Customer Marketing Archives - Act-On

How to Upsell Effectively by Automating These 5 Strategies

Act-On — Tue, 27 May 2025 17:00:00 +0000

Onboarding new clients is exciting, especially after marketing and sales have worked so hard to capture their attention, show why the solution is the right fit, and close the deal. But as marketers know, that’s just the beginning.

The real work starts once your prospect becomes a customer. It’s about making sure they feel good about their decision and planting subtle seeds about other ways you can help them. The sales team is skilled at cross-selling and upselling. But do you know what else helps? When marketing can put some of that work on autopilot.

Many marketers already use automation for lead nurturing and top-of-funnel campaigns. But it’s also a powerful tool for growing existing relationships. You can use it to create automated journeys, build stronger connections, and naturally introduce new products or services. We’ve gathered top upselling strategies to help you upsell more effectively and make the customer experience even better.

Upsell Effectively with Industry Segmentation

If you serve many industries and have multiple buyer personas, you have a significant opportunity to drive revenue by segmenting your new customers and personalizing their experience.

Let’s say you’re a manufacturing company that sells industrial equipment across sectors like automotive, food processing, and pharmaceuticals. Each industry has its own set of challenges, goals, and regulatory requirements, so a one-size-fits-all approach won’t fully capture your cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Marketing automation allows you to segment customers by industry and automatically trigger onboarding emails or product education journeys. With this segmentation, you can address a customer’s specific needs by industry, speaking to their pain points more deeply, and make product recommendations that feel like a perfect fit.

Use Survey-Driven Campaigns, Mapping to Business Challenges

Have you ever gotten an email and deleted it immediately, not because you didn’t like the brand but because the content wasn’t that important to you? It happens. And it’s also a missed opportunity.

A strategy to improve cross-sells and upsells is to understand what specific customers care about and then send them content that matches. An easy way to do this is by creating a survey-driven campaign tied to specific products. Start by sending a quick email asking customers about their current challenges. For example, if you’re a marketing automation company and some of your customers struggle with email marketing, let them tell you that.

From there, you can use marketing automation to route those contacts into customized nurture campaigns that highlight features or upsell opportunities that solve their specific problems. This allows you to send customers more relevant content and product offerings that help improve cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

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Upselling Strategy for Your Power Users

Your most-engaged users likely love your products or services, which can create entirely new opportunities for upsells and cross-sells. Take a financial institution, for example. If a customer regularly uses mobile banking and sets up multiple savings goals in the app, that might be a good sign they’re financially engaged and ready to expand their relationship.

An automated journey could celebrate those milestones, like hitting a savings goal, while introducing relevant services, like a higher-yield savings account, financial planning tools, or even mortgage options that match their life stage.

Aligning offers with the usage of your products and customer behaviors allows you to build stronger trust, add value, and grow relationships and revenue.

Create Feature Adoption Series Based on Product Gaps

Have you ever used a tool for months, or maybe even years, only to suddenly discover a feature that makes your life so much easier? We’ve been there too. The good news is you don’t have to wait for customers to stumble on those moments. You can create them.

A great way to do this is by building a “feature adoption” email series based on product usage gaps. For example, let’s say you’re a financial software provider and notice that many users haven’t tried a budgeting tool. You could trigger a personalized email series that highlights how to use it, shares quick tips, and even links to a short video demo.

Maybe customers who use this feature are more likely to upgrade to the version of your product that includes advanced financial planning tools or real-time spending alerts. By highlighting how the budgeting tool can improve their daily money management, you not only improve feature adoption but also create a path for introducing higher-tier offerings that align with customer needs.

Learning how to upsell effectively may take time and research, but marketing automation can help get you there faster!

Upsell by Teasing Higher-Tier Products

The customers most likely to stay with you the longest and grow their business are the ones seeing strong results from what they’re already using. A great way to support that is by creating educational content mapped to their customer journey.

For example, Georgia United Credit Union built a “next best product” cross-sell program using marketing automation that focused on recommending complementary financial products. They created segments based on each member’s profile, including details like current products and credit score.

Each month, a personalized offer was sent automatically by email, tailored to that specific profile. These programs helped the credit union cross-sell thousands of new products through automation and increased application volume by 96 percent.

Growing Relationships and Revenue

Marketing and sales teams work hard to bring in new customers, and naturally, you want to keep that momentum going. But if you also focus on improving your cross-sell and upsell efforts, your revenue potential can grow quickly. After all, it is often much easier to generate new revenue from existing customers than to find brand new ones.

Automation can be a big help with these efforts. It allows you to provide more value to current customers, support them in ways they may not have considered, and improve the performance of your campaigns.

Do you want to learn more creative strategies to drive more revenue? Check out our guide breaking down “revenue marketing” and detailing how to answer many of the current challenges that marketers face.

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The growth of your business hinges on your ability to attract, nurture, and convert leads. Act-On’s automated lead generation gives you everything required to nurture an unknown prospect into a happy, loyal customer.

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How to Turn Customers Into Brand Advocates and Build Loyalty

Act-On — Fri, 23 May 2025 17:11:52 +0000

Prospects are shopping for your products and services, comparing them to those of competitors, and trying to decide which one best solves their problem. It’s not always an easy choice. Want to know what often becomes the tipping point? Brand advocacy.

We see it all the time in B2C. You’re shopping for a new product, read a bunch of glowing five-star reviews, and decide to take the leap. As marketers know, the same thing happens in the B2B world too.

After dealing with frustrating email deliverability issues, a marketer might attend a webinar on how to improve performance. They hear a real customer story about solving the exact problem they’re facing—and suddenly they see themselves in that story. That moment becomes the tipping point.

So how do you create more of those moments and improve brand advocacy? It might seem tricky, but with a smart brand advocacy program, you can start planting the seeds that turn more customers into loyal, enthusiastic supporters.

What is Brand Advocacy?

Brand advocacy is when customers, employees, or partners voluntarily promote a brand because they genuinely value its products, services, or mission. This support often takes the form of word-of-mouth, social media posts, or reviews, and is seen as more trustworthy than traditional advertising.

Advocates can significantly influence others’ buying decisions, helping to boost brand credibility, loyalty, and organic growth while reducing marketing costs.

Build Brand Advocacy with Customer Shout-Outs

Have you checked in with your sales or customer success teams lately? Ask if they’ve gotten any recent customer high-fives. Better yet, set up a centralized place to collect this feedback as it comes in. At Act-On, we use a dedicated “voice of the customer” Slack channel where team members regularly share wins, shout-outs, and other helpful insights. You might hear things such as:

“Your onboarding process was hands-down the easiest I’ve ever gone through.”

“Your team fixed our issue in under an hour. Huge thank you for your support!”

“We finally hit our Q1 goals, and your product played a big role in that.”

With the customer’s permission, turn that feedback into quotes you can use across your marketing, including social media graphics that highlight wins, email campaigns that build trust, or sales materials that help your team close deals. It’s an easy way to turn those everyday conversations into powerful social proof that builds trust and moves prospects closer to a yes.

Bonus tip: Ask if some of those customers would be willing to record a quick video testimonial about their experience. You can check out some of our examples here.

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The growth of your business hinges on your ability to attract, nurture, and convert leads. Act-On’s automated lead generation gives you everything required to nurture an unknown prospect into a happy, loyal customer.

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Co-create Content That Places the Spotlight on Your Customer

Your customers are experts in their fields, making them the perfect partners for co-creating thought leadership. Invite them to coauthor a blog post, join you on a webinar, or be featured in a customer spotlight on your website.

For example, Act-On recently hosted a webinar in its Debunk’d series where Chelsea from Station Casinos joined the panel to share tips about email marketing myths that hold teams back. The session gave Station Casinos a platform as an industry leader, while naturally showing how Act-On supports that success behind the scenes. You can check out the entire session on demand.

However, it’s important to remember to focus on your customer’s ideas and expertise. They’re the hero of the story, and you’re the friendly supporting character. When done well, this approach creates authentic customer advocacy and shared thought leadership that naturally lead to brand advocacy.

Turn Customers Into Brand Advocates with Quick Customer Q&As

We love case studies—and chances are that you do too. But let’s be honest, they can come with a bit of red tape, layers of approval, and at least one pass through legal. A fun and simple alternative to mix into your content is a quick Q&A. It’s brand advocacy and social proof minus the long review cycles.

Ask if your customer is open to answering a few short questions by email. With their approval, you can turn their responses into mini-testimonials for your website, marketing emails, and social content. It’s an easy way to capture great results and repurpose them across channels.

Building great customer relationships isn’t just about warm and fuzzies, it’s part of a brand advocacy program that turns customers into brand advocates!

Ask Your Customers to Serve as References

When your prospects are weighing multiple options, they need something compelling to help them make a decision. One of the best ways to win them is through customer references.

