What is Customer Marketing and Why Does It Matter

You probably already have a customer success department, hard at work helping your customers with their onboarding and education needs. What we’re proposing is that you take that a step further, redirecting your existing departments to focus on the same thing. Why? Because the benefits can elevate your company’s relationship with your customers to an entirely different level.

Customer Happiness Above All

Your top priority is better customer happiness — especially given that it’s five to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one, depending on your company and your industry. Any product more complicated than a toothbrush has a learning curve to go with it, and the faster your customers can learn how to use your product and integrate it into their daily lives, the better.

Every department in your company should be working in service of customer happiness. Your accounting department should make invoicing intuitive and straightforward. Your service department should focus on quick, helpful responses to questions. Your product department should be focusing on ease of use and comprehensive features. However, the essential integration with customer success comes from your marketing team.

Marketing and Customer Success

If you already have a marketing team focused on acquiring customers and you already have a customer success team focused on keeping them happy, why would you need a third team that combines the two? The answer comes down to communication.

Your marketing team is reaching out, attracting new customers with the promise of the experience they’ll have with your product. Your product is cheaper, has more features, or is easier to use than the one they currently have. It solves a problem they didn’t know they could solve.

Your customer success team’s main priority is to ensure that your customers’ experience is as positive as possible — but is it the experience the marketing team promised them? Not necessarily.

Too often, marketing and customer success teams are disconnected. They both have the same goal — the success of the company — but they’re not communicating. The marketing team brings in new leads but doesn’t pay any attention to what happens after those leads convert. The CS team is doing all the work after conversion but doesn’t know who these new customers are or where they originated.

When the CS team has to branch out into the marketing world, they’re uninformed and unprepared. They don’t know what previous campaigns have looked like, what your prospects have already heard from your marketing team, and what might resonate best with them.

In short, your customer success people aren’t marketers. They’re intelligent and thoughtful, and they specialize in one-on-one communication and hands-on instruction. But on the occasions that they have to do some marketing, like creating educational materials to send out to thousands of new customers, their skills fall short.

Customer marketing combines your marketing teams’ large-scale messaging skills with your CS teams’ insight and educational abilities in one department. Together, they’ll make powerful campaigns, bringing in exactly the right customers, enhancing their experience with your product, and convincing them to stick around and renew.

Elevating Customer Satisfaction Through Integration

The integration of marketing and customer success into a dedicated customer marketing team is a strategic move with profound implications. The driving force behind this alignment is the relentless pursuit of customer happiness, a cornerstone of sustainable business success. It’s essential to recognize that retaining existing customers is not only cost-effective but also a testament to your commitment to fulfilling promises made during acquisition.

By bridging the gap between marketing’s broad-scale messaging expertise and the one-on-one communication and instructional prowess of customer success, this unified approach creates a potent synergy. It enables your organization to attract the right customers, enrich their product experiences, and, most importantly, convince them to remain loyal and renew their engagements. Ultimately, the customer marketing team becomes the catalyst for forging enduring customer relationships and ensuring long-term success in a competitive landscape.