Customer Marketing
Professor: Lindsay Thibeault

WHY IS CUSTOMER
MARKETING IMPORTANT?

…
…
Buyers used to
decide primarily on
what the company
had to say, but now
they primarily decide
based on what the
company’s customers
have to say.

It’s now shifted
to word-of-mouth.
Reviews are more important
than ever before.

Consumers are faced
with more choices.
Emerging technologies have expanded
to let people create products and
companies more easily, everyone is
competing for attention.

If you’re practicing inbound, you’re putting your
buyer in the center of your business.
You need to build a delightful end-to-end experience tailored around
your buyer's journey and every experience they have with you.

INBOUND METHODOLOGY

If you establish trust
with people, chances
are they’ll recommend
your product or
service to their friends
and family.

If your business strategy revolves around the customer,
you’ll need to have a customer success strategy that
leverages cross-department collaboration and integration.

HOW DO YOU CREATE
LASTING RELATIONSHIPS
WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS?

It costs far more money
to attract a new customer
than it does to retain an
existing customer.

Customers expect more.
They want interactions that feel more
conversational, contextual, and human.

• Listen
• Serve
• Follow up
To create lasting relationships with your
customers, you have to:

80/20
RULE
Spend 80% of the time
listening and spend
20% of the time talking.

ACKNOWLEDGE
By doing this, you’ll confirm that you
understand their needs.

EMPATHY
Use your product/service yourself to
understand and feel the customer experience.
Be in the mindset of your buyer persona.

Social media monitoring
is great for listening to
your customers in a
scalable, efficient way.

You should be measuring and tracking as many
customer interactions as you can.
Collect qualitative and quantitative data, pre- and post-sale,
using manual and automatic methods.

• Use open-ended questions
• Start questions with who, what, where, when, why, and how
• Include follow-up questions to dig deeper
Ask Customer Questions

• Listen
• Serve
• Follow up
To create lasting relationships with your
customers, you have to:

Your business’ number
one priority should be
to serve people.
If you lead by serving others,
they will serve you back.

Understanding your personas
will make it even easier to
delight your customers.
Personas can help ensure that your solutions and
recommendations are relevant and useful to your customers.

The businesses that are the
best educators will be the
most successful.

• Listen
• Serve
• Follow up
To create lasting relationships with your
customers, you have to:

When a business fails to
follow-up with a customer,
they risk losing the trust
they’ve developed.
As a marketer, you want to continue to educate
your customers just like you think about
educating your prospects.

RECIPROCITY
Responding to one positive action with another.

• Provide you the ability to collect customer data
• Help you improve your communication and customer education
• Teache you about how you can innovate
SURVEYS

People won’t remember every
interaction they had with your
organization or product, but they
will remember the overall feeling
it imprints on them.

HOW TO SOLVE FOR
CUSTOMER SUCCESS

• Increase engagement with your products/services
• Drive customer revenue through retention, cross-sell, up-sell
• Grow a community of customer advocates
Customer marketing can help:

All of the inbound
marketing best practices
for the attract and engage
stages of the inbound
methodology also apply to
the delight stage.

• Segment your customers
Ways to solve for customer success

SEGMENTATION
Breaking up your contacts into smaller
groups of similar people.

YOUR CUSTOMERS
SEGMENT

YOUR CUSTOMERS
LOCATION
SEGMENT

YOUR CUSTOMERS
LOCATION
COMPANY
SIZE
SEGMENT

YOUR CUSTOMERS
LOCATION
COMPANY
SIZE
SERVICE
TYPE
SEGMENT

YOUR CUSTOMERS
LOCATION
COMPANY
SIZE
SERVICE
TYPE
ROLE
SEGMENT

SEGMENT
YOUR CUSTOMERS

When creating segments you should
always have an end goal.

HAPPY CUSTOMERS EXTRA HELP
CUSTOMERS
ACTIVE CUSTOMERS
Goal:
Continue healthy habits
Goal:
Help customer
reach goals
Goal:
Upgrade to additional
products or services

Net promoter score (NPS)
is a good way to
determine who is a
promoter of your brand.

NET PROMOTER SCORE (NPS)
A quantified view of your customers’ relationships and
experiences with you. The better you do at creating a
valuable and enjoyable end-to-end experience for your
customers, the higher your NPS will ultimately climb.

“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you
to recommend this product to a friend?”

• Promoters: customers who answered the question with 9 or 10
“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you
to recommend this product to a friend?”

• Promoters: customers who answered the question with 9 or 10
• Passives: customers who answered the question with 7 or 8
“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you
to recommend this product to a friend?”

• Promoters: customers who answered with 9 or 10
• Passives: customers who answered with 7 or 8
• Detractors: customers who answered with 0 through 6
“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you
to recommend this product to a friend?”

• Promoters: customers who answered with 9 or 10
• Passives: customers who answered with 7 or 8
• Detractors: customers who answered with 0 through 6
• NPS = Promoter % - Detractor %
“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you
to recommend this product to a friend?”

• Segment your customers
• Provide social media support
Ways to solve for customer success

Your customer audience is different,
so be sure to engage and promote
content that is helpful to them.

You should collaborate
with the customer
support team to route
customer-related
questions, making it easy
for communications to be
handed off to the
appropriate person.

• Segment your customers
• Provide social media support
• Create customer-specific content
Ways to solve for customer success

If your company is doing
its job and helping
customers grow, then your
customers will want to
continue to grow with you.

• Source ideas from customer service
• Use real-life customer examples
• Host customer content brainstorms
CONTENT FOR CUSTOMERS

• Segment your customers
• Provide social media support
• Create customer-specific content
• Acknowledge and celebrate your customers
Ways to solve for customer success

Building a
customer loyalty program
is a key way to keep
loyal customers engaged
with your brand.

THANK YOU.