Create Loyal Customers and Lifelong Brand Ambassadors by Doing This

By Mary West, Senior Manager, Success Specialist, Salesforce

When a customer buys your product, you’re in the driver’s seat to turn them into a loyal customer and lifelong brand ambassador. And being thoughtful about how you do that can increase user adoption, likelihood to invest more, and diminish the desire to look at a competitor. In fact, according to MarTech, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits between 25% and up to 125%.

Companies have the unique opportunity to tell their clients how they can be successful with their product: how to think, what to pay attention to, what tools would enhance their results and why. Truly, it’s more revenue in the bag with very little effort.

For marketing automation users, there are three easy wins to build and maintain rapport with customers post-sales, to bring them closer to becoming a lifelong brand ambassador:

1. Create nurture programs to help a client deepen their knowledge of your product and all the ways they can use it. Maybe you start with a new user programme that walks them through getting set up for success right from the beginning: citing documentation, ways to connect with one of your team members, worksheets, or even customer success stories. Get a client excited about their relationship with you, and find ways to give them the building blocks for a successful implementation.

Some other examples of post-sales nurture programs might be:

• Guided self-implementation
• Ways to use advanced functionality
• Unpacking concepts that are commonly hard to misunderstand
• Customer stories with creative use-cases

2. Host a webinar series with customers who are using your product in a creative way. The value here is that you get to encourage a client who is already doing great work (and getting results!), have them share their use case to inspire other users, and invite them to do a Q&A session at the end so people can dialog and engage with each other on the call. We can’t all be experts in how a client could be best using your product, so why not pull from a wider range of resources that could inspire out-of-the-box ways?

For Pardot users, all you need are a few things to make this a success:

• A webinar connector to sync attendees into Pardot (like GoToWebinar)
• A few customers willing to show off their efforts and related success
• An email invite and list of potential attendees (could be comprised of those in a similar industry or company size)
• A public calendar where those not on the invite list can find your webinar and register
• A follow-up email to thank attendees for joining, including a recording of the session or a .pdf of the content
• A social post with the trackable .pdf to be shared with social networks

From there, you can build a library of success stories and use cases, and organise them based on geography, industry, company size, goal, problem they were solving, etc. Its a way for you to capitalise on your customer’s successes, and make that success tangible for your other clients.

3. Host office hours with existing customers. Customers are always chomping at the bit to connect with technical experts at a company, so why not give them some access? Grab some of your top customer services folks and let customers sign into an office hour (when its convenient for them) and ask the specialists some questions. This gives the client a way to process an idea or goal with someone who can actually tell them not only if it will work, but what the pitfalls will be. They might even offer a way to make the client’s idea better.

Collecting questions in advance (either through a form or a Chatter thread) can also allow your specialists to show up prepared and thoughtful in their responses, armed with resources, and also make it easy to follow up with a client if there wasn’t time to get to their question. This is a powerful stride in building long-term rapport with your customers and helping them see that you’re passionate about their long-term success. This also has the added bonus of alleviating support volume.

In a Nutshell 

So while you’re setting goals for the upcoming quarter or for the next year, don’t neglect the post-sale opportunities you have to drive more revenue, develop lifelong brand ambassadors, cut down on support volume, and tell your customers how they can make more of their experience with you. Pardot makes all of these tasks easy to accomplish so that you can continue to try new things and build a better business.

Article first appeared on the Salesforce Pardot blog.

Curious to know more about Pardot? E-mail us or call us at 03-7885 9720 and we can consult you on what may work best for your business.

Lava is an authorised Salesforce Partner in Malaysia and has more than a decade of experience in cloud solutions which includes marketing automation, CRM implementation, change management, and consultation. We pride ourselves in not just being a CRM partner but in also understanding the needs of our customers and taking their business to the next level.