I eventually settled for “To All Photographers: Meet Statua”, which is one of the ideas that didn’t seem too stupid or repulsed me.

The thing is that I know I could’ve done something simple. Maybe something like “Statua V1.0 Released”. That’s clear, concise and communicates what the post is about: we have released a new theme called Statua. Simple. It is however also boring as hell.

We don’t do boring. It’s never been one of our brand attributes to be boring and we’re definitely not gonna start being mundane with the headlines of our blog posts either. I regularly laugh at myself for the headlines that I end up using for blog posts, because there are some really silly one’s in there. But at least they’re not boring. And some of them are even quite quirky I’d think.

Boring isn’t wrong; it’s just not us. We could easily use headlines such as “Statua V1.0 Released”, but that would very quickly make the blog seem like a very formal, technical place for advanced developers. Instead our blog is one of the cornerstones of the WooCommunity and we want it to be a fun place, where we can have valuable, interesting interactions & conversations with our users. That’s what we’re about and our attempts at quirky headlines are much better suited to our audience and achieving these goals.

Here are the ways I’ve found to make and keep WooUsers happy…

1. Be Kind

The most simple of all strategies, be kind! Sometimes back and forth communication can be tough to deal with all day. If I’ve not had the best of days it’s tough to keep being helpful. I’m sure we’ve all experienced it before, perhaps I can best equate it with trying to show your dear mom how to use Google over the phone. Or better yet, explain how to sync anything or install any app… True test of patience.

No matter what though kindness kills, and it’s a good thing. It’s not anyone’s fault that I’m in a foul mood, and often a user comes out and says they know can be a pain if they don’t understand something. I always try to give the best help I can and smile while doing it. Usually once a problem is solved we are both happy and thankful for each others patience. Using a smily face or two always helps.

2. Go The Extra Mile

When does going the extra mile ever hurt anyone? We care for our WooCommunity and often go the extra mile to leave with a satisfied customer. For example, something I often like to do is help people testing themes on our Theme Playground. Since many haven’t purchased a theme yet, they don’t have access to theme docs or support forums. When we receive emails from people struggling on the playground I will take a screenshot of the theme documentation they need and send it their way. I also try to manage every problem I can for users on the playground. Some have trouble setting up a theme, others can’t figure out a little custom css they’ve done, etc…

We’re known for great support, and the Theme Playground shows our willingness to go the extra mile and let you try our themes. I try and provide the support before they’ve even purchased a theme.

3. Be Available & Prompt

I keep our inbox, Facebook, & Twitter accounts open just about all day everyday, including during the weekends. This lets me take a quick glance and see if there is anything I can take care of while I’m doing something else Woo related. In fact I just fired off an email to Ole, while typing this. (Hi Ole!) I like to respond as quick as I can, and as we outlined in a previous post, we’re striking a balance between a quick answer and a helpful answer. I respond as quick as I can with the best answer I can. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll let you know while I find one.

The culture in the U.S. is very much centered around getting things and getting them now, I try to help alleviate the wait by being available and prompt to answer. Even if I say, “Sorry I don’t know the answer but am looking,” WooUsers seem to appreciate the honesty and transparency.

4. Be Real & Understanding

Having sympathy, empathy, or any ability that to perceive people’s emotion is something I work on every day. It’s good to be able to tell when a user is frustrated or happy. Both types of emails include a lot of caps and exclamation marks, but to tell the difference is key.

This definitely is a big deal when interacting with our WooUsers. We use tags on Twitter to show which one of us you’re talking to, we leave comments under our real names on the blog, etc… We hope this lets you get past our facade as WooThemes, even though that facade isn’t inherently bad. It’s just better to know a real person that understands is helping you with your issue or concern, and not our WooBot… I’ve found that being understanding and showing real emotion often leaves WooUsers happy, even if we couldn’t solve the problem.

5. Free Stuff

Although it’s funny, giving away free stuff always makes people happy. Sales and discounts could count under this as well. Free or discounted items are always a good way to give some thanks back to our WooUsers and make them happy. Nothing else could be said about free stuff, except people LOVE it.

