After you make a sale on Candid, you will receive an email that contains the name, email and phone number for your new customer.
This email also tells you how much money you have earned and will continue to receive as long as this customer stays subscribed. Exciting times!
To make sure your customer has a good initial experience with you, it’s important you send them a welcome message on on the app you are using as soon as possible. It’s up to you to send this message manually, Candid will not send it for you.
Your welcome message should contain:
- A friendly hello
- Introduce yourself and thank them for purchasing your product (mention the product name) so they know why they are receiving your message
- State what communication formats you allow in the app (text, images, videos, audios, live calls)
- What words/language you don’t allow (no hate speech, personal attacks, discrimination, banned topics etc)
- How and when you will reply
- Explain how your product works (more on this coming up)
Let’s take a deeper look at these questions and some other criteria you may want to clarify to help avoid confusion.
If you do a good job during this ‘onboarding’ process, it will help you avoid problems in the future.
All of this happens on the app you selected when you created your Candid product (WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, etc), a private communication platform, which you control. Candid will not send any messages or manage the app for you. You have to it manually.
Protecting Your Time And Energy
It’s important to set clear expectations for how your communication with your customer will work.
This is not just for good customer service, but also to protect your time and energy.
You shouldn’t feel like you need to respond instantly to every message. You will have to experiment and train yourself how best to interact with your customers so they get value and you enjoy the experience without burning out or feeling overwhelmed.
Demand on your time is impacted by how many people you support. A group with 100 people may be overwhelming if you have to answer personally every question, however if the people in the group support each other, you may just need to show your presence now and then.
Working with three one-on-one clients is comfortable, but if you start pushing towards ten or more, you may feel more pressure.
Your product structure matters too.
You can use Candid to sell access to membership content, where you drop new training videos (if you’re a coach) or new behind the scenes videos (if you’re an influencer) to members via whichever app you prefer. Your job is to create videos, which then get distributed to the entire group on the app, not have conversations with everyone.
You can create as many Candid products as you like. You may want to experiment by breaking down your products to focus on different target markets or different topics/problems and experiment with individual, small group and/or premium content communities.
For more help regarding product structure, see our guide here.
Candid conversations should be fun and profitable, but not burn you out or consume all your attention. Finding a good balance is important.
A Checklist For Making Your Life As A Candid Creator Easier
How your Candid product is structured is up to you, but whether it’s a group or one-on-one product makes a difference.
If it’s a group, you may want to first send a private message with the welcome details and rules direct to your new customer, then bring them into the group. You don’t want to annoy all the other people in the group with a lengthy welcome message every time you get a new customer!
If you have a lot of rules to explain, you should keep the welcome message in a separate document, like a blog post or PDF, which you can link to for new members to view. This allows you to easily update and add to the guidelines as needed, keeping all the information in one place.
We recommend to avoid confusion, you address any of the following points in your welcome message, if they are relevant for your product:
Communication Frequency
- How often can customers post messages/ask questions (you may want to suggest they post one question at a time, then wait for an answer before asking more)
- How often you will reply and what formats you will reply with
- If you have certain windows of time when you will reply (hours of the day, days of the week, etc)
- For one-on-one live calls, how to schedule these with you and how many they can do each month
At first you may not be sure of a good cadence for interacting with your Candid customers.
Some creators like to set a specific time, for example, at 1pm each day they will reply and post to the app, then again the next day (not including weekends).
Other creators enjoy the back-and-forth discussions that can occur in short bursts over text or audio messages at random. You may interact for half an hour to complete a discussion, then not communicate again for several days.
Don’t turn into a slave to your app notifications. Don’t reply instantly to every message, or you will train your customers to think you are always standing by. Then they get upset when you take more than 24 hours to reply!
Encouraging Participation
- Invite new customers to post an introduction so you (and other members if a group) can learn about them (you may want to provide a guide on how to write an introduction)
- Set a series of questions that all new members need to answer
- Provide a checklist/intake form for new members to complete so you learn more about them
- Encourage participation by suggesting what questions/topics they can discuss
- Give members homework/tasks and ask them to report back results
- Ask new members what their goals are, what do they hope to get from access to you/your product
Too much discussion can be a nice problem to have. It means people are getting value and will keep paying their subscription fee.