Start by checking in with your sales team to identify your “superfan” customers. Ask if they’d be open to serving as a reference for potential buyers. Then, when a prospect is ready, make the connection.

These conversations can be incredibly helpful. Prospects get to ask questions they might not feel comfortable asking a salesperson, hear honest feedback, and learn more about your solution from someone who’s actually using it.

Nurture Your Existing Customers to Improve Retention

Last—but definitely one of our favorites—is nurturing your existing customers to improve retention through customer marketing. After all, when your customers are successful, they’re more likely to be satisfied and spread the word, right? These automated programs also give you the chance to strengthen relationships and create powerful cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Add existing customers to automated nurture campaigns that share helpful, relevant resources. And when it makes sense, include content that supports their success or introduces products and services that can help them continue reaching their goals.

For example, Georgia United Credit Union created a “next best product” cross-sell program. Using each member’s profile, the team segmented messaging based on current products and sent personalized offers through email. After launching the program, they saw thousands of new products sold and a 96 percent spike in application volume.

You can track engagement, identify customers who are a good fit for upselling or cross-selling, and move them into campaigns that help them explore new options and build loyalty.

Expanding Forward

Marketers today are working in an exciting time. With all the technology and automation tools available, we can build strategies that drive brand advocacy and scale them pretty quickly.

Remember those quotes you collected from your sales team? You can reuse them again and again on social media. And those automated sequences you set up? Keep adding fresh customer quotes and Q&A responses to keep the momentum going while the technology does the heavy lifting.

The key is to experiment with these strategies, find out what delivers the best results, and use automation to reach, grow, and strengthen your customer relationships at scale.

Want to better understand how to turn customers into brand advocates throughout their journey? Download the complete guide to learn how to start building stronger relationships with your customers.

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The growth of your business hinges on your ability to attract, nurture, and convert leads. Act-On’s automated lead generation gives you everything required to nurture an unknown prospect into a happy, loyal customer.

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B2B Customer Loyalty & Retention Strategies That Work

Act-On — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 16:27:23 +0000

B2B customer loyalty and retention is complex. We’ve all had that experience when you purchase a new product and love it, but then things quickly go downhill. Maybe you can’t reach support when you need it and end up wasting valuable time navigating a complicated maze of a phone tree. Or maybe you do reach someone, only to be transferred again and again before hitting a dead end with a dropped call.

Customer loyalty isn’t built on one product or one experience. It’s often built on many, and marketing teams play an important role in creating them. For those looking for creative strategies to improve B2B customer loyalty and support business growth, we’ve tapped our internal experts to capture some of our favorites.

Create B2B Customer Loyalty Programs

One of the best ways to improve retention and build customer loyalty is by helping your existing B2B customers become even more successful with your products and services. For example, a few years ago, we decided to revamp our customer success webinar program with that exact goal in mind.

Our in-house expert, Jennifer Blanco, transformed what used to be a basic webinar series into something much more valuable. She introduced custom landing pages that guide customers through our solutions, dedicated office hours with product experts, and hands-on workshops for deeper learning.

Webinar attendance jumped by 140 percent. Even better, customers who participated were 25 percent more likely to stay with us, giving our retention rates a healthy lift.

If you already have B2B customer loyalty programs, consider giving them a refresh. Add more depth, make them more interactive, and focus on helping customers get even more value from your solutions. And if you don’t have any yet, it’s worth building and testing some. Tie the outcomes to your retention metrics (such as retention rate, churn rate, and customer lifetime value) to understand program impacts on loyalty and satisfaction over time.

Set the Tone Early With a Solid Start

Post-purchase evaluation is real. You’ve probably done it yourself. You buy something new and then immediately go back to the reviews to reassure yourself it was the right choice. Research shows that 90 percent of consumers say their post-purchase experience is just as important as the quality of the product itself.

And it’s not just a B2C thing. B2B customers do it too, which is why creating a great experience from the start is so important.

One of the easiest ways to make a strong first impression is with a well-crafted welcome email. Even if you already send one, there may be opportunities to make it even more impactful. Here are a few tips from our welcome email pro, Jennifer.

Send it right away. We’ve found customers are more likely to open the message if it’s sent within the first hour of purchase. Automation tools can help you send timely, triggered emails.

Introduce the team. Let new customers know who is supporting them, how to get in touch, and what to expect next.

Share helpful resources. Link to your best onboarding tools, such as a knowledge base, support site, community hub, or login portal. You might also include relevant webinars to help customers get started.

And here is the fun part. Your welcome email is just the beginning. You can build an entire series of emails that help customers succeed with your products and services. This approach sets the stage for long-term loyalty and stronger retention.

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The growth of your business hinges on your ability to attract, nurture, and convert leads. Act-On’s automated lead generation gives you everything required to nurture an unknown prospect into a happy, loyal customer.

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Develop a Customer Nurture Series

You have your welcome email set up, right? Great! Now, if you haven’t done so already, you’ll want to build that out into an automated series to create B2B customer loyalty and retention. But what exactly should you include? In addition to that welcome email we mentioned, here are a few ideas to consider:

A get-started guide. Help your new customers take their first action. Provide a checklist or a step-by-step guide to get them up and running.
Pro tips and best practices. To help customers go from basic setup to deeper usage, consider including examples, videos, or use case content. You can also highlight the features that power users love.
Success stories. Build trust and inspire confidence with a short customer story or case study. Bonus tip: segment your users by industry and make the case study specific to their vertical so it’s as relevant as possible.
Community and engagement. Invite customers to join your user community if you have one. If you don’t, you can invite them to join you on social channels, attend customer events, or participate in webinars.

“The goal with a welcome series is to give the customer the nod for making the right choice and setting the tone for what’s to come,” says Jennifer.

Look for Key Moments to Grow Loyalty

Automation is amazing, especially for smaller marketing teams, but you don’t want to lose the personal touch when you’re working to build B2B customer loyalty and improve retention.

Another tip that Jennifer shared is to look for moments that really matter to your customers. Talk to the sales team and your customer success team and ask, “Is there anything new going on with our clients?”

Maybe one recently landed on a list of best places to work or earned another notable award. If so, send a special gift and a handwritten note congratulating them on their success and thanking them for being a customer. These kinds of experiences add a personal touch that customers will remember.

Set Up a Listening Station

Have you ever heard the stat about customer complaints? For every customer you hear from, there are 26 others who stay silent. That’s why it’s so important to create a “listening station” to better understand your customers’ needs. The more advanced version of this is called measuring sentiment. It involves collecting feedback from sources such as online reviews, emails, support tickets, and other key touchpoints. It may sound complex, but if you’re serious about understanding your customers, it can give you valuable insight.

Listening to your customers, it’s the first step to building b2b customer loyalty for your business.

You can also go the more traditional route and send a customer survey. To improve participation, offer a compelling incentive and consider keeping responses anonymous. You’re more likely to get honest, helpful feedback that way.

Embrace Complaints as Data

As hard as we try, companies aren’t perfect. Customer complaints are never fun to deal with, but if we look at that feedback as data, we can start asking what we can do better.

For example, maybe the sales team hears complaints that onboarding is confusing. That could be a chance to refresh your onboarding content or expand it. You might also do a little customer research to understand the first questions customers are asking. Then, you can rebuild your onboarding program to be as clear and helpful as possible.

It’s really about spotting those points of confusion and putting the right resources and content in place. That way, customers feel good about their experience from the beginning and get on the path to loyalty and retention.

Guiding Customers Toward Loyalty and Retention

Marketers are under increased pressure to show results. One way they can really support the organization is by building strategies that strengthen B2B customer loyalty and retention. At the end of the day, it’s much easier to “land and expand” than to start from scratch—especially when churn is a challenge.

When you focus on a few key areas and put metrics in place to show impact, you can help your team expand revenue with existing customers, build stronger relationships, and turn loyal customers into brand advocates.

Do you want to learn more strategies for improving customer retention? We created a complete guide for you focused on building quality, lasting customer relationships.

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The growth of your business hinges on your ability to attract, nurture, and convert leads. Act-On’s automated lead generation gives you everything required to nurture an unknown prospect into a happy, loyal customer.

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Increase Customer Retention: Why Multichannel Marketing Is an Underrated Tool

Act-On — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 20:34:58 +0000

Winning new customers is an exciting accomplishment. But most marketers also know the real work begins after that.

The cost of acquiring a new customer is estimated to be five to seven times more than retaining an existing one. Retention issues translate to lost dollars and more work for marketing teams who strive to battle the vicious cycle of churn.

Multichannel marketing is frequently used for new customer acquisition but is often overlooked as a strategy to increase customer retention. So, if you’re looking to boost retention efforts, cross-sells, and upsells, we’ve shared our favorite multichannel marketing customer retention strategies to jump-start your efforts.