I utilize these tactics everday. By themselves or combined, one of us can usually leave with a smile on our face. Hopefully though it’s both of us.

Got any idea that you think would make more of our WooUsers happy & satisfied customers? Sound off and leave a comment, I’ll consider adding it to my repertoire.

Initially we thought that it’d just be fun to share a bit of behind-the-scenes insight into the inner workings  of the WooTeam, whilst also generating some traffic to the site (this was probably our main motivation to start this up). Since the first WooVille went live though, we’ve found that the series has been a great addition to our workflow for a couple of reasons…

We hope you get to know us better. Sometimes joking about oneself is the best way to kinda be honest and share insight into who you are. And that’s what we’re attempting with WooVille: it’s not meant to be corporate, but instead it should give you an idea of who we are and how we work. We think that our customers enjoy the fact that they know who is behind the computer, the e-mails they receive, support tickets being answered and themes being released. It’s just our way of making sure we’re as personal as possible. 

We don’t want to take ourselves too seriously. Most businesses are really boring and have crappy policies which they have to follow or else. With WooVille, we’re hoping to show that we don’t take ourselves too seriously and that WooThemes is our passion before it is our jobs. We can smile and have a bucketload of fun whilst working incredibly hard; these things shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

It’s funny & light-hearted. Work tends to get a tad serious every now and again (regardless of how much you love your job) and our once-a-month discussion about the ideas for a new WooVille comic definitely does a great job at lifting the moods. Normally this is just a bit of time for joking around, talking trash and not working.

How does your business look to the outside world?

I guess that’s the question all business owners should ask them every now and again. For us it has become really important to really connect with our users and give them the opportunity to get to know is. WooThemes is a brand and whilst the  brand is not a real person, it doesn’t have to be dead.

Instead we’re really focused on doing cool things – with WooVille being a great example of this – to give our brand as much colour and depth as possible. None of this is an exact science of course, but at least nobody can accuse us of being mysterious…

We’re firm believers in using our own products, which means that exactly the same WooFramework that goes into our themes, is the one that WooThemes.com has been built on and is powered by. We believe that this best communicates our trust in the themes that we develop, and makes for a healthy marketing campaign.

Three examples of us actually using our own stuff:

• We recently hired Ryan as our new community manager and we used our jobs board (the theme is not ours, but we’ll save that for another blog), WooJobs, to advertise the position and handle the applications. We got 34 top applications in the space of 4 days and managed to hire an incredibly talented individual to the WooTeam in less than a week.
• The WooThemes Showcase has been using a slightly modified version of Snapshot (a free theme we released back in the day). The Showcase these days features almost 1500 awesome modifications of our themes and is still running strongly (probably due to the continuous improvements that has gone into the WooFramework which powers Snapshot).
• For our Express iPhone App marketing we use a modded version of our Apz theme to showcase it’s features and act as a sales tool.

There isn’t a much better testimonial than that, is there? 

“The Marketing Campaign”

Marketing campaigns often give off the wrong impression – making a company look somewhat desperate, as if it is trying too hard to sell their product/service to you, and lack the kind of conviction that a proper, personal endorsement invokes. 

When we’re putting our products out there, we want to feel confident about putting our name on the packaging, and proud of the work we’re doing. The only way for us to verify this, and to keep our checks & balances in order is to use our products in real life scenario’s as much as we can.

Another great reason for us to invest in this approach, is obviously due to the nature of our products themselves, which we market as the starting point, or the building blocks for all your new projects. It is a way we get to think like a client and the requirements they might have. We then build a better product for our customers.

Consider this our official stamp of approval on all of the things we’re releasing and creating in & around WooThemes.

It’s not just about publishing blog posts either; by admitting to a screw-up via e-mail is just as hard. If we had a choice, we’d want to be perfect in every situation, and would prefer all of our users to be oblivious to the mistakes.

