Marketing to your existing Customer Base is critical. It’s probably the most important Marketing Campaign you should create early. Here’s a quick overview of what you should optimize for, how to build your program and what to watch out for.
Customer Nurture Outcomes
The outcomes that a comprehensive, well-executed Customer Nurture program can drive are significant, and include at least the following:
1. Referrals
Use nurture to promote incentives such as automated offers like “give 10% off, get 10% off”.
2. Customer interviews, testimonials and quotes
3. Product reviews
Nurture campaigns should drive product reviews on sites like G2 Crowd, Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp.
4. Participation in online forums
Applaud contributions to online forums and communities that discuss your solution
5. Stimulate reviews in directories
Nurture campaigns should help drive comments and reviews about your product in partner directories, marketplaces, and mobile app stores
6. Manage reference customers
Use nurture to help manage the use of your valuable reference customers who are willing to talk to prospects.
7. Run up-sell/cross-sell campaigns
Use nurture to promote new features, or customer usage patterns.
8. Increase engagement and product knowledge
Educate customers about your product to increase feature usage and engagement with your product and service.
Cautions
While you can absolutely start by implementing one of the above priorities, it’s critical to think about your customer marketing program holistically.
- Prevent the duplication of communication and don’t overload your client's inboxes
- Prioritize the tasks that are most relevant to specific groups of your client base
- Segment your customers based on the level of satisfaction, usage, and preferences to optimize the relevance of your nurture program
When to do what?
Throughout the customer journey, there are a few logical moments to provide- or ask for information. Here are some major events:
Triggers to drive above campaigns
- New customer sign-up
- Customer go-live
- Customer NPS Survey complete (and a favorable “Net Promoter Score”). This could be triggered after a product update or support call
- Renewal completed
To recap, the way to think about this is as an integrated marketing approach to our current/active customers. This includes up-sell, referral, loyalty and driving product/service usage. By having a holistic approach we can make sure to balance the gives/gets we put on the various contacts within these clients.
