Anne Janzer

Author

marketing

Why Customer Success is Marketings New Best Friend (or Should Be)

canoe

Marketing and Customer Success are like two people in a canoe. Ideally, you’re both trying to get to the same place (a successful business with happy customers). The trip is much easier when you work together well. And in choppy waters, you need to communicate or you’ll end up off course or capsized.

Many businesses are building teams dedicated to the “customer success” function. Searching for Customer Success jobs on Glassdoor today delivers hundreds of thousands of results.

If you’re in marketing, take a break from making infographics and plotting lead generation campaigns to search out people in the Customer Success role. They may be your new best friends.

What’s In It for Marketers

A successful customer is worth a hundred mediocre leads or a thousand “Likes” on social media.

  • Successful customers give your business social proof – creating credibility that originates outside of the marketing organization.
  • They refer friends and colleagues to your business, doing your lead generation and lead nurturing work for you.
  • Have a new product or feature? Successful customers are a ready-made market for your next new thing.
  • By engaging with successful customers, you can learn more about the market needs and concerns, ultimately creating more effective messages and products.

And if your business uses a subscription model, your current customers account for a large and growing percentage of revenues. It only makes sense to invest marketing efforts with existing customers.

Guess who’s engaging with those customers: customer success teams.

Customer Success has knowledge that can make marketers more effective:

  • What problems customers are really solving
  • What “good fit” and “bad fit” customers look like
  • The issues that trip people up.
  • What’s In It for Customer Success Teams

The benefits of collaboration flow both ways. Marketing messages set the expectations for the customer experience. Customer success teams that collaborate with marketing can make their own jobs easier by making sure new customers set off on the right path.

Marketing is how you do customer success at scale.

Finding Ways to Work Together

Organizational and cultural barriers may get in the way of collaboration across teams. Start with one or two well-defined projects to explore collaboration and prove its benefits. Here are a few ideas:

Audit the new customer experience together: Marketing and Customer Success teams can sit down together and walk through the new customer onboarding process. Exactly what does the customer see when signing up, or when they first use the service or buy the product? Does the experience match the implicit marketing promise? Look for any mismatches between expectations and experience and find ways to address them.

Create a launch campaign: Work together to identify and plot the first steps of successful customers, then create a customer launch campaign to support those steps. The launch plan might be a simple series of drip emails or a game with clear objectives.

Answer common questions: Customer Success teams should share frequent customer issues and questions with marketing teams and look for ways to solve them. If issues cannot be fixed in the product, marketing teams can develop videos or other materials to help the customers get started.

  • For more ideas about integrating marketing and customer success, see the third edition of Subscription Marketing.

Image by Matthew Clark on unsplash.com

Sell More Books with Less Social Media [Book Review]


 coffee social mediaAuthors face a veritable gauntlet of online book marketing advice. Deciding which strategies to follow can be overwhelming. (See last week’s post on avoiding decision fatigue when publishing your book.)

When it comes to book promotion and social media, much of the advice follows the model “this worked for me (or author x), so it should work for you as well.” You’ll read  stories of viral social media posts or Facebook ads driving thousands of email list signups.

One size most definitely does not fit all when it comes to book promotion strategy. It’s easy to waste a great deal of time, energy, and money chasing social media tactics to no avail.

That’s why I was so delighted to read the latest book from Chris Syme, Sell More Books With Less Social Media. The title alone is promising: it’s not about doing more, but about working strategically and leaving yourself time to write.

The book offers practical advice grounded in sound marketing practices. Most importantly, it helps readers (authors) create a social media strategy based on their current platform and needs.

Syme lays out three different platform maturity models for nonfiction and fiction, recognizing of course that some nonfiction genres are more of a blend of the two. You, the reader, can find your current level, and then determine which strategies will help you move to the next. By doing so, the book replaces one-size-fits-all advice with something more nuanced.

The rest of the book is filled with actionable advice on social media book marketing. She offers a free class to accompany it.

I’d recommend this book to any author wondering how to fit social media into their marketing strategies.

 

Marketing and the Subscription Economy: A Zuora Video

At the Subscribed conference in San Francisco last May, I sat down to talk with Zuora about marketing in the subscription economy. Here’s a transcript; the video is below.

In the traditional marketing environment, a lot of marketers only keep their eye on the ball up to the point of the sale. They think about customer retention, but they really focus on lead acquisition, lead nurturing and conversion.

In the subscription economy, your work is just getting started at the point of conversion. Marketing needs to remain involved long after the sale.

[About subscribers and trust]

The difference between a subscriber and a customer is that a subscriber is a long-term relationship. And the relationship needs to ultimately be built on trust if it’s going to remain long term.

That’s a different way of think about people and customers, rather than making a sale.

[Organizational barriers]

In the subscription economy, organizational boundaries can present real barriers to the customer experience. If you think about some of the well-known subscription failures – things that have gone wrong – they’re often the case of information not flowing through the organization in a way that supports the customers.

We can’t look to customer service to take care of everything with a subscription relationship. Obviously customer service is critical, and it shouldn’t be an off-to-the-side cost center. It’s part of the customer experience.

