How marketing drives renewals and expansion

6 min read

Most companies prioritize their customer marketing campaigns by just 20%. They rely on repetitive approaches to drive demand from both prospects and customers, resulting in losses and a failure to maintain. In this article we will dive deeper into Customer Engagement Marketing, to see how it can be leveraged as a primary driver of success for B2B organizations.

What is Retention Marketing?

Marketing plays a vital role in building a strong customer-organization relationship: marketing reputation, customer communications, sales promotions, brand awareness, and boosting lead generation. Marketing aims for higher customer retention rates which lead to customer loyalty.

In the marketing world, the process of driving retention and expansion is called Retention Marketing. The process includes time-based structured promotions to end users inside target accounts to influence renewal. The aim is to build stickiness and reduce churn by creating and proving value, cultivating loyalty, and uncovering opportunities for growth.

Customer Engagement Marketing Components

There are five key components for Customer Engagement Marketing:

  • Growth opportunities - Ventures or projects that have the potential for serious development from one company to another.

  • Journey Insights – A customer gains knowledge from experience. The time to consider your post-failure and your customer’s journey.

  • Loyalty & Satisfaction - If customers are satisfied with your solutions and see the value, they tend to be loyal. Loyalty is evident when your key stakeholders and end-users recommend you to others online or during events.

  • Adoption and Utilization - When your key stakeholders find your solution helpful or beneficial, they may become long-term clients.

  • Value - The amount associated with the fees your client is willing to pay for your offered solutions.

The Benefits of Customer Engagement Marketing

Traditional perceptions dictate that Customer Success is typically focused on driving value by reaching out to key customer stakeholders, whereas Marketing has a key role to play in bringing in potential customers and forwarding these potential customers to customer success teams. As such, you may be asking yourself: Why do we need marketing’s help if we already have Customer Success managers that can reflect and fulfill the company's retention goals?

The New Marketing Funnel

Marketing can bring many potential opportunities to you and help you see potential upselling, cross-selling, renewal, and expansion. In this manner marketing helps customer success achieve higher customer retention, expansion, and revenue growth.

The New Marketing Funnel is where marketing designates teams, tools and plans, including segment-by-segment campaigns, lifecycles, upsell relevance, and expansion in order to attract customers and bring opportunities for CSMs. Through upselling and expansion, CSMs can harness that opportunity and turn those opportunities into sales. A CSM will then forward customer success qualified leads (CSQL) to a sales team member after qualifying the opportunity with the customer.

This new funnel methodology allows marketing to play a vital role in both by generating new customer leads as well as expansion opportunities that later turn into sales and revenues.

How can Marketing help improve Renewals?

Here are some approaches that can help Marketing teams persuade customer renewals:

  • Challenging provocative approach - Marketing can play a key role in promoting new ideas, principles, and inventions in your customers' minds. Using marketing campaigns, they can help demonstrate to customers that you are continually improving our product and service, their investment with us is secured.

  • Product benefit-oriented approach - Demonstrate principles clients should adopt to maximize value with your solutions.

  • Antithetical approach - Be realistic and transparent, reinforce our value, and emphasize time, cost, risk, and difficulties when it comes to changing a solution.

Customer Acquisition vs. Customer Expansion Funnels

It is important to distinguish the difference between Customer Acquisition and Customer Expansion funnels. The two frameworks are keys to any company's growth. Combined they set the basis for approaching different types of customers with different journeys, existing or incoming.

Customer Acquisition Framework

The Customer Acquisition Framework is to acquire new customers by defeating or disrupting the status quo bias. It involves dislodging their incumbent subscriptions from the competition and tries hard enough to convince people that they need to change. Along is to introduce something new to our company and the product and service we offer.

Customer Expansion Funnel

This framework is designed for existing customers. Most marketing teams have a status quo bias for this framework. The role of marketing is to strengthen, protect our incumbent advantage, and prevent churn. Marketing initiatives target customers to stay and develop with the company, with the goal to increase retention, customer loyalty, and expansion.

A different type of approach should be applied to existing vs new customers because they have different needs and different levels of interest. You cannot offer a new prospect of what you might offer to an existing customer. You still need to know what they want, what they need, and what their customer success goals are once you understand that customers are aligned with what the company can offer them.

Summary

Marketing plays a vital role in all of these, establishing the company's image and building a strong relationship between the company's products and services and customers, designing marketing collateral, building brand awareness, and boosting sales. Without marketing, a company is trapped in a room with four walls wherein they can’t explore opportunities outside these walls, but with marketing, the potential for growth and expansion is deeper and broader.

On the other hand, as an organization, we need to strengthen our customer service and treat customers with the utmost respect and care, prove value, and establish trust. This in return will lead to customer loyalty and ultimately to prevent churn.

About the Author

Irit Eizips is Customer Success thought leader who’s mission is helping software and technology companies increase customer retention through maximizing customer value and upsell strategies. Irit is frequently featured in podcasts, books, and industry events as a subject matter expert on customer success operations and strategy. In 2014, Irit founded CSM Practice, the very first boutique Customer Success strategy consulting firm. Irit is known for her unique experience and expertise in launching customer success programs at scale based on best practices. Check out Irit's blogs, YouTube videos and weekly newsletter dedicated to the latest trends and strategies for customer success.

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