Why Use Multichannel Marketing with Your Existing Customers?

Imagine that your customer makes a purchase. They’re excited, and they love your product, but the novelty wears off over time. They get bored, and all those shiny new features lose their appeal.

In the meantime, your team has launched brand-new product features. But the customer has no idea, and eventually, they go shopping, find a competitor’s product, and make a switch.

Bummer, right?

Using customer retention tactics, such as multichannel marketing, helps keep your existing customers engaged. That engagement affirms your product’s value and provides opportunities to cross-sell and upsell.

^{Strategies for increasing customer retention are what separates the best marketers from the rest.}

How to Increase Customer Retention: 4 Strategies

As with any marketing effort, your starting point should always be the customer. Talk with your sales and marketing teams and gather intel.

Where do your customers struggle?

What questions do they have?

What are their most pressing goals and reasons for purchasing your product?

To increase customer retention, you’ll want to understand these needs and map relevant content and resources to touchpoints along their journey. Here are four areas to try.

1. Email nurturing

During 2023, we had an interesting challenge. Our nurture sequence emails were doing reasonably well, but we knew they could do better. Our internal guru, Kelsey Yen, took up the challenge.

She inventoried the current programs and worked to match them more closely with people’s intents and journeys. Open rates jumped from 25% to 48%, and click-through rates increased from 1% to nearly 18%.You can read the step-by-step guide here.

While Kelsey was working to improve new prospect nurture sequences, you could easily apply a similar strategy with your existing customers. Here’s what that might look like:

Send a welcome email to new customers.
Ask about their most pressing interests and goals, and then segment them in your marketing automation program.
Funnel customers into a nurture sequence, delivering specific content and resources based on their interests to reinforce the value and increase customer retention.

Measure your open rates, click-through rates, and engagement to continue testing and refining new content and focusing on areas with positive metrics. For example, if you learn new customers interested in email marketing are also interested in deliverability, you can continue adding more training and resources to that nurture sequence.

Remember when you talked with sales and customer service and mapped out customer interests and needs? You’ll want to continue using that information.

Imagine that you sell marketing automation. You learn that your new customers struggle with deliverability issues after the new Yahoo and Google changes, so you decide to create content to help and reinforce your value.

You might create a webinar on the topic featuring your internal experts (more on webinars shortly). Then, you can cut that content into mini lessons and share it on social media.

By the way, you are asking customers to join you on social media, right? Identify one or two channels where they hang out, and then make the ask during your welcome email. And don’t just ask; give them a sample of some awesome content you’ve produced on the channel recently so they can see the benefit of joining you.

^{There’s nothing better than increasing customer retention, even winning a new customer.}

3. Training and tutorials on landing pages

In 2022, we relaunched our Power-Up webinars, a series created specifically for our existing customers. The goals are to help them solve their challenges and understand how to get the most from their marketing automation, and grow the relationship.

In the first year of the relaunch, we delivered value to 286 accounts. The following year, that number grew to 400 accounts, representing a 140% increase. What’s more, those who attended experienced a 24% increase in retention rate.

Here’s what we do:

Find topics our customers need help with. We look at webinars that have done well in the past, as well as feedback we’re getting on an ongoing basis.
Create and deliver the webinar. We also have “office hours” to give our customers more guidance in a smaller group setting.
Post the webinar on a landing page, with related content to help our customers deepen their knowledge.

Our focus is on helping our customers be as successful as possible in accomplishing their goals, which naturally increases customer retention.

4. Website content with customer stories

Most marketers create customer success stories to help new prospects understand how an existing customer solves their problem using the product. However, many don’t create stories for their existing customers.

Talk with your sales team to learn which customers have experienced impressive success by using additional products, such as cross-sells or upsells. Then, record a video or written case study, repurpose that content into the relevant lead-nurturing series, share clips on social media, and post it to your website.

How to Improve Customer Retention by Starting Small

Take one action. Revamp your welcome series, plan a webinar, or publish an upsell customer success story. Then, test another, and another, until you have a reservoir of data to draw from. Find out where you’re getting the most success, and then double down to scale your results.

And of course, an important tool in scaling is marketing automation. It’s also useful for gaining insights into customer interests and needs. Check out our Using Marketing Automation to Boost Customer Retention guide and we’ll give you the playbook on harnessing that data.

How to Reduce Customer Attrition and Keep Your Best Customers

Act-On — Thu, 30 May 2024 22:52:49 +0000

Budget cuts, doing more with less, and consolidation of business tools are all on the rise in 2024, and so is customer attrition. Jeff Coleman, chief customer officer at Act-On, explained during an interview that, as the economy contracts, customers are deciding to use fewer products and consolidate the ones they already have. And that leaves many battling to reduce customer attrition to protect at-risk business.

Research shows that only two-fifths of companies focus equally on customer acquisition and retention, despite customer attrition costing U.S. providers $168 million annually. The challenge is that even if you’re focusing on retention, cross-sells and upsells, doing these tasks well isn’t always easy. The job begins the moment the customer transitions from prospect to customer.

Jeff explained that the hunting and farming analogy is a common way to illustrate the difference between acquiring new customers (hunting) and retaining existing ones (farming). However, he thinks of it more like fishing at a friend’s lake.

“If I show up at your dock and you let me fish in your lake, you’re being nice, right?” asks Jeff. “But if I leave my litter, overfish, and behave badly, you won’t let me fish there anymore.”

In other words, this bad situation happens when customers aren’t getting what they need after the initial sale (when we visit their ‘lake’). As we cultivate stronger relationships with our customers, we can deploy strategies from the onset that help build a foundation for reduced customer attrition and improve future growth.

^{The risk of customer attrition makes customer marketing and customer success crucial for today’s teams.}

What is Customer Attrition?

Customer attrition, also known as customer churn, refers to the loss of customers over a specific period of time. It occurs when customers stop buying a company’s products or services. This can happen either by canceling subscriptions, switching to competitors, or simply no longer engaging. High attrition rates can signal dissatisfaction or poor customer experience. Reducing attrition is key to maintaining long-term business growth and profitability.

How to Reduce Customer Attrition

One way to reduce customer attrition is through growth. However, not all growth opportunities are created equally, with some being significantly easier to land. Jeff breaks opportunities into a couple of categories, which are:

1. Adoption-Led Growth

With adoption-led growth, you’re capturing opportunities that exist due to a natural evolution of business. “If your company uses Slack and hires five more people, you probably need five more licenses,” says Jeff. “Or if you have 1,000 employees using software and only have 700 licenses, it’s time to sell the additional licenses. These are the easiest opportunities to land.”

Capturing the “low-hanging fruit” is important, but you also want to master the more challenging opportunities. These require more complex strategies and time to execute.

2. Sales Expansion Growth

Sales expansion growth, which includes your cross-sells and upsells, is trickier than adoption-led growth. The challenge is that a “post-sale” isn’t like a traditional sale, yet you can’t approach it with a service-only mindset either. Expansion requires strategic planning to protect your existing business.

“Salesforce is an interesting example of this, where the salesperson is responsible for a loss up to a certain point,” says Jeff. “You can’t sell something new if it causes churn on the other side. You don’t get to count the increase unless you count the decrease.”

Before expanding, the key is to get the customer to use fully what they’ve already purchased. According to Jeff, most expansion is built on successfully deploying what the customer purchased the first time. In other words, it’s hard for a customer to justify buying more when they haven’t fully realized the value of what they already have.

Jennifer Blanco, director of customer marketing at Act-On, explains that when marketing to existing customers, an inverted pyramid is used.

^{Once your customer makes a purchase, customer attrition becomes enemy number one!}

“The first hurdle the new customer needs to get over is onboarding. The second is adopting your solution,” says Jennifer. “A great onboarding and adoption are the overall key to success. Not nearly enough companies put enough emphasis on these areas.”

When considering customer growth and retention, an important distinction is customer satisfaction versus customer loyalty.

In a recent McKinsey & Company study, customer care was cited among the top three priorities for participants. And despite companies working really hard at customer care and service, Jeff suggests that you can’t differentiate yourself on service alone. He explains that you need to get people to use your product successfully. It needs to be embedded in the infrastructure of what they do.

“I read this book about net promoter scores, and it talked about loyalty,” says Jeff. “It said, ‘How many times have you heard someone say, Yeah, I like that steakhouse, but if there’s a new one in town, I’m totally going to try it?’ There is a difference between satisfaction and loyalty.”

Building loyalty is one of the reasons why investing in a strong onboarding process is critical when it comes to getting embedded into customer workflows and helping them experience the full product value faster.

