TIG #10: A Simple Way To Improve Customer Engagement

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to share a very simple tip that you can implement to improve customer engagement.

Connecting with customers is essential if you want to drive success. But the playbooks we used to rely on to drive our engagement strategy are no longer working.

Your customers are using an average of 200+ SaaS applications. Each with its own Customer Success strategy. With so much attention competition out there, we need to re-imagine our customer engagement tactics.

Research shows that:

The Median SaaS Blog Shrunk by 1.64% and the median time on page was 3 minutes and 19 seconds (source)
Email response rates are down 40% vs. pre-pandemic.

This one powerful idea is the key to capturing your customer’s attention, adding true value to your customer’s business and furthering loyalty.

🔑 Reduce The Noise, Increase The Value

Chances are that your customer’s inbox is overflowing. They are overwhelmed with the volume of comms that each of their vendors is throwing at them. The spray and pray approach is causing people to simply ignore all the communication you send to them.

It’s not that email is dead. In fact, email is still a great way to connect. Last year, I ran an email programmatic play at Hubspot that drove a 40% reply rate and generated 2500+ Success Qualified Leads.

The issue is the quality and relevance of the content that companies are sharing. The same point of contact gets targeted with product content, sales offers, CSMs reaching out to book a call etc.

Customers want cohesion. Content that aligns with their own goals and challenges.

How did this play work?

Using very specific customer buckets we identified:

The right companies
The right use-cases
The right people in the business
Once we had the right list, we created a series of email campaigns, designed with the goal of educating these key personas with industry best practices and use cases that were relevant to their own roles.

The content for these campaigns was a mix of text, videos and webinars. We went deep into the use cases, had plenty of tactical ‘how-tos’, and focused on things customers could action straight away in their portals.

We stayed away from a sales pitch. Focusing on what each persona could achieve with products they already had. We only positioned premium features from an enterprise subscription once the value based on what they already had was clearly articulated.

The results were fantastic. The reply rate was over 40% and more than 30% ended up booking 1:1 time with their CSM to discuss the use cases further. We generated over 2500 SQLs on the back of these.

So instead of creating countless newsletters with lists of the latest product updates, sent to the same POC over and over again, try contextualising for your customers’ business and hone into educational content that can help specific personas do their jobs better.

Relevance and Value.

Well, that’s it for today!

TL;DR

Segment your customers better including persona and org maturity.
Bring depth to your content. Focus on education, not marketing.
Blend different mediums. Be creative. Include videos and images when relevant.

1 lesson, but a critical one.

See you next Friday.