Ask the Experts: How To Strengthen Customer Relationships To Drive More Revenue

Do you have a strategy in place for converting your customers into loyal advocates of your brand? If so, how are you measuring those efforts? Believe it or not, there are tangible ways to gauge how likely your customers are to renew and turn into revenue-generating referral machines.

Customer marketing is about getting your customers to love your product so much that they cannot help but sing its praises to anyone who will listen. With the right strategy, gaining those raving fans is more attainable than you might think.

Customer marketing isn’t just about getting customers to say nice things. It’s about keeping them engaged and excited enough to provide valuable feedback and get them excited to try your new features. Keep reading for expert tips on using customer marketing to drive more revenue!

How Customer Marketing Improves Customer Relationships

Picture this: a business that knows exactly what you want before you even say it aloud. A business that treats you like a top priority, offering personalized experiences and rewards just for being loyal. Customer marketing is all about building these types of relationships.

Instead of hitting your audience over the head with your message, customer marketing shows empathy, resolves issues, and creates valuable content. It’s your way of showing your customers that you care. This, in turn, leads to happier customers, more repeat business, and overall growth.

Your customer marketing efforts continue to strengthen relationships with current customers to attract new ones. Strategies include sending thoughtful gifts to top accounts or creating personalized email campaigns based on customer activity with product recommendations and deals.

Customer marketing increases retention rates

Retention rates increase when customers feel valued and have a positive experience with your brand, leading to more repeat purchases and referrals. For example, Invesp found that increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95!

Customer marketing boosts revenue

Customer marketing boosts growth by encouraging loyalty, repeat business, and additional purchases. This leads to increased sales, profits, and market share.

Customer marketing improves reputation and brand awareness

Buyers trust the recommendations of family, friends, and colleagues more than any other type of advertising. Therefore, Word-of-mouth marketing is especially powerful in the B2B SaaS space, and customer marketing is one of the best ways to encourage it.

When customers receive a thoughtful gift thanking them for their business or seeing their feedback taken seriously, they leave positive reviews online and recommend the brand to their friends and family.

How To Diagnose Your Customer Relationships

You know that feeling when you’re in a long-term relationship and suddenly realize you’re not the same person you were when you first started dating? Well, constant evolution and growth happen in business relationships too.

If you want to avoid “autopilot” relationships with your customers, it’s essential to occasionally stop and examine the relationship’s health. Here’s how:

• Start by analyzing customer behaviors

Analyzing and evaluating your customer behaviors is like being an undercover detective for your business. Collecting and analyzing data on how your customers interact with your product or service can gain valuable insights into their habits and identify areas where you can improve engagement and retention.

Every data point can illuminate a customer pattern or preference, from website visits to social media engagement. Open rates, product usage, and even customer satisfaction scores can help unlock the secrets of your customer’s desires and goals.

“Don’t spend forever analyzing customer behaviors. There are hundreds of data points out there. So try to determine which ones make the most sense for your business. That will help drive you in that right direction.”  – Austin Sandmeyer, Lifecycle Marketing at Sendoso.

• Segment your customers

Imagine you’re at a party and want to talk to a group with similar interests. You wouldn’t just shout to the entire room and hope the right people hear you—that would be exhausting and ineffective. Instead, a better approach would be identifying people with similar interests, such as music tastes or hobbies.

Segmenting customers means identifying different groups based on characteristics, behaviors, and patterns. Then you’ll tailor your message and campaigns to each group. Think of it as targeting your approach to the right people versus shouting at the masses.

• Map your customer’s journey

The customer journey is a fancy term for all the points where a customer comes into contact with your company—from first finding out about you, to purchasing your product or service, to renewing. Mapping out this journey can help you figure out where to tighten your message or improve the user experience.

It takes a village. You’ll need different stakeholders from across your company to get involved. You’ll need to see where customers are dropping off, where you need to provide more education, and where you’re doing well. It’s about creating a lifecycle and highlighting those critical touchpoints.

How To Build Your Customer Marketing Strategy

You must create an effective customer marketing strategy to maximize customer retention and engagement. Taking the right steps will ensure your product is valuable, your brand is engaging, and your customers are informed.

When building a successful customer marketing program, you must take three primary steps: First, you’ll focus on educating your customers in the way they prefer to consume information; then, you’ll use advocacy programs and personalized recommendations to build a stronger connection. Finally, you’ll become the go-to source for knowledge and challenge your customers to reach their goals.

Let’s dive deeper!

Step 1: Educate

• Documentation: Trainings, Help Articles, Self-Guided or On-demand Courses

Comprehensive documentation is vital to help your customers better understand your products! Detailed documents, user guides, and step-by-step tutorials can do wonders for navigating complex features. Also, don’t underestimate the power of FAQs and knowledge-based articles to answer common questions quickly.

A great way to show software in action is through video tutorials. Organize your articles in a user-friendly structure to make learning accessible. Ultimately, helping your customer base understand your products will provide value for them and for your business.

“I see many help centers strewn with 100 thumbnails and a bunch of information all over the page. Disorganized help centers make me feel lost and confused. I usually wind up pushing off what I was trying to learn because it becomes something I have to block time for instead of just using the tool I wanted to use at that moment.” – Austin Sandmeyer, Lifecycle Marketing at Sendoso.

• Personalization: Hands-On vs. Hands-Off

When teaching your customers how to use your product, one size does not fit all! Like in a classroom where kids learn differently, your customers have varied learning styles and preferences.

