In this third and final part of a three-part series, you're going to see how everything we've learned before this comes together to really give tangible ROI to drive product adoption, humanize your community, to make the community more fully alive, ways we can see that in action, and how those things are measured. In part one, we talked about being truly human and relational and how doing that consistently will have a ripple effect throughout your community. Then in part two, we talked about a specific event format that you can use to get feedback in real time from your community in a way that makes them feel listened to and heard.
By now, it's probably a no-brainer that hosting online events that go beyond content and instead develop human relationships are going to help people spend more time with your product or service. It also helps your community to enter into more robust and interpersonal relationships that help them self-serve and support one another. New people involved with your product or service are also going to start gaining value more quickly than they would on their own because they will be able to leverage resources from past recordings and get to know people in the community by interaction and knowledge sharing. In addition, your community is going to be less scared to try new things.
For example, Airtable recently reported that they had lots of feedback about confusion with their group sorting and filtering features. New users were especially confused with understanding how those features worked and were afraid to test them out for fear of breaking everything. So they changed their software to offer new features for quick groups and quick sorting that also provided suggestions to users in order to help them be more confident and less afraid in trying it out. The only way Airtable could have possibly known to make this change is by collecting real user feedback that came through relationships they had with their customers.
Online events help you identify people that would be a good fit for these user groups or case studies. Also through them, you gain direct user feedback so you can have insights and revelations on how you can improve your product or service to keep people coming back and gaining more and more value. By engaging with people through this online event strategy, people are more likely to stay engaged and buy into the next tier of whatever it is that you're offering.
For example, in a course or coaching community, this event format will keep people engaged and trust in your authority. Remember, just because they bought something from you doesn't mean that they're going to be sticking around. Don't make that mistake. One time, I personally paid $5,000 for a coaching course community and was so confused by the software they used that I barely logged into it. Their live events were so low value that I simply stopped attending them and just did the coursework on my own. While I did still get some value out of it, I definitely didn't get the full $5,000 value. Even though I paid for it, I wasn't fully present because what they were creating in their community really didn't serve me as a user.
So well prepared and produced online events can make a huge difference and would've helped keep me personally engaged for the investment I had made and I would've likely been convinced to buy into the next offer from that coach.
Last, this event strategy is also going to help you achieve the ultimate result of all these positive elements coming together in a community that culminates in reducing churn and gaining new members. If users are getting more value out of your product or service, are less scared to try new things and more likely to buy into advanced or premium items you offer, they're guaranteed to stick around and become an engaged community member instead of another faceless user that no longer engages with your brand or service. The customer lifetime value for you and for them will increase and the value they get in return will be fantastic.
All of these things put together are going to create a vibrant, helpful, truly robust and relational community that serves not only your business, but each member can serve one another and gain value. Again, going from those faceless, flat users to really engaged and alive community members.
