When you think of customer success and marketing, you may be thinking that those two areas of the business—and their related strategies—aren’t very related.
But the reality is that the entire company can benefit from having a solid customer success strategy and a customer-centric mindset. In fact, by making customer success an enterprise-wide priority, the entire company benefits—along with your customers, of course!
This is especially important given the reality that it is less costly to retain current customers than it is to acquire new ones. In other words, focusing on your customers’ success is actually a really cost-effective way to drive growth for the business as well.
So what does customer success for marketing success actually mean in practice?
Gain a more holistic understanding of your customers.
Although marketers have a lot of tools at their disposal when it comes to developing, testing, and evaluating the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, an enhanced focus on customer success can help to further illuminate their data and add more color to the usual customer metrics.
For example, customer success platforms offer a range of rich data for new and existing customers, including:
- Product usage
- Customer sentiment or the Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Overall customer health
- Supplemental stakeholder contact and preference data
Marketers can use all of this information to create more tailored outreach and targeted messages or to identify potential advocates to participate in marketing activities such as case studies, webinars, events, and more.
Proactively nurture existing and potential customers.
We all know that it is hard to shake a first impression.
However, with more connectivity between marketing and customer success teams, marketers can create more accurate expectations for future customers, making it easier for CS teams to hit their marks right off the bat.
And, once they are established customers, an effective customer success strategy allows you to build on that solid base by delivering superior experiences, proactively mitigating risk, and ensuring your customers are seeing value.
Even better for marketing teams, your customer base often contains an untapped (or not fully tapped) source of content, validation, and perhaps most importantly for marketers, stories. All of these inputs can be used to shape more effective marketing campaigns.
Identify brand ambassadors and advocates to bolster your brand.
A common tactic during the research phase is to learn about what your peers and competitors are doing. We all know how invaluable a recommendation is from a trusted friend or colleague.
Capturing customer stories, which can be shaped by your customer success platform, can be incredibly valuable across your campaigns and marketing initiatives, providing validation of your product’s strengths in the market and helping prospective clients to understand the tangible impact your product or service will have on their business.
Strengthen your ability to upsell with a more programmatic approach.
If done right, upselling can be a win-win for all those involved.
Based on your understanding of your customer’s usage patterns, you can not only identify which customer relationships are healthy but also which customers could benefit from additional services that your platform offers. While your brand benefits from the additional revenue (with a low cost of sale), your customers also gain with additional integration, productivity, and functions in a way that already matches their existing workflows and usage behaviors.
Take the next step toward enhanced marketing success.
In a time when there is increased scrutiny on budgets, being able to further tap into your brand’s existing strengths can be a force multiplier. For those that know how to leverage them, customers can be one of the most powerful ways to drive new business and increase revenue, often with lower costs of sales.
If your organization wants to learn more about how to use the power of a customer success platform and industry-leading tools to more effectively market to potential and current customers and get more bang for your marketing buck, the team at Gainsight would welcome the opportunity to speak with you.
Click here to schedule your own free personalized demo of Gainsight and, while you are at it, make sure to download our free resource, “Gainsight’s Buyer’s Guide to Customer Success Solutions.”