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The Importance of a Stronger Foundation

A stronger foundation and reducing customer attrition start with your welcome series, according to Jennifer. She shares that, at Act-On, we break this into a couple of initial nurturing sequences:

The new welcome nurture sequence. We give our customers the lay of the land and tell them what to expect during the onboarding process.
The brand-new user welcome series. This nurture campaign is designed for users who have never used Act-On before. It has a few touchpoints focused on what to expect and beginner resources.

“I’ve found it’s amazing how many customers aren’t doing the basic things to get off to a great start,” says Jennifer. “We know that onboarding tasks are critical to our customers’ success, so it’s also critical to our success, right? The purpose of the nurtures is to make sure customers have the basics checked off their lists.”

Marketing automation is helpful for setting up these experiences with customers, but Jennifer highlights the importance of combining automation with a human touch.

“I’m constantly asking our customer-facing teams, ‘Hey, what have you heard from our clients lately?’” says Jennifer. “I want to find out which of our customers have recently had successes so we can celebrate with them and send them a gift or something special.”

This cross-functional balance is an important part of success. It improves the experience and builds stronger relationships to prevent customer attrition and build loyalty.

^{Listen to your customers and help them solve problems: step one to reducing customer attrition.}

Rethink Measurement

Customer marketing isn’t always straightforward to measure, mostly because there isn’t a single variable to track and calculate. When Jennifer measures success, she often looks at the overall impact:

How many customers participated in the program?

How many have upgraded to this specific feature?

What was the revenue impact of all of that?

For example, we recently relaunched a customer success program that involved transforming a basic customer webinar series into landing pages, office hours, and hands-on workshops.

During the first year, 286 accounts attended, and that attendance grew to 400 the following year – a 140% increase. Participants who attended had a 24% increase in retention.

So, remember: it’s a long game.

“If you can retain and grow your customer base, you’re going to continue to see your revenue go up,” says Jennifer. “But if you can’t keep and grow your existing customers, you’ll always be playing catch-up.”

Looking at existing strategies for churn management and customer relationship expansion can help prepare for stronger growth, because you won’t be fighting an uphill battle created by lost business.

Do you need help developing a stronger strategy to reduce customer attrition, reduce churn, and improve cross-sells and upsells? We created a step-by-step eBook to help guide you:

Email Marketing v1

The growth of your business hinges on your ability to attract, nurture, and convert leads. Act-On’s automated lead generation gives you everything required to nurture an unknown prospect into a happy, loyal customer.

Learn More

What Is Customer Marketing?

Act-On — Wed, 29 May 2024 23:20:44 +0000

Lead generation is on the to-do list of most marketers. And sure, you might have some successful strategies in place, but wouldn’t it be nice to capture some easier wins?

One of the best ways to land these wins is through customer marketing. Why?

Companies have a 60% to 70% chance of selling to an existing customer, compared to a brand-new one (the latter is only 5% to 20%). Research also shows existing customers spend 67% more than new customers.

The bottom line is that existing customers are easier to sell to, and they buy more. So, if you want to capture more of that revenue, a great place to start is customer marketing.

What is customer marketing?

Customer marketing is the strategy of continuing to actively market to your customers after you’ve made the initial sale by building relationships and improving your brand experience. Customer marketing helps promote retention, and foster upsells and cross-sells. The customers who know, love, and use your products are much more likely to purchase additional products and services in the future.

And if they don’t love your products (yet), you want to provide value and help continuously, so when it comes time for renewal (or shopping the competitors), staying with your product will be the clear choice.

Why is it important?

The cost of acquiring a new customer is roughly four to five times the cost of retaining an existing one. And yes, customer acquisition is important for growth, but if you don’t balance that with marketing to your existing customers, you can end up in a vicious cycle of churn and burn.

Here’s what that looks like:

You onboard customer X.
You lose customer X.
You spend 4-5x more to replace customer X.
And the cycle grows longer and more expensive…

Customer relationship marketing helps you to correct this imbalance to retain more customers, upsell, and cross-sell to achieve a higher customer lifetime value.

Customer marketing strategies that work

As you create your customer marketing strategy, most organizations have a couple of primary goals:

Create happy customers. Why would they want to switch to a competitor? They love you!
Grow lifetime customer value. They love you so much that they’re presold when you recommend other products and services.

Here are a few customer marketing strategies for reaching these goals:

1. Personalize onboarding

Onboarding email: “We’re really great. Our product is really great. Us, us, us… {continues with corporate speak and canned messaging}.”

The customer’s response: Delete.

Oops, that didn’t go so well. Let’s try again.

When your customer buys your product or service, you want to send them a personalized welcome email and onboarding series. The content should be specific to the product they purchased and give them resources, guides, and training that help them successfully use the product.

And remember, once you create this email, don’t set it and forget it.

Continue to talk to your customer service and salespeople. Ask about the problems that customers have during the onboarding process and then use that intelligence to create progressively better content.

2. Map your customer success journey

Map out the specific journey your customers take after purchase. The first step, which we mentioned above, is that welcome email. Now, you’ll want to target a few more touch points. Here are several to consider adding to your list:

Adoption and training. Your customer is brand new when it comes to using your product; what do they need to know? Again, chat with your sales and customer service teams and ask questions about where new customers get stuck. Use the answers to these questions to create training and resources to solve common problems and support your new customers.

Help customers understand the overall value. Continue showing customers the great ways to use your product, and reinforce its value. For example,

“Hey, customer, did you know you can do this cool thing? Customer X just recently grew revenue by Y% using this exact feature. Give it a try! Let us know how it works for you.”

And here’s a pro tip: You can use marketing automation to set up these experiences.

Expand the relationship, cross-sell, and upsell. Once your customer has some wins with your products, consider telling them about complementary products and upsells. Explain how these solutions can help them continue to grow their success.
Ask for feedback. Don’t wait until you’re close to renewal to ask for feedback. Ask early and ask often. Then, take that feedback to your team, look for ways to improve the product or service, and let the customer know how you’re using their feedback.

These are just a few potential options, but the point is to start thinking about the customer journey and then set up touch points along that journey to create stronger relationships.

^{Delighting your customers with marketing content is a great customer marketing strategy to keep them engaged with your brand.}

3. Segment users with similar characteristics

We can’t answer the question “What is consumer marketing?” without mentioning segmentation.

That’s because it’s the framework that allows you to personalize at scale.

Remember that welcome email we mentioned earlier? You can use it to segment your customers even further and help them reach their goals. For example, if you sell marketing automation, you might ask the new customer about their goals during that first welcome email.

Let’s say you learn their primary goal is to grow revenue through email marketing. You can use that data to segment new customers by interest and then provide personalized training, tools, and resources targeted to email marketing. Or you might discover a top interest is improving email deliverability. As a result, you send a comprehensive guide written by your internal mentor on the topic (by the way, we actually wrote that guide! You can check it out here).

When your customers reach their goals faster, your retention strategies will be more effective, and they’ll naturally want to grow their relationship with you.

Measuring your results

As with any marketing strategy, you’ll want to show results, right? And while customer marketing metrics are tricky to track since programs happen over a long period, you can still track them. A couple of metrics to consider include:

Lifetime customer value (LCV). LCV is the total revenue generated from a single customer throughout your entire relationship with them. For example, if a customer spends $100 per purchase, makes five purchases per year, and has been with your company for three years, their LCV would be $100 x 5 x 3 = $1,500.

ROI. With ROI, you measure the profitability of your customer marketing efforts as related to their cost. For example, if a customer marketing campaign costs $10,000 and generates $50,000 in revenue, your ROI would be ($50,000 – $10,000 / $10,000) * 100 = 400%.

New customer acquisition will undoubtedly be part of your marketing strategy in the future. But when you balance that strategy with powerful customer marketing efforts, you can make faster strides toward growth because you won’t be battling churn.

Do you want to know more tricks for keeping customers? We’ve shared our favorite strategies for using marketing automation to boost retention with your existing customers.

Welcome Email to New Client: Best Practices & Example

Tue, 21 May 2024 21:06:40 +0000

Post-purchase evaluation, the process a customer goes through after making a purchase, is real. Research says that 90% of consumers report their post-purchase experience is just as important as the quality of the products. And that process starts with a welcome email to your new client.

Did I make the right decision?

Should I have purchased XYZ products instead?

Maybe I acted too soon….

We recently spoke with our internal customer marketing expert, Jennifer Blanco. She explained that while you don’t need to overthink it, you do want to seize the opportunity to get your new relationship off to a great start.

“The welcome email doesn’t need to be overly produced or analyzed, but if you don’t have one, you’re missing out,” says Jennifer. “It offers an opportunity to connect with your new customers and reassure them that they made the right choice.”

Not sure where to start? We’ve got you covered with some of our favorite tips and welcome email best practices.

What is a welcome email?

