Episode 5: 9 Ways to Find Advocates

Plus, an Assignment for next week

Hi! 👋 Welcome to the next episode of The CMA Newsletter where 250+ marketers get better at building Customer Marketing programs and strengthening relationships inside organizations in less than 5 minutes.

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Today is a hard day to write but I’m going to push through. You’ll receive this the day the Supreme Court has ended the nation’s constitutional protections for abortion. I’m so sad and disappointed.

Customer Marketing has got me through some dark times. I know that sounds weird but I’m the type that dives into work to get my mind off of the terrible awfuls.

With that said, here are the 8 ways I find engaged customers that just might become advocates:

• Net Promoter Score - Email triggered off score (8,9,10’s)

  • From what I have read for years, you’ll want to ask your promoters to take an action the same day or the day after they give the score. Reason being is because they are HOT and ready to engage further.

  • I send the G2 review ask first. You can do whatever is most important to you at that time. Reference program, Advocate program, get into beta, etc

  • I have a wait step of 4 days then I hit em with the Advocacy program.

• Customer Success Qualified Advocate Program- CSMs are 🔑.

  • See Episode 3

• MKTO Smart List - Bring in all the customers who are engaged in other email programs.

  • Build a smart list in MKTO - Show me all of the customers who have opened 9 out of the 10 marketing emails. WHAT? That’s crazy! Yes, these people exist and you want them in your program! These customers are super into your brand and content. Hungry customers if you will!

  • In the same smart list, filter out non happy accounts and customers in onboarding (or any other exclusions

  • With your list set up, you’ll have a constant flow of folks to target.

  • Then the flow step in MKTO is to send the email inviting them into your advocacy program.

• Engagio (acquired by Demandbase)

  • Did you know you can see all of your customers who are looking at the content on your website and how many minutes they are spending with your brand? 

  • Upload your active customers and create a view of all contacts.

  • Work with ops to set a certain threshold of engagement.

  • Engagement describes something fundamental about the customer’s connection to your brand: Higher degrees of engagement mean a deeper commitment. More time. More emotion. More of a relationship. More activity – such as buying and advocating. In short: engagement matters.

  • Trigger emails to folks spending X amount of engagement minutes with your website content.

• Usage Reports - We use Tableau. Other tools include Amplitude or Pendo

  • Build dashboards and perform ad hoc analyses of what your customers are doing the most of or least of.

  • This is more manual —> I extract the CSV of the users I want to target and create a more personal outreach based on the info I now know.

• After Renewal or Upsell

  • Automate an outreach or a enable CSMS to nominate them into the program.

• Support Tickets - The more support tickets, the stronger the user.

  • It depends on the stage of the company. I’ve always worked at pre-IPO companies and it’s a great indicator. It also depends on the way your program is structured. We want both raving fans AND people who are engaged at every level. At Sendoso, Support tix means they are sending a ton so they would benefit from our community to learn from one another and in turn, lesson the support tickets and ease off CSMs.

• Account Based Marketing Tactics

  • Treat non-advocates with an ABM approach. Get a target list, run email programs with a personalized direct mail play, & retargeting ads. 

  • *Tip*- Include your CSMs in these plays. They have the strongest relationship with those big whale accounts. Send the direct mail from them. You’ll get way better response rates.

• Set up Gong Trackers

  • Setting up Gong trackers for CMA can be an effective way to find people who love your platform. Relevant key words can be set up to capture customer interactions with CSMs that look for positive sentiment in customer conversations.
    

I want you to create a slide for your CSMs to add to the customer onboarding deck. It should explain the value customers will receive when they enter the program. See my slide all the way at the bottom of Episode 1.

I like to position it as an exclusive community that you have to work towards. So the program isn’t offered to everyone. You have to hit a certain inclusion criteria like:

• Be graduated from onboarding

• Account is healthy

• Doing X with your platform.

This creates intrigue and excitement so when they do receive the automated email or personalized outreach from the 9 ways listed above, they are eager to join. (In a perfect world) :)

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Love your CMA Soulmate,

Leslie

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More Digital Resources

1. Catch up on previous newsletters here.

2. Follow me on Linkedin for edu-taining content on CMA tactics

3. Check out my video course Measuring the ROI of Customer Marketing & Advocacy if you want to showcase the ROI of your programs. Enjoy your 20% off

4. I took my metrics sheet out of the course as an extra offering. Customer Marketing & Advocacy Metrics Spreadsheet is available now if you aren’t ready to purchase my course.