Customer success & customer engagement marketing
Part one.
As what I wrote for this issue is super long, I’m going to split it over two weeks. This is part one.
In a SaaS business, the customer success function could not be more important. It’s not uncommon that customer acquisition costs (CAC) are high, and also not unlikely that you won’t make a profit from a customer in their first 12 months.
But with the right customer success set up, that expensive customer could stay for years, with high profit margins over that time (lifetime value or LTV).
Without customer success, we’d also have no case studies, no customer quotes, no ROI, no verified persona information, no product feedback, and very little profit.
Where does marketing fit into customer success? There’s two paths:
Dictating/informing customer success to keep them in line with the value proposition, and general positioning of the product
Learning what obstacles they’re facing with customers, and finding scalable solutions (within the skillset of a marketing team) to fix those problems
We’re focusing on the latter today. There’s already a bunch of repetitive functions that overlap between customer success and lead nurturing. Automated email flows can prep a customer for predictable events like a contract renewal, onboarding, and offboarding. Manual emails (and other channels like text messages or social) can also be really effective for upsell campaigns, newsletters, community building, product comms, and other misc things like company announcements.
Customer success campaigns can range pretty widely;
Onboarding/welcome
Referrals
Upsells and cross sells
Price increases/changes to invoicing
Increase product engagement/usage
Product education and awareness
Driving community engagement
Events
And then within all of this, you’ve got collateral. What types of assets can you as a marketer make that serves the purpose of the campaign or stage of the customer lifecycle?
There’s also just some marketing ways of thinking that can help customer success move from being very dependent on 1:1 time between success manager and customer, to processes and automations that are personalised but not actually personal.
Contract campaigns
One of the most interesting (and challenging) types of customer campaigns I’ve worked with have always included changes to contracts or pricing.
Contracts are the lifeblood of SaaS businesses, and having customers on stable, multi-year contracts is the dream. Over time, you might have a lot of low-value customers finish their contract but not cancel, they go onto a month-to-month (or however long depending on your T&Cs) rolling contract.
Getting a large number of low-value customers back onto long term contracts can add up really quickly. This is a campaign you might want to run once or twice a year, as a kind of “bonus” win. You might offer an incentive such as a price decrease (remembering that in 2nd and 3rd years, customers are more profitable even if their contract is small), a product or package upgrade, or even a price-freeze if an increase is coming up. Remind them that they’ve already been rolling for x months, but if they come back onto a contract, there’s something in it for them.
Your finance and leadership team will LOVE this.
What makes a successful customer newsletter
The biggest mistake in a newsletter that gets sent out to customers is talking about yourself. Customers don’t really care if your CEO was on a podcast, they care about changes and improvements to the product that impacts them,
Each section in your newsletter should revolve around a resource that enables your customers to get the most out of your product, whatever it is. A good customer newsletter should be getting really high open rates - over 50%, consistently.
To get there, you need to set the expectation of what will be in your newsletter and that it will be good, every month. To get started, pick a few topics you know you’ll be able to deliver on most months (some months you won’t have any updates, and that’s fine, leave it out):
Bug fixes, product updates, upcoming maintenance
Engagement resources (more on this below)
Customer highlights or community
Upcoming events
Related reading (a mix of your own resources and 3rd party resources)
Depending on what you do, you could move this around or include other topics.
The customer highlights always go down really well, for two main reasons;
It gives the customer who was highlighted a warm and fuzzy feeling (best to reach out to them and ask if it’s ok to feature them first)
It shows other customers unique or interesting ways to use your product, from which they can take inspiration
A customer highlight can look like “[Customer name] has impressed the [your company’s name] team this month by setting a new record of [some function that your product does]”. You can always ask your customer success team what type of hype your customers enjoy hearing about themselves and use this to spark ideas.
Next week, part 2 will cover:
Engagement resources
Prepping for contract renewals ahead of time
Redirecting your career into customer engagement marketing
Update: Here’s the link to part 2!