A welcome email is the first communication you send to a new customer, and it’s one of your best opportunities to build a strong relationship between the customer and your brand.

The email might thank customers for their business, provide details for getting started, and explain what to expect in the future.

Why does your brand need a welcome email?

After making a purchase, customers want to hear from you. They’re excited about their new product or service, ready to get started, and very likely to open an email you send them. A welcome email lets you capture that opportunity.

Of course, the first step is to decide that you need a welcome email to new clients, and the second is to decide what it will say.

Welcome email open rates

Want to know the average open rate for a welcome email? It’s about 80%. That’s impressive!

How does that compare with the average open rate for a regular email? Stats vary, but across all industries, it’s roughly 36%.

^{There’s nothing quite like the feeling of satisfaction when you make a purchase. Welcome emails can help that feeling last longer.}

Welcome email best practices

Jennifer explains that your welcome email can be as simple as a short welcome message for customers from the CEO, thanking them for their business and communicating your excitement. Or it can be a welcome email series, starting with the same email and following up with several more that include helpful tips or outline the onboarding process.

Here are a few helpful suggestions as you craft your email or series of emails.

1. Send the welcome message immediately

We’ve found that customers are much more likely to open a welcome email sent within the first hour of purchase. So, you’ll want to send that email immediately after the purchase. The best way to do that is by using a marketing automation tool that allows you to create triggered emails.

2. Say thank you

This might feel like a no-brainer, but you’ll want to thank your new customer for making the purchase. Better yet, include the thank-you in the subject line to clarify the email’s purchase. For example, “Thank you for signing up with Act-On” or “Welcome to Act-On!”

3. Introduce your account team

As customers start using your product, you’ll want them to know who’s there to support them. That’s why Jennifer recommends introducing your account team in the new clients’ welcome email. If you can customize the email to include the specific rep assigned to their region or industry, that’s even better.

4. Provide helpful resources

Consider providing links to your most helpful resources, such as your knowledge base, support site, community, or login portal (here’s an example of webinar resources we might include). Also, consider including your support offerings and hours.

5. Set expectations

Let your customers and subscribers know how often you’ll send emails, the types of emails you’ll send, and how to unsubscribe or adjust their subscription settings. Providing these details is important to deliverability and ensuring future emails arrive in their inbox.

6. Include a simple call to action

The intent of welcome emails is to thank customers and embrace them as the newest members of your community. So, while you want to keep it simple, you can also include additional links that introduce relevant products, services, and content.

7. Send more than one welcome email

You don’t want to stuff your welcome email to new client (or any email, for that matter!) with too much content. Doing so could overwhelm your customers, leading to lower click-through rates in the future. If you have a lot of content and resources to include, consider dividing them into several emails to create a welcome series.

You’ll also want to distinguish between an onboarding series and a welcome series. An onboarding series focuses on guiding new users or customers through the first step of successfully using your product, while a welcome series is more high-level.

“The goal with a welcome series is to give the customer the nod for making the right choice and setting the tone for what’s to come,” says Jennifer.

^{Welcome emails aren’t just something to check off your list. Make them better with our tips!}

Optimize your growth

Mastering your welcome email is an important part of starting a positive relationship with your customer, but it’s also part of something much bigger: customer marketing.

Customer marketing is focused on outreach to existing customers, promoting retention and growing revenue through strategic upsells and cross-sells. Research shows that repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers and convert at higher rates, so it’s a huge opportunity.

So, yes, master the welcome email, but also consider how it fits into your larger customer marketing strategy and how it will grow the customer’s lifetime value.

Do you want to know the tricks for keeping your customers coming back for more? We’ve given you our favorites in our on-demand webinar.

New client welcome email example

Want a starting point? Here’s a new client welcome email example from our internal swipe file. Use the welcome email template as inspiration so you don’t have to start from scratch.

WELCOME TO ACT-ON, JENNIFER!

First things first, congrats on joining the Act-On family. You’ve made a big decision to elevate your marketing automation strategy and we’re glad you’ve put your trust in Act-On. We’ll be here to make sure you’re successful at every step of your new journey as you begin to level up and grow your business.Members of our team are currently meeting to make sure there is a knowledge transfer and you are set up for success. They’ll be reaching out in the next day or two to schedule an onboarding call.We look forward to partnering with you and celebrating your future success. Thank you for choosing Act-On, we’re so glad you’re here!

Cheering you on,
Jeff Coleman, Chief Customer Officer

Retention Marketing: How We Reached 400 Customer Accounts with a Refreshed Program

Jennifer Blanco — Tue, 07 May 2024 21:17:49 +0000

Is retention marketing on your list of priorities? It’s certainly on ours! Keeping your existing customers happy not only helps secure more referrals but also paves the way for more cross-sells and upsells.

In 2022, we decided to relaunch our Power-Up Series, which is a customer success program we paused during the pandemic. The relaunch transformed what was previously a basic webinar series into custom landing pages, office hours, and hands-on workshops.

During the first year, 286 different accounts attended, and that attendance number jumped to 400 in 2023, which is a 140% increase. Customers who participated were more likely to stay with us – their retention rate went up by 25%.

So, if you’re looking for creative ways to improve your retention marketing, we’ve shared our framework for reaching more customers and keeping them happy.

Email Marketing v1

The growth of your business hinges on your ability to attract, nurture, and convert leads. Act-On’s automated lead generation gives you everything required to nurture an unknown prospect into a happy, loyal customer.

Learn More

Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy: The Three Parts

Have you ever attended an event that provided high-level information only to find that once you got into actually doing the work, you were a little lost? Our refreshed Power-Up Series decided to tackle this challenge through a three-part framework:

The high-level webinar. The webinar is our “main event” and focuses on a topic we think our audience will love (more on that shortly). For example, if the topic is email deliverability, our experts provide a high-level overview.

The workshop. The workshop takes that high-level information and helps our customers apply it to their exact situation. Think about it like college: You attend the lecture and then attend labs to actually do the work.

Office hours. Speaking of college, we designed regular office hours to meet the customers where they’re at on any issue they need help with (not necessarily related to the current topic). Customers can bring their questions to our experts and work one-on-one to solve them.

We also created dedicated landing pages for each topic with additional resources, such as articles or guides. These pages receive a significant amount of traffic. In 2022, we had 1,985 views on the landing pages. In 2023, views jumped to 4,311, marking a 217% increase.

^{Providing additional resources for customers is a great way to practice retention marketing.}

How We Find Topics Our Customers Love

How do you know what topics your customers will love? Of course, we started by partnering with Support about frequently asked questions. We use data and anecdotal feedback to guide our decisions, and we also look at:

Industry trends. What trends are happening in your industry right now? This is often a great starting point. For example, Google and Yahoo launched new requirements to help improve email security and user experience earlier this year. Our internal data showed deliverability is a popular topic with our customers, so we decided to do a Power-Up on the topic. Attendance broke our records for a single event, with 430 registrants.

Traffic data. One of the great benefits of building a landing page for each Power-Up is that we can track traffic data to gauge customer interest. We use this data to determine what topics our audience needs help with and to guide future content creation.

Webinar participant surveys. Asking your attendees to fill out a survey is a great way to understand how to improve on an existing topic and develop future retention marketing content. First party data is an underused intelligence source for marketers. Before relaunching the series, we sent an email survey post-webinar to gather feedback, but the response rate was low. With the relaunch, we took a new approach: survey attendees directly on the Zoom platform. The response rate increased to 25%.

Here are some of the questions we asked:

Did you find this session beneficial?
What percentage of today’s webinar was new information to you?
Would you like more information about {X} topic?
Are there any other topics that would be helpful to you?

With this data, we could follow up with customers who want to learn more about a specific topic and use their feedback to guide future customer marketing efforts.

^{Our internal webinar program captivated customers, the sign of a great retention marketing play.}

Tracking Attendance Rates and Planning

When sending promotional emails for customer retention marketing webinars, the last thing you want is a poor response. That’s why we look at historical data to plan future events.

Here’s what our internal data says:

Avoid July and August. Many of our customers are out for summer vacations.
Skip March. It’s often a time for spring break travel.
Pause during December. Everyone has checked out for the holidays, so we may as well wait until Q1.

Also, our internal webinar expert Kelsey Yen, has another tip for sending promotional emails.

“I send my webinar promotional emails the same day of the week and time of day I plan to hold the event,” says Kelsey. “If engagement is high, it’s an early indicator that the time might work well for the audience.”

When thinking about webinar marketing, you can also look at past email open rates to determine the day and time that typically works best for your customers.

^{Retention marketing is a frequently overlooked strategy to score big wins.}

Customer Retention Marketing and Adding Value

From the moment customers decide to purchase our product, there’s a value exchange. We always want to be on the right side of that value exchange because once customers feel like they’re not getting enough, we’re at risk for retention problems.