Eliminating mistakes completely (as a company) is impossible and trying to contain them / keep them secret is an exercise of volatile PR. We’d rather not even try that… Instead we believe that these kind of things are better said and admitted to, than just ignored, and figuratively speaking – a layer of wallpaper stuck on to cover the crack in the wall. We have found the WooCommunity to be appreciative of our transparency in this regard.

Under Rug Swept

Richard Branson has been quoted as saying that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”. When we apply that principle in our interactions with our community / audience, we do so publicly, without trying to sweep our dirty laundry under a rug.

The best example of this would be comments on the blog: if someone complains, questions us or criticizes us about something we’ve done wrong, we just interact on that point right there & then. No need to pussyfoot around the comment; if it’s irrational and invalid, then we’ll say so too. Most companies tend to want to un-approve that comment and will (optionally) engage with the comment author privately, out of public view via e-mail.

On many occasions these interactions have actually lead to other WooThemes users joining the conversation in defense of ourselves. There’s just no better defense than having a massive clan of WooThemes users doing the debating based on their own enthusiasm and passion for what we’re doing. So much for trying to be a corporate robot, blowing your own little trumpet.

The Win

Customers love knowing what is going on and by communicating with sincere transparency, you are bound to earn the respect of your customers. Keep them updated – with the good *and* the bad news – at all times; they’re bound to support you regardless.

We’ve always believed that the mark of a great company is not how perfect they are (i.e. how well they avoid making mistakes), but instead how well they respond to making mistakes. Dealing with a supposed perfect company just makes one anxious of when the unsuspected screw-up will happen (heck, I’m a Apple fanboy, yet I probably feel this way about Apple).

If you address these issues in a sincere, transparent & objective way, you’ll also be developing a voice for your brand. Develop the right voice for your brand with these interactions and you’ll be able to leverage the respect, trust & loyalty of your customers to further grow your business.

We’ve found that our users are much better at telling us when they’re not happy with, and when we’re not doing something right, whilst the positive stuff is just silently enjoyed. This means that unless we look at things holistically, it would be easy to get a skewed view of our user perception. It is however a well-known (online) fact that people that complain, do so very loudly, whilst compliments are a tad harder to find.

Beyond our ego’s and the feel-good factor of knowing our users are happy, there’s a different challenge to this situation: the decisions we make. If we make every decision based on the “unhappy voices”, we’re probably alienating the silent, but happy majority of our users that don’t want us to make decisions that will change anything / everything. Magnus said it best recently:

And most importantly, users will tell you when they are unhappy, but not so often when they are happy. So don’t panic.

So don’t sweat it. Focus on interacting more with your happy users, and be objective about the negative feedback that you receive. Your time is much better spent proactively and on keeping the happy users even more happy; don’t ignore the negative users, but don’t let their voices and opinions run riot either.

Most marketing campaigns are focused externally and geared to market to prospective new customers. More customers = More revenue. But there’s also a much more lucrative marketing angle that you are forgetting: marketing to your existing customer base, and getting them to spend money with you again, again & again.*

Here’s some quick math:

• We have pricing points ranging from $70 to $200. Let’s say that if we take the different pricing points and calculate what the average value of a purchase is by our users, we get to an amount of $100. So if we got 10 new users, on average we’d have a revenue of $1000 (10 x the average of $100).
• Now consider that we have 40 000 registered users. If we can convince 1% of them (that’s 400 users) to make another purchase with us, we’d have generated $40 000 (400 users x the average purchase value of $100). In this way, there’s no marketing or customer acquisition costs involved; we’ve just targeted the customer base we already have.

Definitely not bad business that, right? This is potentially one of your most lucrative sales channels, yet you’re probably ignoring it in favour of growing your business and revenue by only focusing on new customer acquisition. The idea is to maximize what you have (your existing customer base) by offering them reciprocal value in the most cost-efficient way.

In our opinion, this is one of the easiest ways to grow your business without having to be a marketing genius. Just add value.

Having a brand or company voice means (this is our interpretation) that we are consistent in what we say, what we promote and the value we add across the board. I think it’s amazing that we are able to interact with existing & prospective users in such a way that has almost become expected from us, because we have associated great core values such as reliability, efficiency & uniqueness with the way we conduct our business. So when we release a new theme, you know that you can trust the quality & awesomeness thereof.

