Influencers 101

When someone with a large following signs up for your service, you have a chance to strengthen your brand in a big way. SignupSumo, built by the community on Assembly, will send you VIP signup alerts. Here’s what to do with them:

The goal of a product team should always be providing an excellent experience for all users, not just the special ones. Giving special treatment to certain users means giving second-class treatment to other users, and it’s not a good strategy.

However, getting influencers to love your product is a great marketing strategy. It has worked for lots of successful products, and it can work for you.

Once you know that someone with a large following or some other level of influence has signed up for your product (SignupSumo handles that part for you), here are a few ideas to hook them in.

Engage

When an influence signs up for your product, reach out. It will show them you care, and it will also give you a chance to learn what brought them to your product and what they think so far.

Starting a conversation is key. It might lead to this:

Or this:

Help them spread the word

If a prominent blogger signs up for your service, don’t send an email asking her to blog about you. They hear that all day every day.

Instead, maybe share why you like her blog or a post you have feedback on. Maybe tell them a story about your product that is related to what they like to write.

An important person just started using your product — that’s a big opportunity but the focus needs to be on giving before taking.

Once you’ve started that dialogue, they’ll know where to find you when they want to spread the word.

Testimonials

When you see that Barack Obama signed up for your app, the first thing you probably want to do is plaster his face to your homepage and tell the world he uses it. Don’t. Give it time.

Social validation from familiar faces is a *great* way to tell the story of your product, but nobody wants to be the poster child for a product they started using today. Focus first on providing a great experience. When you know you’ve accomplished this, you can reach out and ask for a testimonial.

Learn

Each time a prominent person signs up for your service, you’ll come up with new ways of offering them a concierge on-boarding process to ensure a great experience. Rather than simply using this to inform the way you treat future VIPs, use it to inform the way you treat *all* of your users.

If a personal welcome email to VIPs is garnering great feedback and engaging them, then maybe you should send that personal welcome email to all new signups.

If you have any ideas for great ways to engage and leverage VIP signups, let us know: @signupsumo

Get notified when influencers sign up for your product: signupsumo.com