High-fives and celebration Slack channels are common celebratory traditions of sales departments that have converted a prospect into a customer. But for marketers, a sale is merely another stepping stone in the customer lifecycle.
According to the Pareto Principle, 80 percent of a business’s revenue comes from just 20 percent of its customers. This idea is just one of the reasons marketing managers across Los Angeles are always searching for new ways to engage with current customers, drive retention and generate upsells.
The key to building customer loyalty? “Consistency throughout the journey,” said Zach Pond, vice president of ABM marketing at mobile game company MobilityWare.
Marketers at MobilityWare and Redgate Software, a company that makes digital tools for Microsoft Data Platform, said the first step to building loyalty is ensuring new customers are implementing tools quickly and seeing immediate value.
One way Redgate Software ABM manager Lindsay Gattis generates immediate value is by providing onboarding tools. After customers sign up, they have access to tutorial videos, specialized landing pages and client portals.
Once a customer is a frequent user, Pond said marketers should uses push notifications and in-app messaging to engage with customers at every step of the lifecycle.
Both Pond and Gattis said it’s important to remember that each customer is unique, and to create a personalized marketing plan directed toward each customer’s discrete challenges and needs. They suggest using tools to track which touchpoints customers respond to and adjust strategies accordingly.
After customers close with Redgate Software, Gattis said they gain access to a whole suite of onboarding tools. YouTube videos hosted through Redgate University, post-purchase landing pages and client portals help customers understand how to optimize their usage of Redgate products.
How do you adapt your marketing campaigns once a prospect becomes a customer?
Once a prospect becomes a customer, we need to make sure they are implementing our tools quickly and receiving immediate value from them. We work with our customer success marketing function to help with customer onboarding and our ABM (account-based marketing) campaigns shift toward expanding into additional teams within the same account.
Channels and tactics that have proven successful are video tutorials for client onboarding through Redgate University on YouTube, post-purchase landing pages and client portals for curated implementation resources. Follow-up email cadences continue building the relationship with the account manager.
How do you involve marketing at all touchpoints of the customer journey, and what does that look like in action?
At Redgate, the customer journey begins with “awareness,” a stage where almost all of Redgate’s marketing departments are involved. Digital marketing, demand generation, events, brand, product marketing and ABM all have a part to play. Content marketing is our main strategy at this stage, but we also run targeted pay-per-click ads, organic social media and events. We also work to strengthen our analyst relationships.
In the “interest” stage, we use similar tactics, but ABM will use even more personalized content.
In the “decision” stage, ABM works directly with the sales teams to bring the deal home with highly personalized collateral, account-specific events, and business case documents and proposals. Post-purchase, we utilize our customer success marketing team and we start the cycle over again.
The benefit of ABM is that we can create highly personalized campaigns.”
How do you leverage marketing campaigns to help win back previous clients?
The benefit of ABM is that we can create highly personalized campaigns specific to a client’s use case, challenges and needs. In one instance, a past client had disengaged with the account manager and started moving away from our tools. ABM ran a campaign to reinforce our value and establish our status as the enterprise standard determined by their DevOps team. We created a custom blog post, display ads and messaging sequence that emphasized standardization across teams, enterprise scalability and the value of conforming to enterprise standards. Our messaging centered around your decentralized organization is preventing you from working at scale, and that got their attention. We reengaged a technical decision-maker who was interested in standardizing usage across the organization and our efforts resulted in a significant purchase.
Pond said it is important to consider where the customer is in their journey when strategizing marketing campaigns. His job is to ensure players have an ever-evolving game experience. If there is a player who has been playing for days, marketing should push notifications about harder levels. If the customer is new, he recommends displaying the range of game options.
How do you adapt your marketing campaigns once a prospect becomes a customer?
Once we have turned a prospect into a customer, we utilize push notifications and engagement campaigns to make players aware of new in-game events, updates and special offers. Our messaging is informed by both seasonality and popular events and these elements are a key part of forming a relationship with our users. By ensuring players an ever-evolving gameplay experience, we have numerous touchpoints and opportunities for re-engagement.
It’s also important to consider where the user is in their journey.”
How do you involve marketing at all touch points of the customer journey, and what does that look like in action?
We use ads, the App Store, in-app messaging, cross-promotion and push notifications. In our space, it’s been beneficial to reinforce the game value prop in our messaging. Helping players understand how to play our diverse card and puzzle games, making sure they’ve got access to intelligent hints, and then reminding them that the goal is to ensure they have a laid-back and relaxing experience has been effective. Consistency throughout that journey has been key, but it’s also important to consider where the user is in their journey. For example, a player type who’s been in a game for several days may benefit from learning about a “hard mode” feature.
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