What can be a big problem is not enough discussion or no questions being asked at all. There’s nothing worse than a dead chat group.
Customers who sign up and then don’t use what they pay for will not keep paying for long.
You may need to be proactive, asking questions of individuals or to the entire group, post update videos or drop audios that ask questions — keep the content coming and stimulate discussion.
In coaching and consulting products, you should hold your clients accountable. Stipulate actions they need to complete and give them deadlines.
In fan-interactions, focus on fun and connection. Give your followers what they want most — insights into your life that they can’t find elsewhere. Get personal, treat your customers like close friends and they will never cancel their subscription.
You Make The Rules, Don’t Be Afraid To Enforce Them
- Set clear rules about topics that are allowed to be discussed, and those that are not
- Be very specific about breaking rules that lead to cancellation (hate speech, racism, personal attacks, illegal activities, etc)
- If people break the rules, don’t be afraid to cancel their account and remove them from the app
- Reserve the right to cancel any customer’s subscription for any reason
- Give instructions on how to cancel subscriptions and request refunds (these actions should be completed in Candid)
Candid has a General Terms of Service, a Creators Terms of Service and Privacy Policy that all Creators must follow. These only apply to the Candid website. Each app has their own terms of service, so be sure to adhere to them.
You should set up your own product-specific rules and provide them to all new members when they connect with you via the app you choose to use. You can be as strict as you think you need to be, allowing people to have two or three strikes and you’re out policy, or simply boot and ban people if they break the rules once.
Each app gives you controls to block any number or account. You can also remove people from app groups that you created.
Don’t be afraid to cancel and refund annoying customers. One bad apple can ruin your day and also ruin your groups, causing other members to cancel.
Change As You Learn
How you structure your products will change as you learn more about your customers and yourself.
Apps like WhatsApp, Telegram and Viber facilitate very personal connections, so it’s important you manage your time and energy well. You want to give your customers a first-class experience so they keep paying their subscription fees, but you also want to maintain your happiness as you do so.
Don’t feel you have to create everything mentioned in this guide immediately. Start with a basic welcome message/onboarding experience with instructions and simple rules, and then expand from there.
You can add more rules and structure as situations arise and you get more customers.
Candid products can be modified, or you can delete them and replace them with new products if you want to start from scratch again. You can adjust the price, switch between one-on-one and groups, change the title, description and how/what you deliver.
Bear in mind if you do change the price, any active paying customers will still pay the old price and you should continue to support them. If you do not intend to, or you are changing your product and the existing customers don’t like your new format, they should have their subscriptions cancelled within Candid.
If you delete a Candid product, all active customer subscriptions will be cancelled. However, if you don’t refund the most recent payment from each customer (done through Candid), you should continue to support customers even on a deleted product until the current paid-for period ends. You can discuss this with your customers and decide what to do.
Begin With Customer Number One
All businesses start with nothing. Don’t feel obligated to create detailed welcome messages and onboarding content before launching a product.
Go out there and make sure you can get paying customers first. Get customer number one. Give them an amazing experience. See what it feels like to receive that email from Candid telling you that you made a sale.
When things grow, you can grow your systems and documentation. You may even hire a person to help you create welcome content and moderate your app conversations, so you don’t have to do it all yourself.
Candid makes it super easy to get started. A Candid product sales page takes 5 minutes to create.
You set a title (product name), description, price and upload a short video using your phone that explains what you are offering. Review your new sales page, click publish and share it with your audience.
People visit your Candid product page, click subscribe, make payment to sign up, then you connect with them via app you selected and give them welcome information. They keep paying month after month to keep their access to you and/or your premium content.
It’s that simple. Signup for Candid now.
You could test a Candid product today and have your first customers tomorrow.
From there, it’s up to you how far you take it.
Go register for your Candid account, or login if you have one already, and create your first product.
Then get busy telling your audience that you have an amazing new opportunity to communicate with you.
Good luck!
