Episode 13: Mastering customer lifecycle marketing, from onboarding to advocacy

Host  0:00  
Welcome to The Advocast, where we discuss all things customer advocacy, discover the latest trends, best practices, and tangible advice as we talk to some of the brightest and sharpest professionals in the industry.

Host  0:14  
Hey, Rachel, how are you?

Rachel Ward  0:16  
Hello, Maria, I'm wonderful. How are you?

Host  0:18  
I'm doing great, and thank you so much for accepting the invite to our podcast, The Advocast. I'm so happy to have you, and I would love to start straight on and have a first question. How did you end up in the customer marketing world, or universe, as we like to call it?

Rachel Ward  0:39  
Yeah, thanks for asking that question. My journey is a little different than most, so I spent the early parts into the middle parts of my career. I guess I'm still.. I've got a ways to go, but for about 15 years I worked in the adult beverage industry, so I work for brands like Brown Foreman, Diageo, and Heaven Hill, so if you're a big bourbon nerd, or you like tequilas, or we had rums, you name it, we had it. I did field marketing and sales for those brands, and then a little bit mid-career decided to make a switch. I was traveling a lot, and my husband had been working - he's been at Mailchimp for almost 14 years now, but at the time it wasn't quite so long, and I was noticing the better benefits and balance and time off, and the lack of traveling or working at, you know, 11 o'clock on a Saturday night. So I decided to make the switch into tech, and I started in partner marketing. I had managed a lot of channel partners in the industry, and the industry being the alcohol industry, and that's distributor partners, so it was a really good segue into tech, definitely a big learning curve, you know, a lot of things are transferable, but how we talk about them and the tools that we use, very, very different, and so started in partner marketing, I was rocking and enroll in there, and then at the time I was working at Call Rail, and we were one solid core product, and the team had decided they would be launching another product, and soon several more products to become a platform, a marketing automation platform, and so our CRO was very passionate about expansion within our customer base and selling these additional products and tools to our customers, and so I sort of fell into customer marketing that way. I think at first they called me demand gen manager, I got named a lot of different things, and I had a lot of different managers until we kind of figured out where I belonged, but I really started with a focus of expansion marketing, and so it was a little bit of demand gen for customers, and really, through, I was kind of doing it on my own, figuring it out as I go. It was a really great opportunity. Looking back, I'm so grateful to have had the chance to have no idea really what I was doing, and test and fail, and test and win, and just iterate along the way, and yeah, so eventually realized we were missing other parts of the life cycle, like adoption. There was a lot of opportunity to work on some retention and advocacy pieces, and eventually grew a team, and so that's how I ended up in customer marketing. And I've never looked back. I love

Host  3:17  
it. Amazing, amazing, you have a huge and long experience, and I would like to know, like, from your perspective as an expert, how did you see the landscape change? What would they change? Did something stay the same, or what are the overall trends you are seeing in the industry?

Rachel Ward  3:35  
Yeah, so you know, I think several customer marketers might have different answers, but for me, what's changed a lot over the last few years, especially recently, are customer expectations. Now, more than ever, customers are expecting you to send them personalized and relevant communications. They don't want their time wasted or their inbox crowded with irrelevant offers, or you know, maybe they're using a product they don't want to be sold the product they're already paying for and using. So, with that comes personalization and personalization capabilities. I think the tools have advanced, and while nothing is ever perfect, there's a lot of opportunity now to, you know, create rich segmentations and personalized communications, and you know what else is focused, I think, or sorry, what else has changed would be a, and this is a little bit of what's trending as well. What I've seen a lot of from my point of view, it's been a huge change switch from advocacy focus roles to lifecycle marketing and retention marketing and expansion marketing roles coming open in in the job market and at companies and I think there's a huge growing investment in, you know, making. Sure, your customers are set up for success from the moment they become a customer all the way through their journey till they renew, and so that's been a really big growing focus that I would say is trending, and something that's changed.

Host  5:12  
What do you think about AI, and how do we, you know, how did artificial intelligence already influence our lives, and how will we influence even more in the future?