Some want step-by-step guidance and a helping hand, while others like to explore and learn independently. By accommodating both groups, you can ensure everyone has a great experience while getting to know your product. After all, we want our customers to feel confident and empowered with their new knowledge!

• Timeliness: Timebound vs. Lifebound

Ensuring customers stay informed about your product is essential for building a solid relationship with them. After all, how can they stay engaged with you if they don’t know what you’re up to? In addition, your product is constantly evolving, and your customers may not always be aware of the latest updates.

“You wouldn’t have a relationship if you never communicated with your significant other. Your product is constantly changing, and maybe you know a lot about it, but that doesn’t mean your customer does! Working with your product team to develop educational resources that improve stickiness to strengthen customer relationships is critical”.  – Austin Sandmeyer, Lifecycle Marketing at Sendoso

You can use various strategies to keep your customers in the know- newsletters, blogs, social posts, and webinars. Regardless of your chosen method, ensure you’re providing valuable information that keeps your customers updated on what’s happening with your product.

Step 2: Inspire

• Showcase: Advocacy Programs, Company Highlights, Awards

It’s great to know your customers are progressing, but that’s only the first step. Unfortunately, showcasing their wins can be challenging. Whether through case studies or use cases, you need to let the world know about their successes.

You can highlight your rockstar customers through advocacy programs, company highlights, or even bringing them into your all-hands meeting. It may take effort, but showing off your customers’ achievements is worth it.

Remember, no one tells your customers stories better than they do. For example, our Sendoso SuperSender advocacy program allows our star customers to share their success and promote their brand while gaining priority access to beta programs, advisory boards, and special events.

By allowing our customers to win awards and showcase their success, they also influence the direction of our product development.

• Personalization: Recommendations, Surprise + Delight

Right now, you’re sitting on a goldmine of valuable data, but it’s up to you to share it with your clients in a way that resonates with them.

One way to do this is through personalization. If you’re selling to sales leaders, for example, make sure you’re highlighting their usage, product data, and industry benchmarks.

By comparing their numbers to others in their field, you can provide targeted recommendations on improving and getting more out of your platform. With your expertise and their data, the sky’s the limit!

For example, you could send emails to customers showing changes in usage or other KPIs that will pique their curiosity and keep them logging into your platform regularly.

“Imagine receiving personalized feedback and inspiration from companies based on your data. Instead of generic emails, they send you usage reports and recommendations for improving their product. Even better, they provide suggestions for developing better email cadences and other game-changing improvements. It’s like having a personal cheerleader, encouraging you to improve and achieve greatness. And the best part? It doesn’t matter if you’re not hitting every ball out of the park yet – these personalized insights are meant to inspire you and help you reach your full potential. That type of personalization makes an impact!”  – Austin Sandmeyer, Lifecycle Marketing at Sendoso.

• Community: Super User Groups, Networking Events

“Community” has been all the rage in marketing for multiple years now, and not without good reason. Communities are fantastic tools for providing inspiration and education. From networking events to pre-customer support, your community can be an invaluable resource for connecting and growing your business.

Super users can make a massive difference in unlocking new users and integrating different tools into your workflow. So don’t hesitate to look for and leverage your super users – after all, they’re the key to creating a thriving, friendly, and trustworthy community.

Step 3: Expand

• Use Case Development: Targeting Cross-Sell Opportunities

One of the best ways to expand accounts is to ensure your customers get the most out of your product. To increase chances of upselling and loyalty, show your customers various ways they can use your solution.

Let’s say you sell project management software. Aside from the obvious uses, you can also demonstrate how it can assist the sales team in tracking leads and opportunities and how the customer service team can use it to resolve complaints.

Having your product serve multiple purposes throughout an organization makes it more “sticky,” preventing churn.

By amplifying their experience with your product, you create super fans more likely to refer you to friends and colleagues.

• In-Product: Notifications, Use Case Development

Expand your product offerings through the thoughtful and strategic use of notifications. When working on development and product, think about how push notifications, pop-ups, and presentations can help your customers get the most out of the product and generate more revenue.

Of course, bombarding your customers with constant notifications is a no-no. Still, with a bit of creativity and a good understanding of your user base, you can encourage users to upgrade to gain access to additional features.

• Challenge: Goal Development, Targets

To motivate your customers to achieve their goals with your product, you first must have clear documentation of your customer’s objectives and challenges. Next, understand what they want and where they want to go. Then, you continuously challenge them and push your customers forward.

“Both parties should think, ‘How can we get to the next promotion or hit that next level together?’ That’s the pinnacle of a true customer relationship. So, make sure you develop goals from the beginning and keep challenging them.” – Austin Sandmeyer, Lifecycle Marketing at Sendoso.

The Bottom Line

Customer marketing is your secret weapon for reliably strengthening customer relationships and predictably driving more revenue. With the right strategy, you’ll build trust, loyalty, and advocacy by providing personalized guidance and engaging customers with recognition and rewards.

You can monitor the health of your customer relationships by tracking user activity and measuring their satisfaction. Incentivize customers to refer others and offer thoughtful gifts to loyal customers with targeted messaging and content.

With the right plan in place, you can ensure that your customers remain satisfied long-term and gain value from your product – ultimately leading to bigger wins in your business!

Want to turn your customers into loyal brand advocates? Don’t miss our latest webinar, Three Ways to Strengthen Customer Relationships and Drive Revenue!