We’d also like to think that from the very beginning we’ve been very quirky & trendy in the way we’ve branded the company and how that is influenced our marketing voice. Whilst some things have changed recently, most of the things that are WOO at the core have remained consistent throughout our journey. Supposedly “simple” things like keeping visual branding consistent & WOO-ing as many things as we can, has really gone a long way in building & maintaining this WooVoice (see what I did there?).

So there are many things that we have done to develop & evolve into the brand, company & community we are today. The biggest question however is: How are you interpreting our voice?

This means that we are constantly looking at ways in which we can improve your experience over & above the purchases you have already made with us. So it’s kinda saying that you make the decision to buy X from us, but we’ll give you X + 10.

And this approach obviously has a knock-on effect: we create more loyal users who spend money with us more regularly. This is both profitable and it allows us to repeat the process of re-investing in value additions which we don’t necessarily get paid for (directly).

Try this in your business.

We get a slew of e-mails every day and most of them are our own imperfect doings (i.e. our themes do at times have bugs, user accounts are sometimes exposed to glitches, and our website isn’t always as clear as it could be). The tone in these emails normally ranges between being neutral and being negative; and we have thus learned that the only way to counter these imperfections is via truly valuing our users and giving the best possible customer service experience.

Amazing customer service manifests itself in different ways: user experience, usability, being helpful, going the extra mile, responding efficiently and quickly to a problem/query/or recommendation. There is therefore many different ways to impress your user in such a way that you can turn a neutral / negative situation into a positive marketing experience.

The bottom line is, that a customer may walk in your door being unhappy, but if you can let them leave in a happier state, you’ve “won”. There simply is no substitute in business to great customer service!

This means that we’re all refreshed and ready to rock again. We gathered some amazing ideas via all of the discussions on the trip, fueled by much Jagermeister, and we’re looking forward to roll those out in the coming months.

But first up, you can expect the release of CityGuide, which should be going out later this week. The theme is basically ready to go, and has been thoroughly beta-tested, so it’s just a matter of wrapping up the little bits & pieces and then releasing what we expect to be another hit. Thereafter we have a few more surprises (these will definitely include these two designs which we teased last week), but I’ll leave it at that…

And on the content-front, I’m hoping to expand on the idea of using your own products as a great marketing strategy soon. We will also be working on a “case study” of sorts for the Woo on the Slopes campaign, where we have a look at some positives / negatives of the trip and how those influenced sales & traffic (both of which went up btw). So you can look out for that too.

For now though, we’re just happy to be back and rocking again.

Whilst design is ultimately subjective, one thing that can’t be disputed is the fact that our designer focus has probably contributed significantly to our success. This seems to be confirmed by startup guru, Dave McClure, in a recent BusinessWeek article about the value of design to startups:

“Design and marketing aren’t just as important as engineering: They are way more important.”

So in a very techy industry (the interwebs), there seems to be a lot of room for the more design-orientated folk among us. In the past, you could probably get by if you had a superior & groundbreaking product, but these days your competition is much tougher and you need to fight for every person that gives you their attention (superb design tends to be successful in this regard).

In a recent comparison of microblogging giants, Tumblr & Posterous, the author says (about Tumblr’s popularity):

“Or, to put it another way: Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.”

Two posts on the topic and both seems to indicate that a superb design has become a competitive advantage, which may just differentiate you from your competitors (and ultimately bring you success, instead of putting that on their doorstep).

Design.

By now you can guess where we’re going with this: don’t underestimate the value that design can bring to your startup or just any project in general.

Superb design work is admittedly quite expensive, but a mediocre design, user experience & marketing campaign just won’t cut it anymore. If you haven’t been giving this enough thought & energy until now, you need to implement a more design-focused approach in your thinking & strategizing.

We’re just one of the success stories in terms of companies that has been successful with this approach and whilst I don’t think that you can’t be successful without such an approach; I do think you’re giving yourself a massive head start. Bonus for me is the fact that others seem to be convinced that you can design your way to the top.