Rachel Ward  5:25  
Yeah, so that's definitely shaking things up, and going to continue to do so. I am, I know a lot of people get kind of on edge about AI. I think it's great. I see it as a way to not erase jobs, but create more efficiency in roles to streamline processes to help with automation, so you know, as customer marketers, we're oftentimes asked to find and produce voice of customer content, like case studies or testimonials, and some of these AI tools are able to come in and scrape calls that exist within your sales database or your customer success database, and you can find some of those rich insights or happy customers that way. So that kind of takes a little bit of the burden off of the one to one communication with CS, or trying to find that perfect customer. You know, there's going to be a lot of changes, I think, with AI, and we're seeing people get really creative with how they want to test using it within their product, so I think it's really exciting, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else is coming.

Host  6:27  
Yeah, I'm also on this on this part of on this side as well. Like, first we are doing and producing a lot of voice of the customer stories, so first it was like, oh my god, will they replace us? How that will work, but actually I see it now as an enhancement to our processes, something which can make our lives easier, we can do things faster. So it's a lot of, I see it more as an efficiency tool and creativity tool at some point, and we start implementing and using it, but I kind of like it as well, and I'm excited, what's there to come.

Rachel Ward  7:03  
Agreed. Yes, it's, it's only as strong as its user, I think. So, you know, it's who knows, maybe one day I'll be wrong, but for now, that's the way I see

Host  7:14  
it. Yeah, yeah, agree. And you also mentioned customer lifecycle marketing. You mentioned the more and more of the advocacy focus is shifting to expansion customer lifecycle marketing, and I would like to know what's the simple definition for you. How would you describe customer lifecycle marketing?

Rachel Ward  7:40  
Yeah, so put simply, customer lifecycle marketing is the strategic approach to, you know, guiding your customers, nurturing your customers throughout their relationship or their journey with you, with your brand. So that's from the moment they become a customer, you want to onboard them, get them to the aha moment quickly, then you want to help them become a richer user, a stickier customer, maybe they use more features, what you know, maybe they need more integrations, whatever that is that you've identified makes a power user, so you help them adopt and then you move them along to maybe their stage of growth, where they're a really good fit for some additional tools or features that you offer, all the way to, you know, renewing with you, and then shouting from the rooftops how amazing you are to other customers to that advocacy point in their journey,

Host  8:31  
and you know so much about the life cycle marketing. I would like to ask you, what would you advise? What advice would you give to someone if they would like to start a customer life cycle strategy from scratch.

Rachel Ward  8:46  
Yeah, so I've, I've gotten to do this three times now. So, by no means am I an expert, I learn something new every time, because every company is different. But I would say my first piece of advice is to not boil the ocean, you cannot do it all at once, and I think we all know this in tech, but if you're a type A perfectionist personality like me, you're going to see all of the different gaps and opportunities, and you're just possibly going to get overwhelmed or want to do it all and get frustrated by that, but really just get started, so you know, first I really recommend starting with your customer journey map, or your lifecycle map, or you know, there's several different names for it, but this is a key tool for understanding what customer communications are currently going out, how other teams are engaging the customer, and at what stage they're engaging the customer, and so it gives you a, even if it's not perfect, even if it's not all of your segmentations, it could be just your general ICP that you get started with, and you identify, you know, how are you talking to each customer through what channels at each stage, simple like that. So start with your customer journey map, and then you know for. Find that low hanging fruit. Find some of those gaps that you can kind of get rolling out quickly. This is a very easy example. It's usually this is already happening, but let's say you, you're starting from scratch, and you're, you find out that customers are getting no communication for marketing whatsoever. It's only CS, and maybe products sending out, you know, offers for beta, so an easy low-hanging fruit, while you're building all of that other stuff, or even ramping up your first campaign, is to simply start a customer newsletter, where you can just engage with them, whether that's product updates, whether that's new content offerings, just whatever you've got. It's a great way to start testing some content and some assets and initiatives, and just see what works while you're building out your first campaign, so you know, and then again, collaboration is key. You can't build your customer journey without cross-functional alignment and help and understanding, you know, how products engaging the customer, how CS is engaging the customer, possibly how support is engaging the customer, and even sales, because sometimes customers make their way back to sales, depending on your internal processes. And then my last piece of advice for starting from scratch is to be patient, you know. Rome wasn't built in a day, which we've all heard, but the second part of the phrase, which isn't as commonly shared, is they were laying bricks every hour, so you know, starting those small initiatives, grabbing that low hanging fruit, launching a few things, even if it's a one size fits all, which, as marketers, you know, make us cringe, but sometimes you just got to get it out there to see who's responding, what's working, and what's not, so that it can inform your, your later and bigger strategy when you're ready to scale and and grow

