Table of Contents
intelligent
Lifecycle
Marketing
Bluenose. All rights reserved
1
Table of Contents
Introduction
Definitions
Nurturing the Customer Journey through Intelligent Lifecycle
Marketing
Requirements for Implementations
Intelligent Lifecycle Marketing Process
Conclusion
2
Introduction
Successful organizations have a rigorous, operationalized, and quantifiable
marketing approach to the pre-sales motion. There’s a highly defined process
on how businesses can nurture opportunities to a high level of qualification.
But many companies don’t apply the same level of structure to the post-sales
process. From the moment the customer relationship commences, businesses
need to develop strategies for growing adoption, closing renewal and upsell
opportunities, and creating customer champions to serve as advocates.
Currently, many organizations approach customer marketing through hightouch interactions with account administrators and sponsors or via mass
messages to end users based on marketing priorities. Both approaches
carry significant drawbacks. The first doesn’t deliver true account insights
because it usually lacks visibility of end user engagement. Furthermore, this
approach doesn’t efficiently scale as a business ramps up its customer base.
Since the second approach lacks proper targeting and relevancy, it can lead
to messages that appear like spam to end users, which damages the overall
customer experience.
In order to better extend the marketing function beyond leads and
opportunities to paying customers, organizations need to utilize lifecycle
marketing. While lifecycle marketing involves delivering value throughout the
customer journey, this paper introduces the concept of “intelligent” lifecycle
marketing. Intelligent lifecycle marketing involves programmatically engaging
with every end user of every customer in order to better build a base of
advocates and drive adoption. Intelligent lifecycle marketing is much more
than simply communicating with customers, as it must be personalized for
every account and end user. Just like the pre-sales approach, a lifecycle
marketing framework must be built with scalability, structure, and quantifiable
3
metrics in mind.
The purpose of this white paper is to assist companies in developing an
operational framework for intelligent lifecycle marketing. We explore the
requirements for this initiative and include some example campaigns to
illustrate its value to businesses with a subscription model.
Definitions
In this section, we’ll define certain words in the context of intelligent lifecycle
marketing.
Customer
Most businesses define “customer” at the account level. By doing so,
businesses often rely on anecdotal information from administrators or
executive sponsors. This approach doesn’t provide true visibility into the
health of a customer.
In the B2B software world, the “customer” must mean every end user for
every account. This is the only way to truly understand a customer base.
Product Adoption
Many organizations think of product adoption as a binary metric for each
end user. They then classify customers as having “X% product adoption.”
A more robust definition is needed in order to properly measure this
4
important business metric. Adoption should encompass: core feature usage,
differentiated feature usage and new feature usage. Furthermore, the number
of usage events (defined as a designated type of activity) should be measured
for every feature category.
Core feature usage gives organizations an indicator of whether users have
effectively been onboarded and are gaining a baseline level of value.
Differentiated feature usage gives your organization insight into whether the
product is being fully utilized and the potential risk of customers moving
to another vendor. New feature usage adoption helps to gauge if product
investments are paying off.
Advocacy
Advocacy is crucial in the enterprise software world because advocates buy
more, refer more and can meaningfully reduce the cost of acquiring new
customers. Advocates are happy, passionate customers who are willing to say
great things about your brand and product – often without asking.
It’s important to segment the champions of your brands into “active
advocates” and “passive advocates.” Active advocates are the ones that
appear in your social media pages, webinars, case studies and other
marketing material. There are a variety of tools and programs to identify,
nurture and engage these active advocates.
Passive advocates are end users who utilize your product every day and enjoy
it but don’t evangelize your brand in a meaningful way. Passive advocates
tend to be just as valuable as active advocates due to their in-depth
understanding of a product. Analyzing data is the only way organizations can
discover passive advocates.
5
Nurturing the Customer
Journey through Intelligent
Lifecycle Marketing
Below, we’ll list a few examples of intelligent lifecycle marketing campaigns
that SaaS organizations should use to nurture the customer journey. These
campaigns are focused on onboarding, growing adoption, nurturing upsell and
cross-sell business, and driving advocacy.
Onboarding
Business Objectives
An onboarding lifecycle marketing campaign should have the following
objectives:
To efficiently enable end users of an account with an organization’s
solution at scale.
To identify and educate end users who are lagging in product
adoption.
To provide a smooth transition to subsequent campaigns focused
on more in-depth adoption initiatives.
Criteria for Success
Organizations should use the following metrics to monitor the quality and
efficiency of onboarding:
6
License utilization within an account.
Base level feature adoption per end user.
Average time to license activation.
