Customer marketing involves focusing your attention on people who have already purchased your products and services. The intent is to make sure they are satisfied with their purchase, since happy customers are likely to buy from you again and even recommend your brand to other consumers. Sounds pretty good for your brand, right? And yet, not everyone has hopped on the customer marketing train, as Koyne Marketing and Influitive found out when they joined forces to ask more than 200 B2B marketing executives and CEOs about their customer marketing habits. Here’s some of the information they collected with their 2017 State of Customer Marketing report.
Customer Marketing Activities
If the concept of customer marketing is new to you, learning about the most common activities may help you understand it better. According to the report by Koyne Marketing and Influitive, the three most popular activities include:
- Customer references and testimonials – 62 percent
- Customer events and user groups – 45 percent
- Newsletters – 41 percent
So those are the top ways companies reach out to customers. But the next most popular options–at 37 percent each–include:
- Advocate marketing
- Online customer communities
- Customer satisfaction/Net Promoter Score
- Cross sell/upsell campaigns
Skills and Metrics for Customer Marketing Success
If you’re wondering which customer marketing skills you need for a successful customer marketing plan, look no further, because the companies in the report ranked them in order of importance. The top five skills are:
- Relationship Building
- Communication
- Customer Service
- Digital Marketing
- Creativity
Influitive and Koyne Marketing also asked the companies which metrics they use to track their customer marketing success. The top three metrics include:
- Upsell/cross sell revenue – 22.90 percent
- Churn or renewal rate – 21.40 percent
- Customer satisfaction – 19.10 percent
Customer Marketing Satisfaction
This report found that larger companies tend to be more satisfied with their customer marketing results. In this survey, a large company has an annual revenue of over $1 billion, and the large companies surveyed here were satisfied with customer marketing 71 percent of the time. Medium companies–which make $25 million to $1 billion–said they’re happy with their results 52 percent of the time. Small companies, which make under $25 million, said they’re satisfied with their results 44 percent of the time.
Clearly, there’s room to grow when it comes to satisfaction with customer marketing results. The same goes for the impact customer marketing has on revenue, since 49 percent of companies surveyed said their customer marketing activities created moderate to significant profits for them. About 23 percent said their customer marketing plans resulted in a minor impact on their revenue, and 27 percent don’t even track the impact on revenue.
So, while nearly half of the companies in the report see a lot of value in customer marketing, over a quarter of them don’t even know how much value it offers them. Maybe once they begin tracking it, they’ll better understand its importance to their company.
How Customer Marketing Figures into the Future
Customer marketing doesn’t seem to be going away, so it’s a good idea to learn more about it if you’re not doing it already. In fact, most companies have discovered its importance and are committed to allocating more resources to ensure its success within their business.
About 66 percent said customer marketing is very important to them, and 27 percent called it somewhat important. So, it’s no surprise that about 62 percent of companies surveyed said they plan on putting more resources, such as budget and staff, toward customer marketing next year. Approximately 34 percent said their resources will remain the same, and less than 5 percent plan on decreasing them.
So, if you want to focus more on customer marketing this year, you’re in good company. Just make sure you plan ahead, track customer marketing metrics, and measure the amount of revenue you get from your efforts. You can learn more from Koyne Marketing and Influitive when you download the 2017 State of Customer Marketing report.