Host  11:42  
amazing, so now we have all the life cycle process in place on paper, nicely built. How do we actually bring it to reality? Is there any magic secret which we can do it quicker and easy?

Rachel Ward  12:00  
Yeah, so I might have jumped into this question a little bit in my last one, so I'll repeat myself a little bit here, but again, with that cross-functional alignment, that is so important. Understanding when other customers are reaching out, or, sorry, it when other teams are reaching out to customers is important, you know, understanding what other teams are trying to do with customers, so that you can align, you can get their buy-in when you need their help. You know, you're going to need Rev Ops help to build the things that you need to build to be able to track the efficacy and impact of your campaigns and your programs. You're going to need product. If you're a traditional SaaS product, you're going to have in-app as a channel, so you're really going to need that relationship. So, when you just, when you get your journey map, and you've decided a few things you want to kick off, you know you don't want to do it in a box. You want to make sure you're communicating with other teams, so they know what you're doing. And also, you know one thing I didn't mention, which I should, is be sure you know what your goals are. You may determine, you may discover new goals or things that are important that you didn't account for, but you always want to start toward working for something, and that's what you're going to communicate to those other teams to get buy-in or learn what it's important to them, so you can kind of help them with their goals as well, and then you know, test, you're never going to launch your programs with the right answers, the right segmentations. I shouldn't say never, it's very rare that anybody probably would, right out the gate, have exactly the right audiences, maybe even the right timing, or the right criteria for your segmentations, but do your best with what you have, get it out the door, measure against those metrics that you set for yourself, and then make changes and do it again. So, you know, I worked a lot with product team over the years, and they, I've learned a lot from them about testing, and testing is key. Just, it's how you learn, it's how you make it better, it's how you get better and how you have more success and stronger results.

Host  14:04  
Yeah, we like to self test and fail fast, so you can then move on to the next stage, and you have to keep on repeating. So, just what I heard is start small or start with whatever you have, doesn't have to be totally segmented, and then go and just roll up your sleeves and go and test it and fail and learn and repeat cycle and then exactly collaboration and just engaging everybody, so they're all aware about these initiatives, and I also heard that you talk a lot about goals, so when you think about the three most important KPIs to measure, what would you suggest we should focus on?

Rachel Ward  14:50  
Yeah, so this three, it's hard to pick three, but I think you know your adoption rates is. Are going to be important, so when you're running those adoption campaigns after the onboarding or implementation stage in your life cycle, you'll really want to work with product to be able to measure and understand how you're influencing that feature usage or those integration happening or whatever it is that you're working towards, and you need your customers to do to become that super user, that's going to be really important to understand the efficacy of your campaigns. For me, a big one is always going to be expansion pipeline, so this looks different everywhere, and how you know, are you creating customer leads that go back to sales, or are you, do you not have that model, and you're simply trying to create engaged customers that you're identifying in some way that they're engaged enough to want to talk with CS or sales, for you know, to upgrade to buy another product, whatever that is. Sometimes it's demo requests, maybe you do have it built where you can create opportunities, but just building that expansion pipeline is going to be really important. And then retention rate, or your churn rate, or whatever it is you're measuring, for me it's oftentimes net retention that's going to be really important, and that I'll be clear is a shared KPI. All of these are really, but retention is not a campaign that you run. It is an experience throughout their entire, throughout a customer's entire journey with you. So that's CS, that's support, that's marketing. But there are things we can do in marketing to influence retention and to help reduce churn, and to create happier customers. A lot of that happens in the adoption stage, but aligning with CS, aligning with maybe support shares that goal. Whoever has that goal, that's going to be really important to understand your overall success of your lifecycle marketing strategy.