To that point, I’ll share something we learned early in the Power-Up Series: Don’t sell. Whatever you create should be focused on helping your customers get the most from their existing products without any sales pitches. That idea alone could help improve any customer retention program.

Email Marketing v1

The growth of your business hinges on your ability to attract, nurture, and convert leads. Act-On’s automated lead generation gives you everything required to nurture an unknown prospect into a happy, loyal customer.

Learn More

And if you need help generating higher customer lifetime value and improving retention marketing, we have a webinar for you! Check out our favorite tips from our resident experts in the on-demand resource The Spice of Lifecycle Marketing: How to Add More Flavor to the Customer Journey.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 9: Marc Liu

Galen Ettlin — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 16:14:00 +0000

^{What does it mean to be a rebel? To Marc Liu, it means challenging the status quo, but also knowing when to let someone else take the reins. As chief revenue officer of the startup E-bike company, Civilized Cycle, he has fought through COVID-19 production issues to launch a green product people ACTUALLY want. It’s not a TESLA, but the bike creates an experience riders haven’t felt before}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
You are listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast by Acton Software for all the marketing innovators living outside the box. Let’s shake it up everybody. I’m gay Atland with Act-On Software. My co-host today is Bob Garcia, head of product marketing here at Act-On. Good to have you here, Bob. I know you’ve got 30 years of experience in the software, so your experience will definitely lend to this conversation.

Bob Garcia:
Hey all, it’s great to be here. Looking forward to talking with Marc and Galen today.

Galen Ettlin:
Excellent. And of course, as he just mentioned, our guest today is Marc Liu, Chief Revenue Officer for Civilized Cycles, a sleek e-bike company. Marc also has extensive agency experience spanning the globe, having helped market from major brands like Pizza Hut, Bud Light, Southeast Asia Tourism, and many, many, many, many more. So we’re going to have a lot to talk about, and maybe put your rebel instinct stamp on your passport. Marc, thanks so much for joining us.

Marc Liu:
Thanks for having me. That’s quite the intro.

Bob Garcia:
So Marc, you co-founded an agency Elemental that sold just recently and now you’ve pivoted into working for a really exciting up and coming e-cycle brand. How are you managing that transition from working with multiple brands across multiple verticals to now just being committed to one vertical with one really cool product in an emerging market?

Marc Liu:
Yeah, yeah, it is quite the change for me. I founded Elemental and ran it for 13 years, and so that’s a long time to be doing anything. And in the agency world, bouncing back and forth between different brands is a very different experience to being committed and focused on one brand. I will say first and foremost, it’s quite refreshing to be able to put all of my energies into one brand and really kind of dig deep into the details versus kind of bouncing back and forth. So I’m very grateful for that opportunity, a welcome change to the pace of work. And now obviously I am responsible for a lot more things, so I have to live up to the words that I put out there. I think what’s helped me a lot in that transition has been the fact that I’m first and foremost an entrepreneur at heart. And so my area of expertise is sales and marketing, and I’ve done that on the agency side for a very long time. But what I really love to do is solve problems and tell stories. And whether you’re doing that for lots of brands or one brand, fundamentally the approach is the same. You just get to do a little bit more of it when you are inside of the brand. So I’m pretty happy where I am and it’s a nice new challenge for me.

Bob Garcia:
In terms of the category, it seems like it’s so dynamic. There’s so many different types of products coming in to the market and you’re seeing, you’re really leading with creating a very elegant, high-end vibe and you’re being rebellious in how you approach that. Can you talk a little bit about how you’re starting to differentiate in such a crowded, nascent market?

Marc Liu:
Yeah, and thanks for the kind words about the bike and what we do. We are trying to do something very different for the e-bike market, which is a very exciting market to be in, especially right now in the US. I think everybody has seen during the pandemic, people started buying bikes, and e-bikes were certainly a huge part of that. And although bike sales have kind of plateaued, E-bike sales continue to remain strong because people have realized what a profound change it can make in their lives. The difference in approach that we bring is there are lots of other great bike brands out there, but by and large the way we approach it is making the best bicycle possible and then putting a motor and adding all of this electrified capability to that basic bicycle platform, which is a tried and tested model.

We are trying to do things a little bit in reverse where we’re trying to figure out what is it that people want to get out of a two-wheel experience that currently they’re only really getting from a car, and how we build that into the two wheel experience into what we can still call an e-bike, but providing car-like features, like amazing ride quality, the ability to transport people, adult passengers and large amounts of cargo. And through solving those problems, getting people who are interested in riding bikes but haven’t pulled the trigger on it yet because there hasn’t been anything in the market for them to come over to this side and really get to experience everything that an e-bike can offer. So we are trying to lead also by design and elegance because at our heart we have a sustainability mission. We want to get people out of cars and onto bikes, but we also want people to look good and feel good when they’re doing it as well. That’s a huge part of it. We saw that that was kind of the model that Tesla had established leading with their Model S and the sports car, making that kind of lifestyle desirable first and then bringing additional kind of mass market products to the consumer.

Galen Ettlin:
For you, you’re the revenue and money guy, how are you balancing that creativity with the KPI you’re measuring?

Marc Liu:
Sure, yeah. I mean revenue and let’s call it creativity or the creative aspects of the business are inseparable, especially since we’re a startup. And so every startup, our big challenge is lack of resources relative newcomer to the market. So we have to go out there and tell our story in a way that immediately makes an impact and differentiates us from the pack. And so we start with the hard KPIs that we know we have to hit in order to survive and thrive and also attract investors. And that kind of gives us the shell or the box within, we have to then deliver. And that’s really where the creativity comes from, is from those constraints knowing that we only have X amount of dollars or X amount of personnel and we have to tell this story to as many people as possible, that drives the creativity. So I think they go hand in hand and one really helps the other.

Galen Ettlin:
That’s an interesting point too. We recently had Jascha Kaykas-Wolff from Linux here, and he said a very similar thing along the lines of – the constraints are what lead to the best creativity. If you’ve got some structure, it really leads to better outcomes when it comes to that creative process. So that’s interesting that you also touched on that.

Bob Garcia:
One of the things I’m wondering about, Marc, is just how COVID has possibly evolved or impacted your approach to going to market with the new brand and such a dynamic market?

Marc Liu:
COVID has obviously impacted our business tremendously, both positively and negatively. So on the positive side, as I previously mentioned, it really spurred the demand for two wheelers as people were staying at home and now working from home more often, that kind of lifestyle becomes much more accessible and attractive. But there were also the negative repercussions of huge supply chain issues. We were actually ready to go to market in January, 2020, and we had pre-orders of the bikes that we were only able to fulfill a few months ago because we physically could not get the product out of Taiwan where we manufacture into the US. That forced us to really take the time and lay the groundwork for when we would be able to go to market. So things like making sure that we had all of our sourcing buttoned up, all of the components, so that when the demand hit we would be able to fulfill rapidly. It forced us to take the time to build the strategic partnerships and alliances that would allow us to quickly go to market, and that has borne a lot of fruit. So we’re an omnichannel brand, we sell direct to consumer, but we also sell through select retailers around the country, and we were able to access all of those retailers through the relationships that we built in our kind of furloughed period during COVID. So that’s how we made the most of the time and it’s helped us hit the ground running.

Galen Ettlin:
All right. So Marc, we’ve got some questions we like to ask all of our guests on the Rebel Instinct Podcast. What’s the most rebellious or out-of-the-box thing you’ve done and how would you say it performed?

Marc Liu:
Oh, that is a very good question. One of the things that has been a blessing in my career is that I’ve entered into markets at the beginning of their growth. And so for example, when we started Elemental, the agency, this was back in 2009, and social media and digital marketing as a whole were really just starting to take off as the primary channels of marketing for brands. We had the same learning curve as the established agencies. They didn’t know more than us and we just had to learn a little bit faster in order to compete with them for clients. And so literally when we started the agency, our initial clients were restaurants. I used to live in New York for about seven years and we acquired those clients by walking up and down Broadway, knocking on doors at restaurants, finding the ones that had the most empty seats and going in saying, looks like you need some customers.

We think that we can help you with website design, social media, maybe some Google ads, some Facebook ads. How about we do this for you for free, and if you make money, hire us and make us your agency. And the next question was usually, what’s an agency? And they’re like, okay, we will help you make money and fill these seats for you. And we did that for the first year just knocking on doors. And in a similar period in the throes of the financial crisis, people were having a really tough time financially, but they were also more open to trying new things because obviously what they were doing up until then was not working. And so I don’t know if you would characterize that as being rebellious, but certainly it was a novel approach to group building an agency, and fortunately for us it worked.