Average time to base feature adoption.
Data Sources
In order to deploy an effective onboarding lifecycle marketing campaign,
organizations need to integrate with the following systems to collect and
update customer data:
CRM to assess licensing information.
Product usage to track license and feature utilization.
Marketing Automation across email, SMS and push notifications
to generate and monitor outbound campaign activity, reach, and
response.
Campaign Example
An onboarding campaign can be triggered after a deal closes and immediately
after the implementation team conducts its kickoff meetings in order to
maintain momentum. Effective onboarding campaigns focus on the benefits
of the product for the end user’s everyday business objectives, as opposed to
the features or capabilities.
Robust Adoption
Business Objectives
A robust adoption lifecycle marketing campaign should focus on one of
7
the following objectives:
Establish adoption for core features in order for users to attain a
baseline of product value.
Establish adoption for differentiated features in order for users to
gain full product value and increase switching costs to a competitive
solution.
Establish adoption for new features in order to make sure that product
investments are paying off.
Criteria for Success
Organizations should use the following metrics to monitor the quality and
efficiency of robust adoption:
Core feature usage events by end user.
Differentiated feature usage events by end user.
New feature usage events by end user.
Time to adoption for each feature category.
Data Sources
In order to deploy robust adoption marketing campaigns, organizations need
to connect to information from the following data sources:
Time-series usage data allows organizations to gauge feature
adoption and determine trends and patterns.
CRM data, particularly support information, can signal if there are
technical issues that could hinder adoption.
Marketing automation solutions can help map outbound campaigns to
fluctuations in end user usage activity.
8
Campaign Example
A robust adoption campaign can drive adoption for differentiated features by
targeting customers who meet any of the following criteria:
Those who fall below a usage threshold of the given feature(s).
Those without feature engagement within a set time frame.
Those with dips in feature usage over a period of time.
Separate messaging can be utilized for each of the above customer segments
in order to deliver the most meaningful communication possible.
Upsell, Cross-Sell Campaigns
Business Objectives
A campaign designed to drive incremental license purchases of the same
product a customer owns (upsell) or license purchases of additional products
(cross-sell).
Criteria for Success
Upsell and cross-sell goals should be set before campaign activity begins
by assessing an accounts revenue expansion potential. Depending on
an organization’s process, this can be handled by the Customer Success
Manager or by Sales.
Data Sources
In order to deploy robust adoption marketing campaigns, organizations need
9
to extract information from the following data sources:
CRM systems indicate the terms of the customer’s agreement,
including the licenses assigned, licenses utilized and the renewal date.
Usage data gives the vendor meaningful insight into the customer’s
product adoption beyond license utilization.
Billing systems should be used for revenue assessment since often
CRM systems aren’t up to date with the latest financial information.
Campaign Example
An upsell or cross-sell campaign can be triggered when a customer hits or
exceeds their license threshold. It can also be triggered when usage exceeds
a certain threshold across the end user base. Depending on the organizational
structure, the outbound communication can expose the benefits of a highertier product and/or market the same solution to different groups or teams
within the account.
Advocacy
Business Objectives
A strong advocacy lifecycle marketing campaign should have one of the
following objectives:
Identify advocate candidates within the customer end user base.
Nurture engaged users into advocates.
Encourage advocate candidates to join a formal program.
10
Criteria for Success
Advocacy campaigns should be judged on candidate conversion rates along
with the resulting engagement in advocacy and reference programs (e.g.
social media outreach, PR references, sales references).
Data Sources
In order to deploy advocacy marketing campaigns, organizations need to
connect to information from the following data sources:
CRM data helps to ensure proper timing of campaigns by factoring in
an account’s sales cycle.
Product usage data helps to isolate “passive advocate” power user
candidates.
Social media listening tools, surveys and community data provide
insights into “Active Advocate” candidates.
Campaign Example
An active advocacy campaign can be designed to identify individuals who
are active on social media and community channels and encourage them to
speak at an upcoming customer event. A passive advocacy campaign can
communicate with power users for a given feature and encourage them to join
a user community as a first step of demonstrating advocacy.
11
Requirements for
Implementation
A lifecycle marketing framework must include: business objectives, metrics
for success, data and tools, customer segmentation to the end-user level, and
robust reporting capabilities.
Business Objectives
Lifecycle marketing can only be effective if there are clearly defined business
objectives with specified time frames.
Criteria for Success
The business objectives and criteria for success on lifecycle marketing
efforts must be clearly laid out and made available to all of the stakeholders.
