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Archives for March 2011

Social media and user-generated content: TurboTax reigns in relevance

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With the rise of social media, content about a brand is a compilation of official brand messages and user-generated content — like customer reviews — that have at least equal weight in the minds of target audiences.

In this OMMA Social case study keynote, TurboTax and Dailey, TurboTax’s creative agency, show how they curated consumer content about TurboTax to benefit the client’s customer base: By sorting through millions of product reviews to find the single one that was most compelling to individual consumers, be it a review from a Facebook friend or someone with the exact same tax situation. The TurboTax reviews microsite takes user-generated content to a whole new level of relevance.

While product/service reviews are compelling, this case study shows how filtering user-generated content can make for a better outcome for users and marketers. Watch the presentation.

Social media at TurboTax

Nick Collier, SVP, Interactive Creative Director, Dailey

Christine Morrison, Social Media Marketing Manager, Intuit

Jason Simon, SVP, Director of Interactive Services, Dailey

Why use social media?

  • Get customers
  • Testing waters, engage, listen to audience

Intuit’s prior social efforts

“Tax Rap”- Vanilla Ice

  • 3rd major YouTube contest done
  • 700 entries
  • $250K budget
  • $2.8M in earned media impressions, CNN mention

Leverage Facebook status feeds

  • Post challenge to FB every few days
  • Would judge responses
  • Post the give away prizes to best answers
  • All tax-related

Social only goes so far: Lessons learned

  • Learning from “manufactured social” to form something more organic and close to the product
  • Strategy is built on listening and learning
  • Challenges that were most successful were about the product: People really cared about the topic

Friendcasting

  • Seeing what kind of sales happen when people talk about TurboTax
  • Most common thing people will say: Thank God I’m done, thank you TurboTax
  • Add Facebook status update and measure who’s using it
    • ‘Great news! My taxes are done with Turbo Tax’

Facebook link vs online advertising

  • 4x more likely to click
  • 30% more likely to buy
  • Highest percentage of new customers via link than any other digital channels

Hyper-relevant reviews on TurboTax reviews site drive higher acquisition

TurboTax has 50,000 reviews. Question is: How can reviews be most relevant?

  • Reviews engine: one of your social media friends uses and like TurboTax
  • Someone just like you ‘Like’s us
  • Or people who are just like you — Mom with 2 kids & side business — ‘Like’ us
  • See Facebook friends in banner
  • Integration and co-branding with NBC

Use reviews site experience and Facebook integration to see product reviews

  • Can sort through reviews by life changes, life situation
  • See reviews based on your self-selected filters: see 3 reviews rather than 100,000
  • Reviews are unfiltered, other than of swears and harassment
  • People who see reviews 22% more likely to buy TurboTax than those who didn’t
  • Long-term asset: Can use in competitive claims, banner ads, etc.

Takeaways

  • Take something that happens in nature and measure
  • You can trust your customers to help if you treat them right
  • Solve for customers not the platform
  • It’s not about Twitter, it’s about helping people on Twitter who are needing help

Subscription billing: Essential must do’s and paths to tread carefully

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By Alexandra Smith

Isaac Hall, CEO of Recurly, highlighted subscription billing primers and pitfalls.  Application developers and managers, should use this information to smoothly navigate your subscription billing experience.

Primers and pitfalls of subscription billing: General Information

  • Visa and Mastercard go together: You cannot accept one and not the other.
  • It’s hard to find a bank that supports a start-up; Hall recommends Silicon Valley.
  • You can get away with not accepting American Express customers; it should have little effect on your customer base.
  • Every gateway uses the Luhn Algorithm.
  • You may choose to use Javascript to check if a credit card number is valid.
  • One way to find a merchant is through Fee Fighters, where merchant accounts put bids on your business.

Safeguard your customers and sail smoothly

  • Customers in Europe will expect a PDF invoice, if you need a support app found the best pdf converter by https://www.sodapdf.com/pdf-converter/ you can search for or edit any text in converted files much like you are using a word processor. Keep in mind that their bank statements show transactions not yet settled.
  • Prevent fraud with Address Verification Service (AVS), which works very well in the U.S., or Card Verification Value (CVV), which works globally. Both prevent fraud but do not protect from charge-backs. CVV should only be used on the first transaction. You cannot legally store or encrypt a credit card number.
  • If a card fails, provide a detailed explanation for the customer. This will save everyone time. For instance: “There is a hold on the account,” or “We only accept Visa and Mastercard,” as opposed to “Your card is declined.” There are soft declines, such as insufficient funds, as well as hard declines, such as the account is closed. If customers don’t know why, they will call for support, and you’ll have to go back and forth with your bank.
  • Make it easy to reactivate a canceled subscription, and allow customers to sign up again even after their subscription has expired. Customers are indecisive and wishy-washy.
  • Have a process to follow up with declined transaction renewals.

Deep waters

  • Price your products only in U.S. currency. If you choose to price in additional currencies, the conversion rate will change month to month. Let your customers’ statements sort out the currency.
  • You may only void a transaction prior to it being settled. After a transaction is settled, you can issue a refund usually within a period of 30 or 90 days.
  • Avoid charge-backs; the process to resolve is not easy.
  • You can be liberal about providing refunds; your bank will actually think you are being responsible. However, you will look sketchy if you have a lot of charge-backs.
  • Get customers’ consent before charging them for a subscription! (Ringtones are an example of horrible non-consent based abuse of billing). Auto-subscribing without consent is against the new federal ROSCA Law.
  • Overall, be transparent so your customer doesn’t have to work hard to find out information or resolve an issue.
  • Never email or log a full credit card number.
  • If you sign up to use a gateway (such as PayPal) through a bank, you will never be able to change the bank you use as long as you are associated with that gateway.

Isaac Hall is on Twitter and is CEO of Recurly.

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