How to supercharge your company’s customer marketing with ChurnZero

Customer success and marketing share common goals, especially if your company is one of the 61 percent of SaaS organizations with a dedicated customer marketing function to drive expansion, retention and advocacy.

And, although it doesn’t always come easily, great things happen when marketing and CS unite.

As ChurnZero’s first customer marketing manager, I should know. I’m fortunate to hold this role in a company recognized for its customer-centricity, in which alignment between CS and marketing started strong and is going from strength to strength.

I’m also fortunate to have my own set of keys to our CX team’s customer success platform, ChurnZero (did you guess?) which enables reach and targeting that most customer marketers only dream about.

Let’s dig into three ways ChurnZero can change the game for your customer marketing team, and help marketing and CS join forces to drive more expansion, retention and customer loyalty.

1: Data-driven personas bring hyper-relevance to customer marketing campaigns.

Relevance is your marketing team’s north star. Prospective customers expect it, which is why your marketing team spends a ton of time and resources to build detailed personas of prospect segments, what they need, and how to reach them.

For customer marketers, it’s an even tougher audience. Your current customers are a smaller group, but, they expect a higher magnitude of relevance because of it. Sure, you can likely get away with an “oops” here or there with a friendly audience – although, it’s likely to introduce confusion. However, if a customer is already unhappy, they won’t hesitate to call your company out over a mistimed offer or a message that contradicts what they’re hearing from your CS team.

For customer marketing’s needs, traditional personas are too broad and static, with way too much guesswork. That’s where the value of real-time customer data, that can be sliced and segmented a hundred different ways in a platform like ChurnZero, comes in.

ChurnZero natively integrates with over 60 of the most popular business applications and can ingest data from any other source in your tech stack, constantly collecting data in one centralized platform that you’d need ten different logins to capture otherwise. As your CS team’s platform of record, they’re tasked with keeping this data up to date too. With ChurnZero, you have unparalleled access to data about your customers that you can use to create better baseline personas, plus very specific personas for any use case. Without any imports, exports, pivot tables, or excel cross-referencing, I can build customer marketing personas and campaigns in seconds.

Let me paint the picture. If I were to use the data in the marketing automation team our prospect-facing marketing teams use, I’d be limited to segmenting based on contact title, company name, and anything else we’ve managed to capture in form fills. In ChurnZero, I can instantly overlay a contact’s role as determined by CX, product usage patterns, an account’s health score, support tickets, opportunity and deal data, engagement in our community and learning management system, survey responses, and so much more.

How to introduce a new feature to your user base in a more targeted, relevant way with ChurnZero. 

When you release a product enhancement, different groups of customer contacts need to know different things about it. For example:

• Users with admin permissions need details about feature configuration.
• Day-to-day users need details on how to use the feature in their role.
• If certain product editions must upgrade to have access to this enhancement or feature, these users need benefit statements about the feature and a prompt to talk to their CSM.

At a minimum, contact role, product edition, and user-level product usage data will be crucial in ensuring your messaging is relevant to your audiences. If you’re working expansion conversations into your messaging, you’ll likely need account-level adoption stats, lifecycle stage, sentiment, and health stats too.

Here’s how that looks when you segment it into a ChurnZero playbook.

Within one workflow, I can build conditional logic that first separates out customers based on their product edition, then drill down even further to segment customers based on their contact role to ensure they’re getting the information they need. Each workflow branch can be customized with different step types, different wait times between communications, different message senders, and more.

Here’s an example of the level of detail you can put into your segmentation. Trust me: this isn’t even scratching the surface of the amount of detail I can use to tailor my segments.

2: In-app messaging gives customer marketers a new way to reach and engage.

Email is the B2B marketer’s engagement tool of choice: effective, cost-efficient, and easy to personalize and scale. Unfortunately, the average person receives 121 business emails every day, making your customers’ inboxes a battleground of competing messages that can easily be ignored.

Being able to get around all that competition is the stuff of dreams for your customer marketing team—and ChurnZero’s suite of in-app messaging features can make it happen.

