More and more companies are currently focusing on nurturing their relationships with their existing customer base to foster loyalty, lower churn, and increase revenue through upselling and cross-selling opportunities. But unfortunately, one team cannot achieve these outcomes alone.
When your departments collaborate effectively, they can succeed in ways they wouldn’t be able to when they choose to work separately.
This is the case for marketing and success teams. Why? Because when they work together, it’s the customer that wins! And when it is the customer that wins, customer retention is pretty much guaranteed.
Why Do Marketing Teams and Customer Success Teams Need To Collaborate?
The thing about marketing is that it often has to go deeper than simply knowing your target audience. You have to understand how they behave, the way they think, and the actions they take. The more you know about them, the more effectively you can sell your product or service to them and develop lasting relationships.
However, all of that is often easier said than done. Rarely do marketers personally address a lead, prospect, or client. Instead, they rely heavily on client data gathered throughout the organization.
This is where your customer success team can come in. When these teams work together, they can inspire one another to develop effective strategies to improve customer experience, grow your list of leads, and keep your customers loyal to your brand.
When you combine all of these, your business will surely enjoy increased revenue in the long run.
What Are The Benefits of Integrating Marketing and Customer Success?
The teams responsible for customer success and marketing perform much better when aligned. Once they are in harmony, some of the benefits your company will enjoy include:
Better Customer Visibility
While customer data can highlight trends and patterns, there are times when your marketing team will need to get into the specifics. Customer success managers (CSMs) can assist them by improving their data with qualitative customer insight.
CSMs converse with users to understand their habits and how they change over time. This data about customer connections can help marketers convey a complete customer story.
Better Customer Profiles
Your marketing team can enhance their customer profiles with the qualitative and real-time data your customer success team gives. Your CSMs can even provide feedback on these profiles to increase their accuracy. The more detailed these profiles are, the more innovative and effective your marketing team’s campaign will be.
Strong customer data is great, but it is just historical. As a result, your marketing team is often in the dark about the customer experience at any given time.
To address this, CSMs can inform them of how your customers feel about a new feature, a price change, or even global events and trends.
Customer Success Enablement
Of course, the marketing team isn’t the only one benefiting from this collaboration. CSMs need the right collateral to have knowledgeable, value-focused conversations. Your marketing team can provide the right content at the right time for the target persona to foster deeper, more personalized customer engagements.
Your marketing team can also help CSMs by creating onboarding emails and materials, organizing customer events, and creating CS enablement materials.
How Do I Bridge The Gap Between My Customer Success and Marketing Teams?
A collaboration between these two teams sounds good on paper, but it might be harder to execute when there are no systems and protocols. With that in mind, they might need a little help from you.
Here’s how you can facilitate collaboration between your customer success and marketing teams:
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Schedule Regular Communications
Building team rapport requires constant communication, especially in remote or hybrid settings.
Establish dedicated marketing and CS channel to open the exchange of opinions and ideas. This will make your team members feel more comfortable working together.
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Opt For Joint Meetings
Nobody wants more Zoom meetings! However, one of the best ways to keep track of what’s happening at work is through weekly stand-ups or report-outs.
So instead of having a dedicated marketing and CS catch-up, consider designating a representative from each team to attend the other’s weekly meeting. This will provide information and insight about the teams without adding to your employees’ meeting fatigue.
Choose the platforms that your teams will use together. For example, CRM, analytics tools, and marketing automation keep both teams in sync and other departments, like finance, that deal with customers. They also automate the sharing of data and insights. This guarantees a consistent customer experience, prevents anyone from forgetting to send important customer communications, and increases awareness of particular situations experienced by each customer.
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Track Results
One of the best ways to strengthen this relationship with your marketing and customer success teams is to keep track of the successes and gains that result from their working together. Quantifying these results will motivate them and even aid in consistent improvement.
Some of the metrics you can track include:
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- how frequently shared reports are performed and data is accessed
- ROI from consulting each other’s projects and campaigns
- improvements in engagement and conversion brought on by CS enablement content use
Collaborating For Better Customer Retention
When customer success and marketing team up, they produce customers who are a better fit for your business. Additionally, customers have the opportunity to learn about your brand from their viewpoint rather than that of the company.
Keeping these teams in sync benefits your business by lowering acquisition costs, boosting revenue, and increasing customer retention and loyalty. With all of these advantages, it wouldn’t make sense not to bridge the gap between them!
Get more insights on business growth strategies by reading Understanding eCommerce’s articles.
