Sales Enablement, Reviews & Referrals
Customer Experience Marketing Definition: The tactical changes you make to increase the revenue gained from the relationships you already have.
Why is the Customer Experience Part of Marketing?
Everything your team does – the way they sell, deliver the product, services it and follow up months later – will play a significant role in your future revenue. If you do this well, your revenues will increase; if you do this poorly, you’ll continually rely on new customers to sustain your company. Because all of these areas have an impact on your revenue, we would recommend that your marketing team should be looking at these aspects of your business as well. Improving and equipping your customer experience from a marketing perspective will be one of the most important investments your company will make.
In our previous articles we discussed your 3 Key Marketing Stages, your Outbound Marketing, your Inbound Marketing, and how each of these contribute to your overall leads and revenue. While each of these areas will increase the number of sales conversations you have, your Customer Experience Marketing will focus directly on the sales and revenues gained from the people you’re already in contact with.
To unpack this idea, we typically divide the Customer Experience into 3 areas:
Sales Enablement
The first area your customers will encounter is your sales process. Whether this happens online (with a shopping cart or chat modal), or in a consultation (Zoom, in person, over the phone), or elsewhere, the key questions you’ll want to ask is how you can:
- Increase trust – effortlessly echoing your brand, experience and expertise
- Equip your team – shaping your sales materials around their strengths
- Streamline the process – replacing, combining, or ‘killing’ unnecessary steps
Practically speaking, these questions impact things like signage, business cards, proposal templates, catalogues, and even “finishing touches” like email signatures and contract templates. By looking at each element your customers interact with, you can build a more effective experience which reduces barriers and increases your close rates.
If your business isn’t found in the boardroom (eg. ice cream or Etsy), these same questions apply – perhaps making it easier to sample flavours, or browse colours, or pay more easily. If you were to increase trust, equip your team, and streamline the process, what would that look like?
Fulfillment Process
The next area to look at is the process your clients walk through after they sign. If you sell ice cream this will be short and sweet 😉, but for service companies this can impact months or years of client interactions. We’d recommend approaching this from a practical perspective:
- Understand this will be revised over and over – you don’t need to revamp it all at once
- Tackle the quick wins first – areas that a small change will have a repeated impact
- Tackle the pain points next – areas that might garner a complaint if you don’t improve it
Alongside these rough guidelines, keep in mind that these improvements are intended to impact your revenues – this will most commonly be through:
- Upselling & Cross-Selling – increasing the “Average Order Value” during execution
- Reviews & Referrals – understanding that these are earned during fulfillment, not after completion
- Repeat Customers – creating an experience they feel is worth repeating
The more ways you can improve your fulfillment process, the easier it will be to capitalize on the hundreds of conversations you’re already having.
After Delivery is Done
We’ll be honest – there are endless ways to build a better experience, all of which will increase reviews, referrals and repeat buyers. But there is one area that most businesses are missing — the after-sale experience. While many businesses are eager to grab the cheque, shake hands and move on, there’s far higher ROI in sticking around.
Within your business, ask these key questions:
- How/when are we asking for reviews?
- How/when are we asking for referrals?
- Where/when are our upselling opportunities before project completion? What about after project completion?
- How do we guarantee the customer is smiling when they pay the final bill?
- Months and years after completion, how do we show the customer we care about them?
It’s also good to keep in mind that these aren’t easy questions. What worked for one business may not work for yours; some things need to be tried (and fail) before you discover what works; just because you didn’t get referrals in your first year, doesn’t mean they aren’t possible. Sometimes the reason these tactics are difficult is because of a problem in a different part of the process (eg. a grumpy installer), and as soon as you fix the other problem, this area opens up as well.
How Do You Measure the Success of Your Customer Experience?
Most businesses would say that by fulfilling everything they promised they have delivered a great experience. Unfortunately that’s not success – that just means you’re not in breach of contract (please, hold your applause). A successful customer experience should be measured through:
- Your Close Rate (percentage of deals you win)
- The average Customer Lifetime Value (how much an average customer will spend over the years)
- The ratio of positive reviews compared to total customers
- The ratio of referrals compared to total customers per year
When you take the time to improve your Customer Experience, you will see these results slowly increase and with them, your yearly revenues.
So let’s take a look at the whole picture again:
- Outbound Marketing (increasing exposure)
- Inbound Marketing (converting interested buyers into leads)
- Customer Experience Marketing (this article)
So what next? We have a few recommendations at the bottom of the Marketing 201 Overview…
