November 11, 2019 Andrew Warren-Payne
This post is the latest in our series on B2B marketing optimization and how to take your marketing efforts to the next level.
In our last post, we talked about how to optimize customer success by identifying goals within the customer success account journey which could benefit from optimization. Each stage of that journey will have its own performance indicators, but ultimately retained revenue and customer lifetime value is the goal.
However, a metric on the flipside of customer lifetime value is churn. As ON24’s CEO Sharat Sharan has said before:
These are two separate metrics, but they’re so interwoven that marketers shouldn’t think of one without the other. Customer lifetime value is the net profit you can expect from acquiring a new customer – a number that increases whenever you reduce churn.
So, how can webinars help with your optimization efforts in terms of reducing churn? Here are a few points.
1. Increase onboarding success
Reducing churn starts as soon as your customers start the onboarding process. Interactions must be optimal from the get-go, and the customer must be able to derive value from the product or service they’ve just paid for.
Webinars can help optimize the onboarding process by helping to educate your customers about your product or service. These webinars can bring the customer up to speed, show them how to use the core functionalities of your service and walk them through their first actions, whether it be setting up things like software or using the product for the first time.
Keep in mind, webinars don’t necessarily need to educate. Onboarding webinars can just as easily be used to make the customer feel welcome, to start engaging and start deriving value from the product or service.
2. Win new users to an account
In most cases, there is usually more than one user of a product or service within a company. For instance, with software, there are often a number of regular users across an entire company. So, one way to help reduce churn is to get as many people as possible on the team or within the company actively using the product or service so that they can see its value.
Once again, webinars can help with the onboarding process of new users, but they are also a useful resource in increasing adoption. Webinars can be used before onboarding as a way to answer questions such as ‘What is this?’ and ‘Why does it matter?’ They can also be used from an account-based perspective where you invite a selected group of stakeholders and answer their questions one-on-one.
3. Continually educate and update
Once onboarding is done, you’ll want to make sure your customers continue to use your product/service throughout the life of the contract. This means ensuring you are continually educating and updating your customers online on new features or new products. What better way than webinars to spread the word and make sure your customers are aware of new features and how these features will benefit them?
Additionally, companies often experience a shift in staff with employees leaving and new ones coming in. Having access to onboarding and educational webinars, thanks to the always-on feature of webinars, allows new employees to get up to speed with the product or service and learn in their own time.
4. Build lasting connections
Another way to reduce churn is to build lasting relationships with your customers. And the best way to do this is to engage with them.
Webinars, by nature, are built for interaction. Beyond the fact that webinars can be live, other functionalities like Q&A and poll questions also encourage engagement. Webinars also help you to identify people within your account you can begin to build relationships with, as high engagement will likely indicate a willingness to have conversations.
If you are at all apprehensive about whether you can create an engaging webinar, have no fear. ON24’s Webinar Best Practice Series can help you out with that.
5. Create customer advocates
Building connections leads right into the last way webinars can help reduce churn. Once you’ve made and strengthened these relationships with your clients, webinars give you the opportunity to turn them into customer advocates both within their own company and externally.
Get them involved in a webinar. A simple and low-effort way to do this is to invite them to take part in a panel discussion.
This is a win-win for both you and your client because while they are helping you out with advocacy they are also raising their profile and positioning themselves internally as an expert.
To see ON24 in action and find out how you can reduce churn with webinars, sign up for a live demo to find out more.