For many companies, customer marketing remains an untapped driver of growth, yet it is often overlooked in favor of new logo acquisitions. But companies are experiencing higher operating costs in today’s market, with longer sales cycles caused more conservative buying behavior and increased decision scrutiny, which is more apparent when selling to new customers.
The benefits of going back to the base are numerous — higher conversion rates, reduced churn, lower costs, and sustainable growth are all substantial gains for companies to stabilize and drive revenue generation.
In recent SBI surveys, CEOs and revenue leaders forecasted that more than 60% of their net new revenue will come from existing customers in 2023; a significant increase from just over 40% in 2022. To meet their 2023 revenue goals, nearly 70% of surveyed leaders see customer marketing as their primary driver.
Yet customer marketing has never been formalized as a discipline, instead as an ambiguous idea for growth. As a result, companies often encounter challenges in adopting effective marketing strategies, raising questions such as:
- What is our aim for customer marketing?
- Who is responsible for managing the customer journey?
- How do we align customer marketing with company goals?
Establishing a clearly defined customer marketing strategy involves many moving parts, and it requires a certain amount of dedicated resources and new roles to make your strategy work. But once the sales team develops stronger relationships with existing customers, the cross-sell and upsell opportunities will quickly pay off.
Customer marketing is more than just a newsletter
But customer marketing is more than just an idea. It is an integrated set of activities designed to drive customer retention, loyalty, advocacy, growth, and participation. It builds healthier and stronger customer relationships.
If done well, it is strategic success made practical. You can easily identify a comprehensive customer marketing plan if it has these key activities:
- Journey-aligned content and communications to support customer value realization.
- Automation / scaling of customer success activities focused on deepening customer relationships and improving CSAT and NPS.
- Advocate identification and cultivation.
- Cross-sell and upsell campaigns and programs.
Have you planned properly to capture the full potential of your existing customer base? Take the Customer Engagement Maturity Assessment and identify the ways you can unlock the potential of customer marketing for your organization.
