Why We Wanted to Partner with Agencies

Cloudways is serious about recruiting digital agencies and marketing agencies as new users of our web hosting platform. The Platform can be too technical for solopreneurs without a firm grasp of web hosting concepts, and it doesn’t really suit companies with the scale and expertise to fully self-manage hosting for multiple websites. So we had learned from experience that agencies are a great fit.

The Origin of the Idea

Now, we wanted to create something through which we could appeal to them directly. One ambitious idea was to establish a sector-leading partnership program for agencies. Such programs are nothing new, but we believed that there was a gap to be filled by a program that truly deserved the “partnership” label.

This would require cooperation with a number of agencies on the overall design of the program to ensure that it met their goals as well as ours.

Setting the Objectives

Our objectives were twofold: create a program that would appeal to agencies, and then market it to thousands of agencies. This would allow us to create something of actual value for our agency partners.

We build trust with agencies by showing that we care.
-Owais Khan, Marketing Manager

And so, we had a vision. This was to be a program that would let us offer more than just a web hosting platform to digital agencies. It would have an edge to it – single-mindedly pursuing accelerated agency growth for our partners.

Our enthusiasm brimmed over.

The First Attempts

The earlier iterations of the Agency Partnership Program had not prioritized input from our potential partners to the extent we ended up doing. We realized that the agencies we partnered with had to have a major say in the features of the Agency Partnership Program. After all, it was designed for them.

We used consumer insights to find out what potential partners wanted from a truly revolutionary Agency Partnership Program. The finished iteration of the Agency Partnership Program puts the needs of the customers first, and the entire program is tailored to meet the needs of our own agency customers, some of whom played an important role in the design and formation of the Program.

But creating a partner-focused Agency Program was easier said than done. Our initial attempts were rooted in our standard tech-first way of working. When those didn’t work out, we knew we needed a UX wiz on our side.

Enter Piccia

UX expert Piccia Neri of Design For Geeks is the creator of UX for Everyone – a phenomenal course that teaches the basics of UX to students. Piccia’s also a Cloudways customer and Maverick, which meant she was exactly the right person to offer us an external perspective on the program. We reached out to her, and she agreed to lead our Agency Partnership Program.

Putting the Partnership in the Agency Partnership Program

Marketing Manager Owais Khan and Agencies Community Manager Arsalan Sajid collaborated with Cloudways Maverick Brent Weaver to start gathering feedback from agency owners on what they really wanted.

To do this, the team first created a customer persona to define the target market.

Creating the right user persona

We drew on existing data on Cloudways’ agency customers, tapping into previous conversations with them on what they’d already said about the Platform’s strengths and weaknesses. Some of these customers we’d met at industry events, others we’d interviewed for blogs or interacted with in other ways. By doing this, we were able to understand what was making these owners tick, and thus, we curated our user persona.

“Gregor’s” goals, challenges, and pain points were based on our existing knowledge of agency customers. Like most of Cloudways’ existing clients, he was, to list a few traits:

• Male
• Short of time
• Highly engaged in the business that he runs
• Keen to keep growing personally and professionally.

Based on this persona, we handpicked a few agency customers and approached them directly to validate our ideas. Through interviews with them, we discovered that most of our customers were indeed interested in getting on board an Agency Partnership Program.

The Value We Extracted From Their Feedback

Our customers’ feedback offered us insight into what benefits potential partners would find valuable. Plus it helped throw Gregor into sharper relief – the more they answered questions about themselves and their agencies, the better we were able to hone our user persona and design the program around it. Oh, and it paved the way towards identifying and inviting potential founding members of the program as well.

Testing Email Messaging While Recruiting Pilot Program Members

Using our user persona and our existing customer data, we identified a pool of possible program pilot members that seemed closest to our ideal partner. Our target was to recruit a number of select pilot members from this pool.

The next question was how to attract those people to the project. We couldn’t point them towards an existing program and say, “hey, join this great program!” because there was nothing to show them yet. And we couldn’t ask them to help us start from scratch on a nebulous idea either – we couldn’t provide enough direction there. So we turned to the frustrations we’d already identified that agency customers experience.

We rolled existing solutions to three of those frustrations into a pre-pilot program and asked the prospective agencies if they’d like to be a part of things from there. The four main features that we offered were enhanced support, discounts, a dedicated account manager, and various kinds of co-marketing opportunities. And it turns out we were right on the money on those solutions – the Agency Partnership Program would go on to feature them front and center.

We split our prospects into equal groups and emailed each group either a short or long email version. The longer version had a better response rate (although the small sample size made it hard to draw any firm conclusions), so we used that message exclusively when we invited the next group of participants.

The Design Phase

By this point, we had finally reached the design phase when we were curating the user experience. User flows played a major role here: we started from a spreadsheet where we identified the various phases in the flow. This would then be translated into a visual flow.

With agencies on board and a pilot program to build on, it was time to start creating an Agency Partnership Program with benefits and tiers that truly targeted the problems faced by agency owners.

Preparing For the Launch

Along with the benefits we would offer agency partners, we also realized we had to offer them an exclusive experience. To this end, we made UI/UX changes in the Cloudways Platform for the agency partners. This included personalized messaging, improvised detailing of the real-time invoice, and an agency profile form within the Platform.

What We’ve Built So Far

As much as we hate cliches, we have to acknowledge the truth of this one: if at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again. As difficult as the process had been, the near five years we put into the program led to some spectacular gains.

We Created the Program Guide and Landing Page

Pairing up with Piccia really did pay off on the Agency Partnership Program landing page, a visual treat designed to engage with interested agency owners and draw their attention to how the program can help them out.

We also designed an 8-page long (cover and final page included) PDF guide to send prospective members. This gave us the space to expand on the most important benefits of the program, like the dedicated Partnership Manager, and important details like membership tiers. This could have gotten lost as email, or forgotten if only covered in conversation. Within 6 pages, we had all the content we’d need to convince agency owners they had to get in on the program from the ground up.

Central Resource for Content Creators

We developed a strong framework to hold together all program messaging. This majorly boiled down to aligning the messaging flowing between the PDF guide, the launch blog article, and recruitment emails to potential program members. This messaging framework formed the core of our central resource for content creators to lean on.

Developed a Waitlist

On the operational side, we put in the effort to ensure our technical support could handle the traffic the program would generate. To this end, we carefully throttled program growth; rather than growing too big to handle, we developed a waitlist that interested agencies could join and we could vet. This lets us guarantee exemplary Support experience to our founding partners. And of course, it ensured we’d have early program adopters as soon as we launched.

To announce the opening of our waitlist, we sponsored content on resources like Dribble and Digital Marketers. Oh, and we had some help from our Mavericks who actively promoted it on their channels. All of it really helped us acquire a good number of early adopters through our waiting list.

The First Special Offer for Partners

As we slowly expanded the number of pilot members in the Agency Partnership Program, we began offering exclusive benefits to demonstrate the impact of the program. The first special benefit was an hour of growth coaching with Brent Weaver. During the open coaching session, Brent would discuss the invited partner’s challenges and pain points, and propose workable solutions to those as well.

Given how Brent’s been successfully working with and coaching agency owners for years, his involvement was sure to deliver the right sort of value. We knew we could rely on the insight and expertise that Brent had gained from his experience with people like our program members (and a lot like our idealized member persona, too).

1. Guide
2. Waitlist
3. Persona
4. Framework
5. Discussions
6. Coachings

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