Galen Ettlin:
I’d say that’s rebellious with the door knock. That’s scary. It’s a risk. You never know if someone’s going to yell in your face or say, thank you so much for showing up here.

Marc Liu:
Oh definitely had people yell at us and tell us to leave. That happened more than once.

Bob Garcia:
So what advice would you give to marketers to be more rebellious or creative in their work coming out of that creativity that you use to drive business?

Marc Liu:
Creativity is such an interesting thing because we all know people who seem kind of naturally predisposed to out of the box thinking. And so there’s certainly a part of it that seems like it’s innate that’s born with us, but… I don’t believe that it’s a thing that can’t be taught or at least can’t be nurtured. I firmly believe that all endeavors in life require a certain amount of creativity, especially if you want to get ahead of the competition and there are muscles you can train and work on. My wife is a neuroscientist and she does research on children with autism. So in our household we talk a lot about neuroplasticity and concepts like that, concepts that really kind of fly over my head, but she knows a lot about. But because of that, I get to learn about a lot of these different concepts, including divergent and convergent thinking.

Things that have been very helpful for me. But I would say in terms of a simple approach to rebellious and more creative thinking for marketers is to take a look at what is being done in industries that are not yours or those of your client. And so for example, one of the things that we would often do as kind of a creativity hack for our restaurant clients will be to see, what are people in doing in consumer and fashion and spirits and that sort of thing. There seems to be certain repeated patterns or ways that people market those products and can we take those ideas and apply them to our industry? Can we take them wholesale or can we modify them slightly? And we all get kind of trapped in our familiar patterns and that makes us stale and is the enemy of creativity. So taking that step out and seeing what are people doing in completely different fields and asking yourself, can I make this work in my industry? That’s been a pretty good shortcut to generating some creative ideas for us, and I think it’s something that pretty much anyone can pick up and run with.

Bob Garcia:
That’s super helpful. I mean, it’s inspiring because as we work as a company to differentiate our market, it’s super important for us to not get stuck in our box and really look for inspiration externally and pull those kind of thoughts in to challenge our conventions.

Marc Liu:
That is really the trap of expertise. The better you get at something, the more you have repeated practices or patterns that work, the more tempting it is to just fall back on those because they’ve been successful in the past and that really kind of dulls the blade in terms of creativity. So building in mechanisms within your daily practices or your company’s kind of regular practices to force yourself out of that kind of familiar knowledge, I think is essential.

Bob Garcia:
I couldn’t agree with you more.

Galen Ettlin:
We’ve gotten a lot of interesting answers on this one when we’ve asked other guests this, so Marc, how are you a rebel in your non-work life?

Marc Liu:
That’s so funny because I think of myself as being a very kind of ordinary, bland, vanilla type person. I have a daughter who’s a year and a half old. Most of my time outside of work is spent with her, and we also have a dog I cook at home. It’s a very domesticated life. I do make sure that I have time for exercise. I’m a lifelong martial artist and I practice jujitsu. I have a black belt and I also practice other martial arts. I also think of myself as being very ambitious, not just kind of financially or professionally, but I think striving to have happiness in all these different aspects of my life, professionally, personally, health, spiritually. For me that’s very ambitious because I find it very difficult. I find it difficult to try to find that balance between all the different areas. Balance is one of the tricky words. There really never is perfect balance, and so you’re constantly juggling these things and negotiating between different parts of your life that are competing for your attention. And so for me, that for me is the height of ambition to really have it all in a way where I can feel satisfied that I’m not missing out on these things that are truly important to me.

Galen Ettlin:
I always love that question because people will often say like, ‘oh, I’m not that rebellious,’ and then be like, ‘oh, I’m actually a black belt’ and I think it’s a great answer. Thank you for indulging.

Bob Garcia:
That is a really great answer, and balance is so important in life because it’s so easy to get sucked into any one direction and pulled out a whack. In terms of culture and rebel rebell in our culture, what characteristics, what type of persona or attributes do we need more of to rebel from the current constraints of our culture?

Marc Liu:
The idea of a rebel is quite an interesting one for me because I didn’t grow up in America, and it definitely has different connotations here than in many other countries because of the history, because of the culture that’s been built on the backs of that history. Rebel is an important characteristics to have because the world is very fluid. None of us know all the answers to everything. Having a healthy questioning of the status quo or what we’re being told and that sort of thing is the way that we collectively solve those problems or at least start to ask the right questions to get to a place where we can solve those problems. The tricky part becomes how do you know when to question things, when to push knowing that you don’t have all the answers? And I think for me it is the confidence to question things really comes down to critical thinking.

Having the ability to honestly break down issues or problems that I’m seeing and know the limitations of my knowledge and then seek out counsel and ask people who I know have been there before, done it before, and whether it’s in business or politics or anything else, just engaging with people who might have a different perspective and a little bit more knowledge than me. By being very frank about that and not being satisfied with my own kind of initial idea of things, I think that’s where I then get the confidence to then question. Okay, what I’m seeing in front of me doesn’t seem quite right. Everybody says that this is the way that things should be done, but things don’t seem to add up, and so maybe we should look a little bit deeper.

Bob Garcia:
So humility and curiosity and the willingness to lean in and challenge convention sounds like great advice for all of us to think more about as we engage with our day.

Marc Liu:
Yeah, I mean you really need both sides of it. You need the humility to understand what you don’t know and to seek out counsel, but you need the confidence to push when you need to push. And again, trying to find that balance is that’s the name of the game.

Galen Ettlin:
Along those lines, Marc, I’m curious for you, is there a rebellious figure either here in this culture or elsewhere that you look up to or that you think is someone worth celebrating?

Marc Liu:
I’ve become a big fan of Andrew Yang and ever since I discovered him during his presidential candidacy, and regardless of whether you agree with his approach or not his politics, you cannot deny that he is promoting a different perspective on what this country needs to be doing to advance and move forward and improve things for the people. He ran as a democratic candidate initially and did not get a ton of support from the party and now has launched his own party, the forward party. So again, there are policies that I think have a lot of merit. There are other approaches that I would need to dig into a little bit further, but by and large, if you’re looking for a rebel within the state of American politics, you don’t have to look very far – pretty rebellious.

Galen Ettlin:
Makes sense. Outside the box, against the grain, however you want to put it, but not the conventional.

Marc Liu:
Exactly.

Galen Ettlin:
Okay. Well Marc, finally here it is. Time for our ‘honey, I don’t think so’ segment talking about what’s annoying you lately that needs to stop in the marketing or martex space. You have 60 seconds to make your case.

Marc Liu:
My pet peeve, and I’ve had this for a little bit of time, is the tendency for marketing people, whether it’s marketing agencies or marketing tech companies, to promote this idea that we can track and measure everything and we’ve kind of shot ourselves in the foot because technology improved and we have so access to so much data and analytics. And so we’ve gone out there and told brands clients that everything has a straight line between what you do and the ROI and it’s just not true. There are still huge gaps in the data, but even more than that, fundamentally there are things that we do as marketing and salespeople, not because they have a 10x or 20x return, but just because they’re the right thing to do. And I use the example of restaurants. If you don’t know what the ROI of sweeping the floor is, but you do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do. And so especially when it comes down to branding and storytelling, we need to make sure that brands know that those are things that you may not be able to measure but are very important

Galen Ettlin:
Right on time. Maybe one second over, but I’ll give it to you.

Marc Liu:
Okay, thank you. I appreciate that.

Bob Garcia:
I love the wisdom I’ve picked up this morning. Thank you so much for sharing, Marc.

Marc Liu:
Yeah, thanks for having me. This has been a really fun shot.

Galen Ettlin:
All right, Marc, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it. We’re going to link to all of your socials in our description here of the podcast episode. So thanks again.

Marc Liu:
Appreciate it.

Galen Ettlin:
Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast. Be sure to follow Act-On Software for updates and upcoming episodes and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time.

How to Use Marketing Automation to Cross-sell Insurance

Act-On — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 13:00:00 +0000

Most insurance marketers know that if you want to grow your business fast, existing clients are the low-hanging fruit. The average cost to win a new customer across all industries is estimated five times higher than selling to an existing customer. However, this number is even higher for the insurance industry, estimated at seven or even nine times more. On a dollar per customer level, that’s paying between $487 to $900 for each brand new customer.

You already have customers who are happy with your products and services, and if you offer them the right offer at the right time, you can help guide them into more and better policies and options. And, we get it. Figuring out the timing isn’t always easy. That’s where marketing automation comes in.

Insurance policy cross-selling with marketing automation allows you to capture more of your existing customers’ business and do so at scale. With this tool, you can identify new segments within your customer base, deliver relevant content, and convert more business from the people who already know and love your insurance products.