For example, the business objective could be “improve adoption of new
feature X by 15% in Q1” and the criteria for success would be an adoption
measurement of said feature.
Data and Tools
The minimum technical requirements for a lifecycle marketing framework
include:
CRM Data.
Product Usage Data.
Marketing Automation.
12
Customer Success Solution.
Reporting Capabilities.
CRM Data
This includes data regarding support tickets and opportunity stages (including
renewal stage). CRM data and product usage data are foundational for
intelligent lifecycle marketing campaigns because it gives you the baseline
information you need about your customers.
Product Usage Data
Product usage data is one of the strongest signals an organization can
get about the health of an account. In the SaaS world, strong usage data
correlates with strong adoption and the inverse is also true.
Customer Success Solution
A Customer Success solution is the only way to get all of the needed data into
one, 360-degree view of the customer. These vital bits of information reside
in disparate silos but a Customer Success solution creates a unified view
that’s actionable. A Customer Success solution can continually assess the
customer base end-to-end and extract the relevant customers lists for specific
campaigns.
Marketing Automation
Once a Customer Success solution parses through the data to segment the
customer, a marketing automation solution is the only way that a lifecycle
marketing process can ramp up. The Customer Success team could set
up a call schedule with every single account to gauge their health but that
approach doesn’t scale.
That manual approach also means that individual end users don’t get touched
in a programmatic way. Marketing automation is the only way to deliver
personalized messages to all of your customers’ end users.
13
Reporting Capabilities
An intelligent lifecycle marketing framework must have robust reporting
capabilities. This can reside in the marketing automation or Customer Success
solution but it must be able to reconcile spikes in activities with campaigns.
An ideal lifecycle marketing process incorporates CRM data, usage data and
marketing automation but also includes:
Survey Scores.
Social Listening.
Community Metrics.
Billing Systems.
Survey Scores
This can include Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction surveys and
other quantitative results. Incorporating survey scores helps to paint a
complete picture of your customer and how they feel about a product.
Social Listening
Social media can be the first introduction users have to your company and
it can also be a valuable signal for how end users are feeling about your
product. Tools that mine Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media
channels can be valuable for understanding the ground-level sentiment for an
organization’s products.
Community Metrics
If your organization utilizes communities for support or for customer
engagement, community metrics can be an important data point to include in
your lifecycle marketing process.
Additionally, any input that helps to give you the “pulse” of the customer
can be beneficial in a lifecycle marketing framework. A top-notch lifecycle
14
marketing process should be able to draw from as many customer touch
points as possible.
Intelligent Lifecycle
Marketing Process
Investing in a Customer Success solution is the first step in creating an
intelligent lifecycle marketing process that delivers personalized, timely
messages in a programmatic, scalable fashion. A Customer Success solution
enables businesses to connect those disparate data sources into a unified
view.
From there, a business should implement its segmentation framework,
which should include segmentation by account and at the end-user level.
Segmenting at the end-user level is important because end users may not
respond to account-level messaging. For example, an “unhealthy” account
may still have multiple happy end users – the inverse is also true – so
intelligent lifecycle marketing processes incorporate that to deliver the right
message to the right user.
Once the Customer Success solution and marketing automation solution are
in place, a rules engine will need to be created to dictate what campaigns
are launched. This rules engine should continually scan the end user base
for every single account. When the rules engine hits designated criteria, it will
trigger specific campaigns. Finally, organizations must have robust reporting of
its lifecycle marketing to measure the impact of campaigns.
15
Conclusion
Many companies lack an intelligent marketing framework for the post-sales
process. Existing post-sales marketing programs generally don’t focus on the
end users, won’t scale as a business grows and can damage the customer
experience by coming across as spam.
Intelligent lifecycle marketing enables businesses to maintain an in-depth
understanding of every end user while still having a programmatic way to
touch an increasing number of customers as an organization scales. In order
to implement an effective lifecycle marketing strategy at scale, businesses
must have the right business goals, operationalized process that includes
reporting, as well as the proper tools and solutions.
When properly implemented, lifecycle marketing can lead to demonstrable
positive results for growing adoption, improving upsell/cross-sell, creating
advocates, and other businesses objectives that are key to those with a
recurring revenue business model.
16
ABOUT BLUENOSE
Bluenose is a customer success platform that empowers SaaS
businesses to proactively manage customers through complete
visibility, a robust early warning system, and built-in playbooks.
For more information, visit www.bluenose.com
www.bluenose.com
http://www.twitter.com/BluenoseInc
http://www.facebook.com/Bluenoseanalytics
https://www.linkedin.com/company/bluenose-analytics-inc-
17