Thousands of articles have been written about the great benefits of Marketing Automation for attracting and managing leads. To be frank, that’s why most businesses invest in the software.
In the HubSpot model of ATTRACT, CONVERT, CLOSE, DELIGHT you won’t find nearly as many written about DELIGHTing your customers after the sale.
How often do we consider the benefits that marketing automation can bring to your organisation once your customers have purchased?
That’s a shame because relationships are still worth nurturing after the sale has happened.
Arguably, when prospects become customers is the time when we should know them best of all. So, we should be able to anticipate their needs.
We know what they have bought, so with a little bit of thought and planning we should be able to provide them with a delightful ongoing relationship.
That will increase the value of our brand in the customers’ eyes.
Onboarding
The worst thing that can happen when a prospect becomes a customer is that they are ignored. We got the deal and then they drop to the back of the queue for the delivery of their solution.
That point in our buyer’s journey is a perfect place to automate an on-boarding process around the first few days, weeks and even months of the relationship.
We could ‘drip feed’ new customers useful information about making the most of their product, service and relationship with us.
We could remind them of the expectations that were set around timescales for delivery and introduce them (or reconnect them) with the key people that they will be dealing with.
If they have an Account Manager we can link off to their bio on the website. We should point them at all the resources available to them through the support team.
Maybe you’d like them to fill in a customer survey three months into the relationship to check that they are still happy?
With a series of suitably spaced emails you can keep the contact levels right, the messages personalised and with just the right tone, you can build your perfect new customer “onboarding” journey.
What’s more, you can automate it all so that nobody has to remember to do this.
Lead Scoring
Just because your prospect is now a customer it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep an eye on their levels of engagement across your website and blog.
If you have configured lead scoring to show you who is most engaged, that should still have a function once your prospect becomes a customer.
You can apply lead scoring to your support and FAQ pages, the how-to and video-help pages.
If your key contacts drop below a certain level of activity or engagement (which you will see if you have also configured lead decay) then that could trigger an automatic email notification to the Account Manager to check everything is OK.
Cross-selling & Upselling
Strike whilst the iron is hot. The moment that a prospect becomes a customer, is a good time to upsell or resell.
And you are very well placed to do so. You know exactly what they have bought and the process that they went through.
Considering that it is six times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one, selling into the existing customer base makes a lot of sense.
Again, a series of informative and nurturing emails that point out the advantages, benefits and emotional payback from investing in the upgrade or additional service are all you need to get started.
Surprise and Delight
Surprise and Delight Marketing is a way of unexpectedly treating or rewarding your customers, just to thank them for being customers.
You are not asking for anything in return, you are simply adding to the value of your relationship with them.
You might want to carefully segment your database, if what you are doing is ‘warming up’ some ‘cooler’ or less engaged customers.
This is a great way to build brand loyalty. It could be something as simple as a free Costa coffee, right up to what Lego did at the Oscars – with a troupe of dancers giving out miniature Lego Oscars.
If your budget will stretch to it you could aim for ‘shock and awe’, but ‘surprise and delight’ is enough for most.
You could include a ‘surprise and delight’ step as part of your on-boarding process – then invite them to fill in the satisfaction or NPS survey as the next step.
