools and strategies every day. One of the largest areas of confusion is the difference...
The Evolution of Customer Engagement: Where is Your Business?
The information age has changed a lot about the way we do things. Companies are marketing products differently, consumers are shopping for those solutions differently, and customer engagement has become more important than ever. Not only does increased engagement help build stronger “relationships” with your...
Growing an Online Community: 8 Ways to Super-Charge Engagement
Building community online can have a big impact on your ability to maintain strong relationships with customers or members. Your organization can then leverage those relationships to achieve a variety of business outcomes – ranging from increasing customer retention and developing customer advocates to...