Mark: Now, on the same email theme we touched on briefly, the new member training series or whatever you want to call it. Steve's Tips or we'll call it the Training Series just so we're all on the same page. Sean: We'll find a name for it when they're all done, right. Mark: The idea there is for new members when they sign up to get an email every day for the first eight days, say. One email per section describing a key activity that they should be doing on that day and we should be essentially responding to issues that our members have brought up in the past with these emails. For instance, saving words and phrases, sometimes people can't do Jill: Not being able to get the word card. Mark: That's right. And that's one and that's why Jill maybe you can think about others. Steve: What was this issue? I don't quite understand that. Jill: People, sometimes there's pop up blockers and they just seem to happen randomly. It just started happening to me lots too and so if there's pop up blocker when you save a word or a phrase, it's a pop up and so you don't get them and so people can't save words and phrases. Steve: Right and what is the solution?
Jill: You just have to allow pop up blockers.
Steve: Oh I thought you mean disable the pop up blockers.
Jill: Yeah, yeah.
Steve: And allow pop ups.
Jill: And allow pop ups. Sorry. It's easy. It's just that I had no idea what to do until I was told so most people probably don't either. Mark: Well and it seems like more and more browsers and tool bars and Norton and Windows and everybody now has a pop up blocker and so the more stuff you install the more pop up blockers you have to disable.
Steve: So one of the messages going out would be in order to save words make sure you disable your pop up blocker.
Mark: Probably the message would be saving words and phrases and then we describe how you save a word and phrase because that's obviously very key to our system and then make sure all your pop up blockers are disabled. Sean: Or the message doesn't install so too many tool bars. Mark: That's right we can have that message as well. So, I know Sean you did one up yesterday and before you get started with a Steve's Tip and I think a Steve's Tip is good but I was thinking with these maybe targeting more specific actions as opposed to sort of, this is a general overview of using the read page. Jill: So almost kind of like a user guide.
Mark: Right. Which is what we talked about doing before but I was thinking it is probably better to have more simple targeted tasks. I mean, if we get them saving words and phrases that's big. The other functionality that's on that read page, if they are doing the saving words and phrases they can eventually get at this stuff. They'll be on long enough; they'll start to use it. Steve: Now, these are going to be in the learner's language? Mark: Yeah.
Steve: Ok, so we're best to go to stuff that's already in the help or in the manual somewhere because then it's already translated. Sean: If we can but I don't know. We haven't talked about pop up blockers in there. Mark: The next one up was the choose tip on the user guide which I think it's more focused than the one there. Sean: That's nice because it at least, as you were mentioning it said that some people don't know which one to press? I actually updated it from this end, have these circled and numbered one, two, and then red numbers one, two so you can see which one is which.
Mark: Ok, well, we can look at .
Sean: Right, try to make it more like, press this then press this.
Steve: Again, to explain perhaps to some people why we're doing this. While some people come and join and immediately start saving words and phrases and seem to figure it out and maybe these are some of the very diligent people who download manuals and read manuals but lots of people come and obviously don't understand how the site works so we're hoping that with these messages going out every day it's going to get more people figuring out how to use the site. Mark: And I think, so we can spend a little time trying to identify what are the most common customer service questions that we get, problems that we have and those are the concerns that we should address in a lot of these emails. We can add some other ones that we want to make sure people are, other things that we want to make sure people are doing but, if there are problems that we already know are out there that people ask us all the time, for sure for every guy that asks us there are three others that don't. Sean: These things come together very quickly too so if we end up making 20 different things that are common mistakes we can pick the top 8 and show them and have a link at the bottom that says you can go and see more of Steve's Tips, a whole page of them. Mark: Yeah, exactly.
Steve: When are these going to be ready?
Sean: I started on the second one today but I've been working on the other days which I'm waiting for the quotes. I need that to get that one up today.
Steve: Yes sir.
Sean: And, there was something else we were working on on the site design this morning.
Mark: Oh yeah, right.
Steve: Roughly speaking sort of next weekish?
Sean: Oh yeah easy.
Steve: Because that is, we could talk a little bit later on about this whole issue of our new member drive that we're going to do and it ties into having more help for new members. Mark: Well ideally we have this in place before that.
Steve: That's what you said, yeah. Mark: So our goal is by the end of the week or early next week this is all done and then Marius ? (5:34 2nd file) right now is building it in so that when people register they will automatically be put into this list so once they confirm to receive these they'll get these instantly. Steve: Ok.
Sean: Right, this should be able to be done by the end of tomorrow so we'll review them on Friday. Steve: Ok.
All right.