[The brand promise]

But at the same time, [customer service and customer success teams are] trying to fulfill the tail end of the brand promise. We set up the brand promise in marketing.

From the customer’s perspective, it’s one promise. It’s one brand. So it’s very important that these teams – marketing, customer success, service, sales – are all working on the same page and collaborating closely.

Tweet this: Customer Success fulfills the brand promise made by Marketing.

If you’re interested in more thoughts on the subject, check out the book Subscription Marketing.

Customer-Inspired Marketing

Sparkler Morgan SessionsYour best marketing ideas may come from outside the marketing organization – even outside the company. In the case of Pley, a simple suggestion from a busy parent resulted in a business success and many happy children.

Pley is a subscription-based service for children’s toys. In shorthand: Netflix for LEGOs.

The company does many things right when it comes to marketing its subscription business. I profiled Pley and the PleyWorld community in a recent post on the Marketo blog: 3 Ways for Marketers to Take On the Growing Subscription-Based Economy.

In this post, I want to tell the story of Pley Birthday.

Pley invites customers to give their feedback in an online forum. Better yet, the company pays attention to that feedback. One subscriber (a parent) suggested that the company send multiple sets for a birthday party. And four months later, Pley Birthday was born.

The company reaches out to loyal customers as their birthdays approach and offers a free birthday party kit for up to 15 guests.Slide1 Pley provides the online invitation workflow and sends LEGO sets, activities and goodie bags for the party.

The results are reason for celebration:

  • Customer loyalty: Happy parents continue renewing the subscription.
  • New customer acquisition: Guest goodies include a discount coupon for new subscribers, so the company can track customer growth resulting from the parties.
  • User-generated content: Many parents share pictures or video from the party on social media, creating more visibility for Pley’s service.

Are you listening?
Are you inviting and listening to customer suggestions? Do you foster an environment or community in which people believe their suggestions will be heard?

Particularly in a subscription-based business, your customers are willing to tell you what they value. It’s up to you to listen and take action.

Next steps: If you’re interested in more ways to nurture existing customers, sign up for the Subscription Marketing group. You’ll get access to a growing list of content, including a value nurturing checklist and an ebook on Customer Retention Marketing.

Image by Morgan Sessions on Stocksnap.io

What’s your True Story? (Book review)

truestory-coverDavid Meerman Scott’s New Rules of Marketing and PR came out in 2007, which seems like a lifetime ago. Now it’s a “marketing classic.” As the world continues to evolve, marketers need to be lifelong learners to stay current.

In the interests of continuous learning, I’ve been reading a wide range of books and want to share the more interesting ones here. Ty Montague’s book True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to Transform Your Business is a good place to look for marketing inspiration.

While marketers everywhere realize the importance of storytelling, Montague suggests that we take it further, committing instead to Storydoing™.

The strategy requires an organization to craft its own metastory. Doing so requires a deep understanding of the participants and the stage, as well as the business’ own capabilities. The fourth key component of the metastory is the “quest” – or the higher purpose of a company beyond simply making money.

To move from storytelling to storydoing, you need to let the metastory guide actions. The book offers illustrative stories of the theory in practice for inspiration.

The key takeaways are relevant to every marketing organization:

• Make sure you truly understand your prospects and market participants.
• Honestly assess your own capabilities and personality.
• Have a vision or purpose – and make sure it’s authentic.
• Let that purpose and story inform your messages and actions.

For another inspiring book, see the earlier post on Empowerment Marketing discussing Jonah Sach’s Winning the Story Wars.

There’s always time for messaging

Sometimes when I face a complex project, I tell the client that I’d like to create a ‘messaging map’ or messaging document to get their approval on key messages before I proceed. I often get the response “We don’t have time for that” or “Just work with what you see on our web page, the messaging is implied.”

That’s kind of like a ship’s captain saying “We don’t have time to chart a course, just start sailing and we’ll figure it out as we go.” You just might end up on the rocks.

Adding a ‘messaging’ step to a marketing content project can be a hard sell. It’s another step and another deliverable, and if you’re close to a deadline, it might seem like too much.

Experience proves that if there’s any confusion in the exact messaging, it’s much easier and faster to iron it out up front – before you’ve started writing that paper or creating that website.

The difficult discussions happen around the core messages and positioning, not how they are executed. When you can separate the messaging from the execution, your first draft will be much closer and any review cycles much smoother. Reviewers can focus on issues of tone/style, presentation, precise wording, etc.

In many ways, the less time you have, the more you need a messaging review process. But you might need help selling it to reluctant clients. Here are some suggestions for pitching the benefits of a messaging review cycle:

  • It will streamline the review cycles for the end product – probably removing one review cycle.
  • The positioning is work you (the writer) need to do anyway to develop the content well.
  • If the client thinks the messaging is already on their website, then it will be a good exercise for you to extract it and put it out for review. They may find that they’re not communicating exactly the messaging they think they are.
  • The messaging document, once in place, will streamline development of additional resources, including web pages, papers, presentations, etc. It can become part of sales training as well.

In a future post I’ll write about potential challenges in this messaging process. Use the comments if you have something to add to the discussion.