Instead of interrupting customers to pull their attention towards a third-party platform, in-app messaging presents the message inside your product for customers to see when they’re working and you’re top-of-mind. ChurnZero’s in-app messaging tools open up a whole new communication frontier, allowing you to choose the best channel for each of your messages—all of which you can segment like the persona-driven campaign above. There’s also robust reporting to help you further tailor your strategies.

Three ways to get your customer marketing team’s message into the right hands with ChurnZero’s in-app messaging:  

1: WalkThroughs are multi-step guides that surface resources and guide your customer through processes in your application, targeted to specific pages so you can guide users to success without them ever leaving the app. If your primary focus is product adoption, WalkThroughs are tailor-made for you, but there are so many applications to consider:

• Show a one-step WalkThrough to POCs with buying power encouraging them to book time with their CSM (with a dynamic link, of course) about relevant upgraded features on pages you know they’re getting value from.
• If a customer hits a milestone using a certain feature, scaffold their adoption by encouraging them to move on to another sticky feature.
• Park an icon within your product interface to power on-demand guides so your customers can get what they need whenever they need it.

2: Announcements allow you to pop content up on any page of your application to grab the attention of your users.

You’re going to have content that shouldn’t live on specific pages just waiting for users to stumble upon. With a rich text editor, I can include text, GIFs and images, hyperlinks, buttons, tables, and so much more. Plus, with dynamic merge fields, I can personalize the content of each message for the viewer themselves.

3: Success Centers are centralized content hubs that allow you to park announcements, resources, and campaigns in your application to give customers one place to interact with your content.

Success Centers can be used by any team at your organization – widgets can be used for CX needs, product team messaging, marketing initiatives, customer enablement content, and more. No more digging through emails, your knowledge base, events page, or learning management system.

3: Engagement templates put customer marketing resources in your CSMs’ hands.

While your customer marketing team can expertly build campaigns to drive expansion or event attendance, they lack a way to capture these opportunities when they come up organically. Your CS team, on the other hand, encounters such opportunities constantly through customer meetings, calls and email exchanges.

ChurnZero’s capacity for creating engagement templates gives customer marketers a way to “pass the baton” to CSMs in advance, creating well-crafted but customizable marketing messages that CSMs can pick up and use when the time is right.

Did a customer just describe a challenge that your latest feature enhancement could solve? Your CSM can follow up with a templated introduction that includes benefit statements, links to more resources, FAQs and even a video, all within minutes of ending the call. Think of it as a complementary approach to marketing’s more structured campaigns—as well as a great way to meet in the middle if CX leaders don’t want to give marketers the keys to the CSP.

Three ways to use ChurnZero templates for customer marketing:

1: Event promotion: Nailing down where your customers are located can be tough, which makes promoting in-person events a challenge for your marketing team. Solution: customer marketing creates templated content snippets with registration links, event details, and more—which CSMs then send out to customers they know are in the area.

2: Expansion opportunities: While the data in your CSP is robust, there’s sometimes no rhyme or reason as to when customers become interested in a feature upgrade. Solution: marketing provides templates with benefit statements, collateral, and additional details that CSMs can drop into messages they’re already sending, such as meeting follow-ups or re-engagement campaigns.

3: “Missed” campaigns. We all know that emails get missed in customers’ crowded inboxes. Solution: templates make it easy for CSMs to follow up with the same, precise information, sent by a trusted contact who customers recognize by name.

Build a stronger collaboration between CS and marketing with ChurnZero.

In the near future, we’ll dig deeper into how CS leaders can use ChurnZero to facilitate stronger, more customer-centric partnerships with their marketing teams and other departments.

In the meantime, the examples we’ve explored are just the start of how customer marketers can apply ChurnZero to reach, target, and engage customers more effectively. If you’d like to dig deeper, here’s some further reading on ChurnZero features that can make a difference in your campaigns.

• Product usage data: what it is, and how customer-facing teams can use it.
• Tips for increasing your customers’ product adoption with ChurnZero WalkThroughs.
• Four customer engagement strategies enabled by customer success platform data.
• Post-sale email engagement: four best practices for customer-facing teams.
• A quick guide to low, mid and high-touch outreach using ChurnZero plays.