So it’s great when we get to see, that we’ve influenced people’s perception of “Woo”; but not just the way we use it – but the word as a whole. Last night on TechCrunch, they covered a new startup called WooRank, in the comments on that post some people believed that we were behind this new startup. Pretty neat, hey?

Now this post isn’t intended to gloat, but I’d like to point out two reasons why I think we’ve had this success in “owning” the “Woo” enterprise online (if not completely, we have a massive share of the “woo” market…).

WooEverything

I don’t know whether you have noticed, but we try to use the word “Woo” in as many ways as possible in our every day activities. Since WooThemes is essentially a CamelCase word, we like to combine other words in a similar way i.e. WooTeam, instead of WooThemes Team. Similarly, we have Affiliated Woo Workers, which reinforces the “Woo” branding again.

We don’t do this to be redundant, but we do sprinkle a good few “Woo”‘s in there to reinforce our brand and make sure that it is consistent throughout most of our marketing campaigns & user interactions.

The Ninja

Another one of these elements that I think have become synonymous with our brand is the inclusion of the WooNinja (see what I did there?) as much as possible; in most cases, we’ll find a way to include the ninja and work our branding / marketing around that.

The WooNinja is at least somewhat of a novel idea and I think the way we’ve used it – and how we have made it part of our core branding – appeals to our existing & prospective users. The most important thing about the ninja’s inclusion though, is that our visual branding also stays consistent, which means that the brand as a whole can grow on people much easier (consider that people are naturally averse to regular change).

Take Away

Whilst it’s not gonna help you to “Woo” your own brand with ninja icons, consider the two points that I’ve mentioned above to build your own brand.

Proper branding is about creating a consistent, trustworthy, accessible & fun brand that will appeal to your customers and non-customers alike. And if it helps to include a little mascot to achieve that goal, then you should seriously consider doing so.

What we’ve found though is that irrespective of implementing specific strategies; it has been our persistence that has paid the biggest dividends in our growth over the last 12 – 18 months.

So what is this persistence that I’m referring to? Well, basically it’s just deciding on a plan / strategy and then sticking to your guns in executing those decisions – even if you can’t necessarily immediately see the effects of those plans. Here’s a few reasons why persistence pays off…

1. Persistence leads to improvement. By continuously working away at your ideas and building your business, The natural result of this is the fact that you’ll get better at what you’re doing, which means your products / services will improve. It also goes without saying that improved products / services are much easier to take to market…

2. People love companies that work hard. I think people actually notice a strong work ethic and in this regard, they will recognize one’s persistence. This obviously also bodes well for after-sales service, which is becoming much more important than the initial product / service that the customer purchased.

3. People like to be reminded of awesomeness. The conversation with your customers should never come to an end, as people ultimately love to be kept up to date, and essentially stay in touch with what their favourite businesses are cooking up. If you’re not gonna tell them; nobody is.

4. Staying Visual. You need to make sure that your business and marketing efforts are constantly in front of the eyes of existing & prospective customers. The more visual and accessible your brand / business is; the more likely those customers will be spending money with you.

This has most definitely worked for us and we’ll continue to tweak our approaches, try some new strategies, but ultimately stay as persistent in our execution & implementation of these. This is the only way we know how to market WooThemes and from our success and growth, we’d probably be mad to change any of that just yet…

What’s your take on this though? Do you find our persistence to be a vital cog (as this post suggests) in our marketing machine? Have you seen other companies implementing a similar approach?

The one thing that we’ve always been pretty adamant about though (with regards to the freebies we release), is that the quality of those freebies needs to be right up there. so the free themes that we have released are all top-notch themes and they include all of the functionality that our paid themes would.

Why? We want to impress you guys enough to consider signing up / purchasing the real deal, instead of just using the freebies.

And therein probably lies the art & science of releasing a freebie; you need to actually release something that is representative of your business’ excellent services & products. If your freebies look like half-assed hack jobs, then that’s going to reflect badly on your business and it’s definitely not gonna convert the freebies users to paying customers. I also think that online peeps actually see through low-quality freebies which are simply released for traffic; people simply expect better.