Sean: Like I said, they go together very quickly and I have already, you're user guide Tips out, so that's what I'm using as the basis for these right now and going in and selecting, doing the screen shot and highlighting the things applicable. Mark: Really what's holding us back is identifying what the topics are going to be. Jill: Exactly what you want to say.
Steve: All right. Ok, good.
Mark: So we're going to spend some time doing that and go through your emails maybe and see what people are asking. Steve: And, people for example, who might hear this podcast and who sign up with link.com, would they be receiving?
Mark: Yeah, because they're, if they sign up through the Linguist.com/english link, from English link when you listen to the podcast you go to our English link home page. If you then want to sign up for our additional learning tools you then are actually signing up for a Linguist account so anybody that signs up for any Linguist account will get these training emails.
Steve: Training emails. Ok.
And the Lesson of the Day, or do they sign up for that?
Mark: No you have to sign up for the Lesson of the Day.
Jill: Will incomplete guys also get the email?
Mark: Yeah they will.
Incomplete guys are people who leave us their personal information but don't leave us their credit card information. Steve: But they will receive the Tips?
Mark: Yeah they will.
Steve: But they won't be on the system? Mark: Because the way our system is set up we get their information then we ask for their credit card. If they don't give us their credit card we still have their information, they're still in the system but they will have to confirm in order to get these so they probably won't. I mean if you left and you get an email confirm to receive your training Tips you're probably going to say NO. Steve: Right. But some might.
Mark: Some may still and that's ok. Jill: Some will.
Sean: Then they'll see how amazing it is on the inside and say why didn't I fill in my credit card information? I mean, that relates to what you were talking about with any promotion.
Steve: Well that's right. Should we talk about that briefly?
Mark: Sure. I think we've covered this. Steve: Yeah, I mean this came out of a number of considerations. One is that we have heard from some learners that the times that are available for discussions are not that convenient and obviously it's very difficult to cater to everybody. I mean people have different schedules. So we decided that we would try to increase the number of tutors that we have.
Mark: Not just the times were inconvenient or full.
Steve: There weren't enough of them. Either there weren't enough or the subjects that they wanted to talk about where full immediately or somebody wants to have it 9 o'clock at night because they come home from work and have dinner and now they are ready to sit down and there's no times available. And, of course, our situation is if we don't have a large enough face of members we cannot have a large number of tutors. In the ideal scenario if we have thousands and thousands of learners we can offer a 24/7 with tutors in different times zones and so there are always times available. Obviously we want to try to build towards that.
So the decision we made was that we were going to increase our tutors right away even though we don't have yet perhaps as many learners as we would like to have. The second step is can we get some help from our existing learners to help bring in more people? This is quite a side from what we're doing in search engine optimization for our web site and other promotional activity that we do that's our responsibility. But if we look at our existing members we thought if each member could invite let's say three friends, three guests and those guests would be introduced by a member therefore they're serious and therefore we would no longer require that person to leave their credit card information. We would give our existing members a special coupon number so that they can invite their friends, friend could come in, doesn't have to leave any credit card information and they would get a free month full basic services. They would get their writing correction; they would get their discussion locations.
Jill: A free month?
Steve: A free month we're talking about. Mark: A free month of basic membership.
Steve: A free month of basic. No longer the two weeks with the credit card. For the person that finds us on the internet, it's the two weeks with the credit card because our experience has shown that if you don't have that credit card restriction you get a lot of not so very serious people. So we have that restriction there but if someone is introduced by an existing member then that is an endorsement and therefore those people get a month and it will be without credit card.
Now, obviously we have to increase our tutors in order to be able to cope with those people and I also suggested that anyone who does that would get one additional free discussion with Me or with Jill or with Mark or with Sean, with the tutor of their choice where they would bring their friends so they could bring one friend, two friends, three friends.
Mark: We may want to restrict that to with us because it's an opportunity for us to try and convince their friends and I think some of our other tutors aren't as familiar with our system and what we want to do and probably aren't the right people for that. Steve: Ok.
Good point.
Jill: And the person who's doing the recommending, so we're going to give a free month to the person they recommend and also to them? Steve: No.
Mark: Only if that person pays after their free month is over.
Steve: Essentially if, for every friend who comes on for the free month and then stays with the system the member who recommended that friend gets a free month of basic.
Jill: Like now.
Steve: Yeah. But if they bring three friends on and none of the friends decides to continue then they will not get a free month. So it's only for those friends that they invited who stay with the system, all right? So, I think the idea of having one additional session is again, it obviously we want our members to try and we want to help them persuade their friends to use the system so rather than just getting on a regular discussion session where it could be anybody on there and we want to talk about business or travel or pets or cooking or whatever it is, we want to have one session where essentially we talk about the system. So therefore we would have our member with one or two or three of their invitees and we would talk about the benefits of the system. So that's what we're trying to do.