Host  17:00  
Thank you so much. I really like it, and I like how extension and retention are super important in the way you look at lifecycle marketing, and I think all the companies need that, to be honest, right? Like, we are all about growing, we are all about happy customers, we are all about detaining the happy customers, and it's quite a complex field. So, if I look at the lifecycle marketing, there are many touch points where we kind of connect with the customer, and I just want to know, do you have any tips and tricks? How to avoid the overuse of the customer, or like burning out your customers and making sure they have like this excellent experience throughout the journey.

Rachel Ward  17:48  
Yeah, so this is definitely a challenge I think we've all experienced. Everybody needs to talk to the customer. That's why I say customer marketing is the most cross-functional role in a company, because the customer touches every area of the business. What I have found works best is that you create a gatekeeper, and you need leadership buy-in from all teams to ensure that everybody understands that you do not reach out to the customer without going through the gatekeeper. Now, I've been this gatekeeper, but it doesn't have to be the customer marketer, it could be someone on CS, maybe it's your VP of marketing, usually they don't want to deal with that, but he's smaller company, maybe that's the case, the real, I mean, it's not a, it's not an exciting answer, you just need that gatekeeper, and that person is not - they're not there to say yes or no, they're just there to say when and how, right? Like, not everything needs to be its own email or its own in-app message. Not everything needs to come from CS and marketing and product, you know. So it's just someone who has that bird's eye view, who is able to see all communications when they're going out to create that communication format as well. You know, we, I don't think we should be emailing or reaching out to customers more than twice a week, and even that is heavy at times, but sometimes you need that twice a week if products got something really important to say, or legal has something to share, so yeah, just working with teams to make sure everybody can meet their initiatives, because what you really don't want to do, we all put so much time and effort into these communications, and these, or asking customers to do things for us, whatever it is, we don't want to compete against ourselves internally, either, right? We don't want to all be shouting, because eventually, if it's just a bunch, it becomes a bunch of noise, and your customer just drowns you out. So, that's why it's important. If someone wants, even if product has a beta, they're communicating with you who's in that beta, so you cannot, as a customer marketer, maybe reach out to them for advocacy activities at that time, or you know, maybe you can just be mindful of what campaigns are in, maybe they're in a lot, so you. Apostate, because you know they're going to be getting a lot of different communications from from products, so I think that that's really what's worked for me, and it takes time, and it takes some re-creating of new habits, but it, it usually eventually will settle out into a nice rhythm.

Host  20:17  
So, gatekeeper is essential.

Rachel Ward  20:21  
Absolutely,

Host  20:21  
what I hear. Perfect. Thank you. I want to shift gears a little bit. We are attending Customer X Com in Boston in October, and I wonder, like, are you excited about it? What is your expectation about the conference? I'm excited because I think it's a great event, and I'm super excited to meet you in person, not just like over here virtually, so that's nice. But what about you?

Rachel Ward  20:50  
Likewise, I am excited. I have been a part of these customer marketing communities for years, and I've talked to people over Slack, over Zoom, all different types of channels, virtually, and I am just so thrilled to meet so many of these people I've been talking to for years in person, to have a meal with them, to hug them if they don't like hugging, shake their hands, I'm a hugger, but I know not everybody is, and really just create some of that face to face interaction, I think it's so important. I'm all, I'm all team remote, but even I think you know all all companies for that relationship building need that in-person interaction at some point throughout their years. So this is going to be really great for just deepening those relationships within the community. And then I also, something I think that's really great about this conference is it brings CS, or customer success, and customer marketing together, and you know, when we talk about those trends in life cycle marketing, where retention and expansion have become a main focus, it's so important that CS and CMA really work together and align on their goals and align on their initiatives and agree with how they want to engage the customer, so having a conference that gets, you know, those two teams together is really great for learning from one another and getting to hear, you know, how others think about on a different team, how they think about engaging the customer, and I think it'll be really a really great experience for both teams of people

Host  22:28  
totally in alignment. We have been remote for over 18 years, for us it's a super special time to get to meet everybody, and even just to meet my team, it's a special moment for me, but being able to be part of this amazing community makes me really happy, and being able to spend the in-person time together and get all the learnings, it's amazing, and I also like what you talked about, the customer success and customer marketers also believe that these roles are closer than we think, and should be talking and collaborating even more closer, so getting the learnings will be amazing. And Rachel, you'll be a speaker as well. So I am super excited, and I would love to ask you, what bit will your topic be at conference.

