Grow your Business with Customer Marketing

Ghosting is a 21st-century term coined for situations where someone cuts off communication with you with little to no explanation for why. It happens in relationships in, dating, friendships and even in business. Ghosting occurs when a prospect stops responding to you at some point in the funnel in sales and marketing. Maybe you’ve been tracking them in your CRM, and you’ve noticed that they stopped engaging with your online content. Perhaps your sales rep had a conversation with them, had high hopes that they would convert and only to find out they’re no longer interested in your product. But ghosting happens to customers as well. For customers, ghosting occurs when you make a sale and then forget about them.

And there is a lot of money being left on the table because of it.

What’s Customer Marketing?

Customer marketing is all about marketing to your customers (duh!). Companies that invest heavily in their customer marketing efforts are seeing an improvement in retention, and advocates of this approach are seeing a positive impact on revenue. So how do we do it? The goal here is to ensure your customers get the most out of your products and services whilst getting the most out of your audiences.

Your current customer base is a critical tool that can help increase retention, revenue and acquire more customers.

Increase Retention

Using customer marketing helps your brand be at the forefront of your customers’ minds and reinforces your relationship with them.

Email updates

Subscribe your customers to your marketing emails to give them newsletters that focus on trends in your industry, feature upgrades and updates to your business. These emails allow your customers to feel more like a partner in your business.

Surveys

Send surveys to give your customers a voice. And provide the results to your sales, customer success, and product teams to improve on any processes and/or products you hear in the feedback.

Use good feedback as a way to create User Generated Content such as reviews, case studies and testimonials.

Customer Loyalty Surveys

Finally, create customer loyalty programs to reward your top customers with discounts or referral offers.

Increase Revenue

Whether you’re an e-commerce shop, a small "brick and mortar" boutique, or a major retail chain, you should never overlook past customers and clients as a potential source of future revenue. In fact, it’s often easier to remarket to your past clients than it is to generate new business leads.

Remarket

Reconnect with past customers or audiences to bring them back to do business with you. Remarketing is an innovative and cost-effective strategy because:

• The probability of selling to an existing customer is higher than selling to a new customer. The probability of converting an existing customer is 60% to 70%, whereas the probability of converting a new customer is only 5% to 20% (Marketing Metrics).

• Existing customers are more likely to spend more than new customers. Past customers may spend up to 67% more than new customers. (Bain)

• It costs more money to acquire new customers than to retain current customers. It can cost up to five times more to get new customers (Forrester).

Upsell

If your customer had a successful experience with you and continues to find success with the product or service provided, there are opportunities where you could upsell them on any product upgrades or service offerings.

• Make the upsell relevant to the customer’s original purchase.

• Make your upsell discounted.

• Offer new solutions to new problems your customers have.

Cross-sell

Cross-selling is about getting a customer to purchase products or services in addition to something they have already purchased or agreed to purchase. Examples include service add-ons and complementary products.

Increase Acquisition

This is the process of using your current customers to help create new customers through advocacy.

User Generated Content

If you delivered surveys, you could use that to determine who might be able to provide you a testimonial, 5-star review or case study. When it comes to a large purchase like a car, house or saas software for your business, consumers will be influenced by what their peers say.

Online Communities

Create online communities for your product where customers can interact and potentially help solve each other’s problems or suggest other products or services your company provides.

Social Listening/ Social Monitoring

Use listening tools like Later or Sprout Social to understand your brand positioning and get insights on your audience — infinity and where they’re consuming your content.

Don’t Ghost Your Customers

Be the marketing hero your CEO and your sales teams wish they had. Customer service doesn’t just come from success and account reps, it comes from the entire company, top to bottom. Marketing has the unique opportunity to help influence your customers’ next move. Not to mention, this type of marketing is cost-effective.

As a business, your role is to value the voice of the customer and advocate for their wants, needs, and pain points. It’s your responsibility to make them feel heard. Customer marketing is an integral part of what you must do to ensure that you stay true to this.