Cross-sell the Right Policies at the Right Time to the Right Customers

You want to retain and expand existing relationships, but if you want to do this successfully, you need to work even harder than in the past. That’s because your customers want hyper-personalized experiences. If you reach out with a product or service that doesn’t feel relevant, you instantly lose customer trust, which is critical in all industries, but especially for insurance. And the next marketing email that you send? Chances are, they’ll click right past it.

So, what is the answer?

The solution is greater personalization, especially considering that almost all customers (71%) say they’re frustrated with shopping experiences that feel impersonal.

Each of your insurance customers is at a different life stage, and the products and services they need change quickly, sometimes in a matter of months. A single adult who gets married or has their first child, for example, may now need products that weren’t relevant a few short months ago.
Marketing automation allows you to tap into your existing database of customers, segment those customers, and figure out what offerings are most relevant. Every time you do this well, the customer will feel like you get them – and you will win their trust.

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages (and how to solve them)

Download eBook

For example, Physicians Insurance needed a way to nurture diverse buyers with highly relevant content, to build trust and convert more leads. They used marketing automation to create more personalized content campaigns and improve conversion rates. A couple of results included:

Increased email engagement. More customers stopped clicking past marketing emails and the company experienced a 31% increase in email engagement.
Higher customer retention rates. Not only could the company now more effectively cross-sell, but retention rates increased. A 95% retention rate was achieved due to more customized content and advanced segmentation.

The company relies on relationships to grow business, and most revenue is tied to the core book of business. Marketing automation helped them to make existing relationships stronger and get positioned for stronger growth.

Lead Management Helps Shorten the Conversion Cycle

Sales and marketing both play an important role in nurturing relationships and building trust. On their own, they are important, but when working together, the results are powerful – and sales cycles are potentially shortened.

Over three-fourths of sales and marketing leaders report that collaboration between the two areas is critical to business growth. If almost all of your competitors are getting this wrong, imagine what happens when you get it right. You instantly earn a competitive advantage.

The most tightly aligned sales and marketing teams achieve on average 24% faster three-year revenue growth and 27% faster three-year profit growth. Additionally, companies that aren’t aligning well are estimated to lose up to 10% of revenue annually. A few more considerations include:

The majority of business goes to those who respond fastest. Up to 50% of sales go to the businesses that respond first. If sales and marketing are aligned, it empowers sales to prioritize the most relevant leads and follow up more quickly.
Improved lead management helps to close deals faster. Sales and marketing alignment helps companies to become 67% better at closing deals.
Customers buy more from companies that deliver content at every stage of their buyers journey. Ninety-five percent of buyers say they purchased from a company that gave them relevant content at every stage in their journey.

For example, Insurance Agency Marketing Services is a company that supports the servicing of tens of thousands of insurance policies nationwide. The company was using a marketing webinar and newsletter program that delivered poor results. Sluggish response rates and low webinar attendance stalled their lead generation and nurturing efforts.

They needed better marketing intelligence for lead tracking, to support sales and marketing to deliver more personalized and relevant content. Through marketing automation, they achieved:

A large increase in webinar registrants. One of the company’s main marketing strategies was webinars, but they had a hard time getting sign-ups. With marketing automation, they experienced a 470% increase in webinar registrations.

Increased web traffic. The company wanted to nurture existing relationships, but it also wanted to plant seeds for new ones. Marketing automation supported a 300% increase in web traffic and click-through rates tripled from 2% – to 6%, well above industry averages of 2.2%.

Since people are more likely to purchase from companies that deliver content at every turn in their journey, marketing automation supports the ability to accelerate funnel building by providing the right content at the right time.

Use Content Marketing to Trigger Automated Campaigns

Your customers receive massive amounts of content, and some of that content is really good. If you hope to compete with the noise, you need to provide excellent content, but equally important, highly relevant content.

Your existing clients are continuously sending you buying signals. The challenge is that many of these signals are going unnoticed. For example, a customer might visit your website and download a product sheet about life insurance. Then he or she might attend a webinar about the topic, and visit the website, again, to gather a few more details. If you want to move this interest from lead to sales, your team needs intelligence to spot the triggers.

Without a consistent framework in place, your marketing to qualified leads might be hit or miss, and your sales team wastes time chasing difficult to convert leads. Tools like lead scoring, used with automated campaigns, help close the gap between marketing and sales efforts and convert more business. A few situations where you can use content marketing to trigger automated campaigns include:

A customer clicks a link in your newsletter. Imagine that you send a newsletter to existing clients. A customer clicks a link within that newsletter to learn more about life insurance, and as a result, you can automatically add that person to a drip campaign. That person will receive more information about the importance of life insurance, and how to pick the best policy.
A customer signals interest during a webinar. You promote a webinar about umbrella policies to an existing customer, and that person signs up. The customer attends the webinar from start to finish, and then, you can segment that customer to receive future follow-up campaigns providing even greater depth on the topic.
A customer visits your website for specific product information. An existing customer visits your website several times to view information about accident insurance. Based on this behavior, you can start sending them targeted information about the benefits of this type of insurance.

Automated campaigns don’t need to be complicated; they can be as simple as a campaign that kicks into action 90 days before a customer’s policy renewal date. Of course, this is the optimal time to review their policy and spot any required changes, but it’s also a chance to learn more about the customer’s situation and if it’s changed.

RSA, for example, needed to deliver personalized campaigns and rise above the noise in a highly competitive market. Using marketing automation, the company was able to increase broker engagement by 300% by delivering personalized and more relevant experiences.

Insurance Policy Cross-Selling: Landing More Business

Selling insurance is all about relationships. You want your customers to feel known, understood, and valued by your insurance company. But doing this effectively in today’s market requires tools that weren’t available in the past, and marketing automation has become a critical part of your toolbox.

With it, you can reach your existing customer more effectively by understanding what they need right now, and then showing them that you understand. As a result, you can create deeper and more meaningful connections with your customers and support growth that helps serve them even better in the future.

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages (and how to solve them)

Download eBook

Customer Marketing Archives - Act-On

How to Upsell Effectively by Automating These 5 Strategies

Upsell Effectively with Industry Segmentation

Use Survey-Driven Campaigns, Mapping to Business Challenges

Upselling Strategy for Your Power Users

Create Feature Adoption Series Based on Product Gaps

Upsell by Teasing Higher-Tier Products

Growing Relationships and Revenue

How to Turn Customers Into Brand Advocates and Build Loyalty

What is Brand Advocacy?

Build Brand Advocacy with Customer Shout-Outs

Co-create Content That Places the Spotlight on Your Customer

Turn Customers Into Brand Advocates with Quick Customer Q&As

Ask Your Customers to Serve as References

Nurture Your Existing Customers to Improve Retention

Expanding Forward

B2B Customer Loyalty & Retention Strategies That Work

Create B2B Customer Loyalty Programs

Set the Tone Early With a Solid Start

Develop a Customer Nurture Series

Look for Key Moments to Grow Loyalty

Set Up a Listening Station

Embrace Complaints as Data

Guiding Customers Toward Loyalty and Retention

Increase Customer Retention: Why Multichannel Marketing Is an Underrated Tool

Why Use Multichannel Marketing with Your Existing Customers?

How to Increase Customer Retention: 4 Strategies

1. Email nurturing

2. Social media

3. Training and tutorials on landing pages

4. Website content with customer stories

How to Improve Customer Retention by Starting Small

How to Reduce Customer Attrition and Keep Your Best Customers

What is Customer Attrition?

How to Reduce Customer Attrition

1. Adoption-Led Growth

2. Sales Expansion Growth

The Importance of a Stronger Foundation

Rethink Measurement

What Is Customer Marketing?

What is customer marketing?

Why is it important?

Customer marketing strategies that work

1. Personalize onboarding

2. Map your customer success journey

3. Segment users with similar characteristics

Measuring your results

Welcome Email to New Client: Best Practices & Example

What is a welcome email?

Why does your brand need a welcome email?

Welcome email open rates

Welcome email best practices

1. Send the welcome message immediately

2. Say thank you

3. Introduce your account team

4. Provide helpful resources

5. Set expectations

6. Include a simple call to action

7. Send more than one welcome email

Optimize your growth

New client welcome email example

Retention Marketing: How We Reached 400 Customer Accounts with a Refreshed Program

Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy: The Three Parts

How We Find Topics Our Customers Love

Tracking Attendance Rates and Planning

Customer Retention Marketing and Adding Value

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 9: Marc Liu

How to Use Marketing Automation to Cross-sell Insurance

Cross-sell the Right Policies at the Right Time to the Right Customers

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages (and how to solve them)

Lead Management Helps Shorten the Conversion Cycle

Use Content Marketing to Trigger Automated Campaigns

Insurance Policy Cross-Selling: Landing More Business

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages (and how to solve them)