It’s no secret that marketing requires a thorough understanding of your customer. The more you know about your customer, the better you’ll be able to sell to them and establish long-term relationships with them.
But that’s easier said than done for us marketers. Marketers rarely address a lead, prospect, or customer directly. Instead, we rely on client data gathered across the organisation.
How can you improve your consumer data access, understanding, and use? Begin by collaborating with your customer success team.
Why should customer success and marketing be linked?
We discuss a lot about the alignment between marketing and customer success teams. The sales cycle should be followed by marketing initiatives. However, we rarely discuss what happens once the deal is completed. The account is now assigned to a dedicated account manager or customer success manager.
Building ties with customer success managers is in marketers’ best interests. Their intimate consumer relationships provide them with unique insights that help them improve their marketing.
Customer success can provide a variety of useful insights, including:
Improved customer visibility
Customer data can reveal trends and patterns, but there are occasions when you need more information. Customer success managers can help you improve your data by answering qualitative questions about your consumers. Customer success managers have conversations with users to learn about their habits and how they evolve over time. These customer connection facts can aid marketers in telling a more complete customer story.
Share customer feedback
Customer data that is robust is excellent, but it is only historical. We have no idea what the consumer experience is like at any given time. In near real-time, customer success managers can tell you how your consumers feel about a new feature, a pricing adjustment, or even a global event.
Improved customer profile
With this qualitative and real-time data, you can improve your consumer profiles. Customer success managers can also offer input on these profiles in order to improve their accuracy.
Customer success data is used to evaluate marketing programmes.
Marketing is typically measured in terms of revenue. Increased monthly or annual recurring revenue, or MRR and ARR, is the result of successful marketing strategies.
Similarly, customer satisfaction is measured. Because there is less customer churn when customer success is thriving, MRR and ARR rise.
Consider evaluating your marketing activities in terms of key performance indicators for customer satisfaction (KPIs). Customers who come in through a webinar, for example, may be less inclined to churn. More webinars will increase the long-term worth of your customers.
Content marketing with customer success documentation
Content marketers are customer success managers. They create resources to help clients get the most out of your product. Usually, they are ‘help’ or ‘support’ articles, although films, walkthroughs, and webinars are also available. They have access to fantastic customer profiles and stories as well.
What’s the issue? These pieces are rarely found on a company’s primary marketing website. They’re on a help or support subdomain at best. They are, at worst, PDFs shared privately with customers.
Why should these important documents be concealed under a bushel basket? They serve as a resource for clients and are frequently SEO-friendly.
Repurpose this content for your blog or marketing website. Rework and rewrite the content if it doesn’t satisfy your marketing criteria.
How can customer success help with marketing?
The majority of marketing activities are aimed at acquiring customers. However, once your customer success and marketing teams are aligned, you may move some effort to customer marketing.
So, what exactly is customer marketing?
Customer marketing is focused on retention rather than acquisition. This implies that you design marketing campaigns for present consumers rather than potential customers. It includes lowering churn as well as upselling and upgrading.
Customer marketing requires coordination between marketing, sales, account management, and customer success teams.
If a specific position, such as a customer marketing manager, is created, that individual will report to both marketing and customer success.
Customer success can boost customer marketing in three ways.
They can generate new concepts.
If a consumer requires assistance, they are likely to contact their personal success manager. A new tutorial, video, or support document may be requested by customers. Marketers will have a direct route to useful content ideas if they have a close relationship with customer success.
They have the ability to gather qualitative client feedback.
Was your latest email campaign beneficial or irritating? A customer success manager might call a consumer immediately away and inquire about their experience. Marketers don’t need to work in the dark or wait for survey results to see how effective their efforts are.
They can recognise customer champions.
A strong strategy to both recruit and keep clients is to have an advocate who goes to bat for you. Customer success may discover and develop advocates so that marketing can best position them to engage new and existing customers.
Is it necessary to have a customer marketing team?
How do you recognise when it’s time to refocus your marketing efforts on your customers? When determining whether or not to recruit a customer marketing team, use this checklist as a guide.
- You have a fully staffed acquisition marketing and customer service department.
- You’ve met your new MRR or ARR targets.
- Customer churn is a significant issue.
- Upgrade and upsell opportunities are plentiful.
How to work and connect with customers who are successful
The most difficult aspect of aligning teams is aligning communication and collaboration channels.
Project management systems geared at task completion are commonly utilised by marketing teams. Customer success frequently uses a ‘ticket’ system to track important issues.
Consider the following collaboration tools and approaches to help your teams merge smoothly:
CRM (customer relationship management) software
Customer success and marketing should both be addressed by your CRM. A unified CRM (like RisePath CRM) should have project management features, as well as the ability to organise and centralise customer data and see how marketing influences customer metrics.
Internal chat or Slack
Chatting is essential for building team rapport, especially in remote or hybrid situations. To openly communicate opinions and ideas, create a separate marketing/CS channel. This will make your team members feel more at ease when working together.
Combined meetings
Nobody wants to schedule another Zoom meeting. Weekly stand-ups or report-outs, on the other hand, are how we keep track of what’s going on at work. Consider appointing a ‘ambassador’ from each team to attend the weekly meeting of the other. This will provide insight into the teams without contributing to the meeting weariness.
Conclusion
There are no drawbacks to increased team collaboration and alignment. Our contacts with customer success teams have enriched our expertise and led to improved business outcomes as a marketer across industries. Customer retention and revenue are almost certain to increase when customer success and marketing collaborate closely.
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