All too often, we see marketers halt their relations with a contact once a deal is closed-won — but your marketing initiatives shouldn’t stop there. Client marketing tactics offer a great deal of opportunity to promote upsells and decrease churn. After all, the easiest people to sell to are those who’ve already purchased from you.
Understanding the Importance of Customer Delight
The concept of customer delight goes beyond customer satisfaction. While customer satisfaction focuses on meeting customers' expectations, customer delight goes further by exceeding their expectations. When customers are delighted, they are more likely to become loyal advocates for your brand, spread positive word-of-mouth, and even tolerate the occasional mistake or misstep. In contrast, when customers are dissatisfied, they are more likely to switch to a competitor, leave negative reviews, and damage your brand reputation.
To truly understand the importance of customer delight, let's take a look at some statistics. According to a survey by American Express, 60% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience, and 86% are willing to pay up to 25% more for a superior experience.
Another study by Oracle found that 89% of customers have stopped doing business with a company after a poor customer experience, and 50% of customers have switched to a competitor due to a poor experience.
Clearly, customer delight is a critical factor in driving customer loyalty, increasing revenue, and building brand reputation. But how can your organization achieve this level of customer delight? Let's explore the role of each team in the customer journey.
Measuring Customer Delight
Finally, it's important to measure customer delight to ensure that your strategies are working. While customer satisfaction surveys are a good start, they only provide a limited view of customer sentiment. To truly understand customers' experiences and emotions, you need to use a variety of metrics, including:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
By tracking these metrics over time, you can gain insights into what's working and what needs improvement.
Whose Responsibility Is It to Delight Prospects and Customers?
The short answer is, it's everyone's responsibility. Every team within your organization, from sales to marketing to customer service, plays a critical role in delivering a delightful customer experience. Here's how:
The Role of Sales in Customer Delight
The sales team is often the first point of contact for prospects, making their role in customer delight crucial. When prospects reach out to your sales team, they are looking for more than just a product or service. They want to feel heard, understood, and valued. This is where the sales team can shine by taking the time to listen to prospects' needs, answer their questions, and provide personalized solutions that go beyond the standard pitch.
Sales teams can also play a key role in delighting customers after the sale. By following up with customers, providing regular check-ins, and offering additional value through upselling or cross-selling, the sales team can show customers that they are more than just a number. They are valued partners in their success.
The Role of Marketing in Customer Delight
Marketing plays a critical role in creating a customer-centric culture that delights at every step. By understanding customers' needs, preferences, and pain points, marketing can create targeted campaigns that resonate with customers and drive engagement. From personalized email campaigns to social media outreach, marketing can create touchpoints that show customers that they are valued and understood.
Marketing can also play a key role in educating customers and prospects on the value of your products or services. By providing helpful resources, educational content, and thought leadership, marketing can position your brand as a trusted authority that cares about customers' success.
The Role of Customer Service in Customer Delight
Customer service is often the frontline of customer delight. When customers have an issue or question, they want to feel like they are being taken seriously and that their concerns are being addressed promptly and effectively. This is where customer service can make all the difference.
By providing empathetic and proactive customer service, your organization can show customers that you care about their success and are willing to go above and beyond to help them achieve their goals. This can include everything from timely responses to support tickets to proactive outreach to ensure that customers are satisfied with your products or services.
The Role of Leadership in Creating a Culture of Customer Delight
Finally, leadership plays a critical role in creating a culture of customer delight. By setting the tone for the organization and prioritizing customer satisfaction, leaders can inspire their teams to go above and beyond in delivering a delightful customer experience. This can include everything from providing training and resources to encourage customer-centric thinking to incentivizing teams to prioritize customer satisfaction in their daily work.
Strategies for Delighting Prospects and Customers
While acquiring new business is important, retaining, delighting and evangelizing your existing customers is critical for achieving sustained growth. By investing a portion of your team’s marketing calories into customer delight, you can ensure your customer lifetime value far exceeds the cost of acquisition and that customer referrals lead to new, ideal customers.
