This post is the latest in our series on B2B marketing optimization and how to take your marketing efforts to the next level.
So far in this series on optimization, we have covered acquisition, engagement and conversion. The next few posts will cover retention and loyalty.
A key part of retention and loyalty is ensuring your customers get value from your product or service. This is the key responsibility of your account managers and/or customer success team. But, as marketing should focus on the entire customer experience, this vital aspect of customer marketing shouldn’t be forgotten.
Here are the steps you should take to use webinars in optimizing that process.
Find out the Key Stages of Your Customer Success Account Journey
To optimize customer success, you need to go to the source. Meet up with your customer success team or account managers and look at their customer success account journey. Examine each step of the journey and the processes customer success goes through to pinpoint where marketing can help. While your organization might have its own approach, typically a customer success journey will consist of the following.
1. Onboarding
Look at how customers are brought on board. What are the first steps the customer success team takes to welcome customers to your product or service to help them get value? Are they using resources, like webinars for customer success, to do this? Once you know what these steps are, you can start to figure out how to optimize them.
2. Product or Service Usage/Delivery
Evaluate how customers are using the product or service after onboarding. Ask what key steps are involved and determine what the customer success team wants customers to achieve. Then you can figure out how marketing can help encourage the customer to take the right behavior.
3. Continued Use
While it’s always important to make sure your customers start using your product or service it’s also just as critical that they continue to use it. If they do not continue to engage, any renewal or repurchase conversation will be far more challenging.
Again, as marketers, we need to ask what is it that the customer success team wants to see their customers doing, and what role marketing can take to help them achieve this.
4. Repurchase/Renewal/Upsell
This brings us to the final step: getting the customer to stay with your business and potentially adding on to what they already have. To assist customer success with this process, it’s good to know how and when these conversations about renewals, repurchases or upsells happen. What messages does customer success want to deliver?
It’s also helpful to know what kind of information marketing can provide to customer success, such as engagement data and usage, which enables customer success to tailor their conversations with customers in the right direction.
Identify the Metrics to Measure, Test and Improve
This leads us to metrics and the data marketers can provide to customer success across each stage of the customer success account journey.
These metrics will vary across companies and products, but they may include adoption actions used in the onboarding stage of the journey, the number of active seats, or how many logins have happened over a period of time, giving customer success an idea of how much usage is occurring.
Metrics are essential to customer success for two reasons. First off, metrics help to identify customers that are at risk of churn so that steps can be taken in order to avoid that from occurring.
Second, the metrics can also reveal those customers that are doing well with the product or service, leading to upselling opportunities, or which customers could become brand advocates.
Identify Webinars That Could Address Metrics and Customer Success Stages
The next step for marketers is to identify what webinars can help to address these metrics and as well as optimize the stages throughout the customer success journey.
For example, if the goal is to increase the number of customers using the service/product, look at what webinars or campaigns marketing can create to improve the active user metrics.
Create and Record These Webinars
You’ve identified and prioritized what metrics you need to address. Now, it’s time to create webinars for customer success and focus on what outcome you hope to achieve.
If your goal is to optimize continued use, for example, a webinar educating users on more advanced features of the product/service may encourage them to put these features to use.
Make These Webinars Always-On and Enable Your Customer Success Team in Delivery
Lastly, make sure your webinar for customer success is available to your customer success team and that they are always on for consumption. While marketing may decide to use these webinars for customer success for broader marketing purposes, if the customer success team is aware of and has access to these resources, they can also use them in their own interactions.
Always-on webinars provide continuous access to informative content, allowing customers to access information when and where it’s most convenient for them.
To hear a real-world example of how webinars can scale your customer success efforts, tune in to listen to Securly’s Guide to Scaling Customer Success Through Digital Engagement.
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