So to sum up this “science” of the freebie, here’s a checklist you should consider before releasing your new freebie out into the wild…

• Why are you releasing the freebie? Are you doing it just for the traffic?
• What is the quality like? Is it in line with your products & services?
• Does releasing the freebie enhance your brand & its reputation?
• Does the freebie actually matter? Will your existing & potential new users actually find value in the freebie?

We’d love to hear what you think about this… Want to rant about low quality, hack job freebies? Feel free… And if you wanted to give us feedback on any of the WooThemes freebies and your opinions on their quality that would be appreciated too.

And we believe we’ve been relatively successful, considering that our unique visitors are up 16% and pageviews, 25% from June to July. Also, if you look at the following two traffic graphs, you’ll see that the incoming traffic line is a lot flatter in July compared to June. Weekends will obviously be more quiet, but the aim is to even get visitors to your site then…

June traffic showing considerable decreases in traffic over weekends

The traffic graph for July shows a much more consistent, "flatter" line

*Yellow lines above shows the days on which we published new content.

In June, traffic on the weekend dropped about 22% (per day) in comparison to the average weekday, whilst we managed to decrease that to about 14% in July. That means we’ve already gotten a 36% improvement in just one month! Here’s how we did it…

1. Publish regular content

Seems like a silly thing to say, but most people ignore this. We’ve tried to publish content regularly during the week and then at least once over a weekend. Also – instead of publishing 2 / 3 posts on one day, we’re spacing that out to different times during the week, which means that the site is getting more clicks & pageviews on an increased amount of days.

2. Publish often

This may also seem kinda obvious, but the more fresh content you add to your site, the better your chance to improve your traffic stats. In July we published 18 new posts on the WooThemes blog, compared to the 15 in June. So whilst not a massive difference, the 3 extra posts definitely brought in additional traffic and pageviews.

3. Engage your readers

Here the aim is to ensure the reader actually comes back to the same post a few times, because they’ve left a comment and want to continue to conversation. Looking at comments on WooThemes, we managed to go from 378 comments in June to a whopping 669 in July. So assuming that increased conversation is directly related to increased pageviews, engaging content is a definite if you’re keen on getting a steady influx of traffic.

4. Be interactive

We’ve found that posts with voting polls or another element of user feedback works great, because you are involving the reader and in this way they have a kind of “stake” in the outcome of that post (meaning they might come back to check up on progress or an end-result).

5. Split posts into 2 (or more) parts

Another way of ensuring multiple pageviews from the same user, is to split posts into more than one part. Not only does this add value (since the content is more), but when the first part is very good, you’ve sold the user and you’re assured of getting that second click on the next part in the series.

This is a good recent example: We show you teasers – Part 1 & Part 2.

6. Contests & freebies

Nothing beats free stuff and it definitely has a very positive contribution to a site’s traffic. One of our recent competitions (it had two parts as well) really upped the traffic on the blog last week, whilst the icons freebie on WooCamp has gotten almost 4500 unique visitors to date.

7. Publish at appropriate times

Check where the majority of your web traffic is coming from and publish posts during work hours in those countries, not in the middle of the night, since your content then gets lost on Twitter (i.e. most people don’t check past tweets the next day). Alternatively, tweet about your content twice during different times of the day, so that all your potential users will see the tweet / link.

8. Interlinking

We’ll finish off with another rudimentary tip, but one that is often neglected. I think we’ve managed to use quite an efficient strategy now, whereby we link to content on the WooThemes blog from WooCamp and vice-versa (this would’ve been evident from above as well). You’re not also pushing your content to the reader in this way, but you’re actually providing contextual, additional value to the reader.

We’d love for you to try these out on your own websites sometime; whilst we won’t make any concrete promises, we can assure you that if these tips are executed properly, you’ll definitely see an increase in your traffic. We’d also love to hear from you with regards to ideas on how we could take this up another notch!