To help you kickstart your customer marketing strategy, here are a few valuable tactics for delighting your customers into evangelists.
1. Immersive Virtual Events
Because of the proliferation of both SaaS businesses and remote work, you’re probably used to having customers across the globe. The need (and capability) for revenue teams to meet with customers face-to-face to sell or service their product is nearly nonexistent. But we won’t be the first to tell you that personal relationships still count.
That doesn’t mean you have to spend a huge portion of your marketing or sales budget hosting or sponsoring in-person events. Now and going forward, virtual events offer you a lower-cost opportunity to both engage your prospects and delight your customers.
By hosting immersive events featuring engaging content at a set cadence, your team gains the opportunity to forge valuable, personal connections with clients who may fly under the radar during the regular course of product delivery. Quarterly or annual user group meet-ups and Q&As are great ways for SaaS and other B2B service companies to connect with their clients and encourage knowledge sharing across their user base.
2. Referral Programs
Another way to engage your user base is to enlist them in your marketing and sales process. Referral programs give your customers an option to earn an incentive for sharing their experience with your product or service. And, a well-structured referral program — with clear criteria, easy-to-use marketing materials and a valuable incentive — can allow your customers to shape their own ecosystem.
Your customers will be able to recommend your product or service to other people and, in so doing, bring people with similar pains together to solve them. Through these programs, your customers turn into evangelists, as they bring new, ideal customers into the mix. Inviting your customers to contribute to your company growth trajectory is the very definition of a strong client marketing tactic.
3. Customer Feedback
Your customers can contribute to your growth in more direct ways, as well — through surveys, focus groups and interviews.
Customer feedback programs are designed to help you understand how to better serve and market to your current clients. Taken for their results, they’re a surefire way for you to improve your product, your service delivery, your approach to marketing or just about anything else you can think of. But running a strong program can also delight your customers into evangelists.
By themselves, client feedback programs aren’t known for sowing delight. It would take a really hilarious or insightful survey question to create an evangelist. However, when your company asks a client for feedback and acknowledges that feedback transparently, reacting to it with a swift, responsible and caring response, the experience tends to stick.
In the same way that feedback mechanisms are a client marketing tool, so too should customer service departments be fashioned. A great experience — even during a complaint — is the best way to delight a customer into an evangelist.
4. Customer Newsletters
There are, of course, more traditional customer marketing tactics that can create delight. Newsletters, for instance, are a great way to nurture leads down the funnel, but they can also be used for keeping in touch with your clients and ensuring your brand remains top of mind.
Customer newsletters give your client base fresh content and information that a prospect wouldn’t necessarily be ready to receive. Product releases, company news, educational content and exclusive customer content can help your newsletter so it functions in the same way as your virtual events; it should give your customers something exclusive that actually helps them progress, and they should feel like the experience of engaging with that content is a part of forging a relationship with you. (It is.)
Newsletters aren’t all delight. They’re meant to get a message across, as well. But the delight component is in the additional value provided: you want to help your customers. They can see that when you reach out. The next tactic will let you take that sentiment a step further.
5. Exclusive Customer Content
Show your customers you value them by providing them with contextually relevant content, tailored exclusively to their pains.
Remember, just because a prospect has converted into a customer doesn’t mean that their goals and pain points have vanished; they’ve simply changed. As you continue to build a relationship with your customers, delight will depend upon your ability to understand and respond to those new pains and goals. The same tailored approach you have for sales enablement content should work here.
Start by mapping your customer journey (not your buyer journey). It should reflect the way your customers’ goals grow and evolve through the course of their engagement with your product or service. Once you’ve identified the points along that journey, ask yourself what your customers need in order to accomplish the key goals you mapped. How do you know they need it?
Your client marketing content should effectively address these evolved needs and desires in order to continue delighting your customers into evangelists. Try offering a product sneak peek or promoting educational content that helps customers better use your product or service in the ways that enable their success.
The Takeaway
The ability to delight your customers isn’t just about great product delivery. It’s also about sending them help when and where they need it via customer marketing and providing the best possible experiences with your people, your service, and your content.