Rachel Ward  23:22  
Yes, I am leading one of the workshops this year on expansion and how to, you know, master it. I will do our best at helping you master it in 50 minutes, but I am co-leading this session with Elise, and I'm going to butcher her last name. I've asked her how to say it multiple times, Kia Rello, but she has even more experience than I do, and I've actually had so much fun working on this session with her. I've learned from her, hopefully she's learned a little bit from me. But we'll be leading this workshop, so we've got 50 minutes. It's a hands-on workshop, so the goal is that you come in, you understand how to build your extent expansion strategy, at least from a high level, and then you'll dig in and start building on your own expansion roadmap, so it's something that you can take away to your job when you go home, and hopefully use as a, as a guide to help you get kickstarted, or maybe even improve what you've already got,

Host  24:20  
and Who and why should attend this session. I think the why you already mentioned, like being able to take something tangible after the workshop, this is always, I find, the most valuable piece. I like the theory, but if there is something which is really hands on and practical, that's my preferred way of working. But who do you think would benefit the most.

Rachel Ward  24:44  
I think anyone who has just started building expansion campaigns, or maybe you've been an advocacy professional, and expansion has just landed in your lap, and you really haven't done a lot of campaign work in general. This is going to be really great. For you to come in and learn a little bit about the method behind how to develop your strategy, some of the things you could, should consider, who you should work with, how to measure your success. So you know, I would say I think originally we thought anyone, beginner to expert, should join. I think because it is a limited amount of time, if you are already an expansion expert, if you're welcome, you would be a great asset to those hands-on, you know, breakout, but this is definitely for people who are kind of getting started or earlier in their expansion initiatives.

Host  25:39  
Amazing, so I hope to see many, many attendees joining your workshop, especially if they want to learn about expansion, and if they want to come up with a plan, really, which they can then execute on. Great, thank you, Rachel. And I have the last fun question, which is, if you could, and if you had a chance, or for us, if you have a moment, and you can put something on a T-shirt, which is like a tagline for customer marketing role, customer advocacy, what would it be?

Rachel Ward  26:17  
Yes, so you know, you share these questions with me ahead of time and I had thought of like a black t shirt with skulls and roses and it was like badass customer marketer disrupting norms and raising ROI and then today I was kind of going over my notes and my answers and and I had a different thought and I think what I'd really put on a t shirt is please approve the case study please or just tell me to get lost, so I can move on.

Host  26:44  
I like the best, the better process, or like, please approve it, or just okay,

Rachel Ward  26:54  
yeah, like I'll wear the please approve this case study, please, to all of my first intro customer discovery calls, or the interviews, like, you know, they say, Why are you wearing that? Well, toward the end of this process, you're gonna like ghost me for months. Please don't do that. And

Host  27:13  
later, why? Perfect. Thank you so much, Rachel. It was so much fun, and I really appreciate your expertise and your in-depth knowledge, and I think people who will attend the session at Customer X will learn much more about extension, and I'm glad that they will have a chance to also talk to you in person, so you can share the many fails and triumphs which you had throughout this journey in the lifecycle marketing.

Rachel Ward  27:50  
Yes, I would love to chat. So, if you, if you see me, reach out if you have any questions.

Host  27:56  
Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much for having me. Perfect. Thank you so much, and have a great, fantastic rest of the day.

Rachel Ward  28:07  
Thank you. You too. I really loved being here. Thank you.

Host  28:12  
This episode was brought to you by Wings for You, helping global B2B tech brands unleash the power of their customers' voice. Wings for you customer stories and advocacy programs help you deepen customer relationships, increase retention, and close more deals faster.