What Is Customer Marketing?

Share this post:

Did you know that 65% of customers agree that a positive experience with a brand is more influential than great advertising? This is why so many companies are focusing their marketing campaigns on customers.

These customer-centered marketing strategies are beneficial to both the customer and the business.

But, what is customer marketing and how can you use it to further your business?

To learn more, keep reading. We'll cover everything you need to know.

What Is Customer Marketing?

Customer marketing is a kind of customer retention and business growth strategy. It focuses on taking advantage of and improving current customer relationships.

You'll be able to create a successful customer marketing strategy. You just need to segment, advocate for, and engage your customers.

The end goal is to turn each customer into a brand marketer.

The last time that you had an exceptional experience with a business, you likely told a few of your friends and family about it. So, you're trying to achieve the same thing with your customers. You're trying to impress them so much that they're going to go tell their friends and family about how amazing your business is.

Then, you'll be bringing in new customers through existing customers.

It's also important to recognize that retained customers bring in more value than new and uninterested customers. So, you should be creating as many retained customers as possible. These individuals are the key to rebuilding and bolstering your marketing department.

Of course, you should be focusing on creating quality relationships. It's always quality over quantity when it comes to effective marketing. You should be sure to strengthen bonds with your current customers while trying to attract more. This requires a balanced marketing plan.

In fact, you can decrease your spending by using more effective strategies. You may even be wasting marketing funds with your current strategies.

You have the ability to increase customer loyalty and fortify lifetime value. At the same time, you can decrease your overall spending.

To do this, you'll first need to evaluate your current metrics. Let's look into the key metrics that you need to track.

Customer Marketing Metrics are a key value for your customer success

Customer Marketing Metrics

You want to keep your customers around for a long time. So, you need to make sure that you're establishing a customer-centric marketing strategy.

But, this doesn't mean that you should bribe these customers. And, you definitely shouldn't expect that they're going to do your marketing for you.

Instead, you should be focusing on one thing: their happiness. If you make your current customers happy, everything else will follow.

Focus on improving the customer experience. You should also be innovating your products, services, and listening to customer feedback.

To learn more about how your business is (or isn't) currently doing these things, there are a few metrics that you should be checking in on.

Customer Retention Rate

The first and one of the most important metrics to pay attention to is your customer retention rate. This defines how well your company is able to maintain your current customer base.

In order to calculate it, you should define the time period that you want to evaluate. This could be a week, a month, a quarter, a year, or some other period of time.

Then, you should gather the number of customers that your company added to its roster.

In particular, you'll need to know the number of customers your company had at the beginning of the time period. And, you need the number of customers your company added during the course of that time period. Lastly, you need the number of customers that your company had at the end of the time period.

Then, you should subtract the number of customers that your company added during the course of that time period from the number at the end of the time period. Then, you should divide that number by the number of customers that your company had at the beginning of the time period. In order to get a final percentage, you'll then need to multiply that number by 100.

This will give you your customer retention rate.

Retention = ((End Customers - Added Customers))/Start Customers) X 100

The higher this number is, the better.

You should be sure to evaluate this percentage often. Hopefully, this percentage will grow over time. It should especially grow if you're improving your marketing techniques.

Churn Rate

The customer churn rates tell us how many customers we're losing during a certain period of time. They may leave because they're no longer using a product or they've formally ended an agreement. We consider both decisions as a drop-off in engagement with your company.

Therefore, they've left or 'churned out' of your business.

Just like before, you should start by choosing the time period that you want to evaluate. Since you're going to be comparing these metrics, you should make sure that you're evaluating the same time period over and over. Otherwise, you won't be able to accurately compare your percentages from one period to another.

In order to measure your customer churn rate, you should measure the number of customers that you have at the beginning of that time period as well as the number of customers that you have at the end of that same time period.

To calculate the percentage, you should subtract the number of customers at the end of the period from the number of customers at the start of the period. Then you can divide this number by the number of customers at the start of the period.

In order to get a percentage, you should multiply this number by 100.

You can view the equation below:

Churn Rate = ((Beginning Number - End Number)/Beginning Number) X 100

The lower your churn number, the better. if you have a higher churn percentage, you should reevaluate your customer retention strategy. You may not be providing enough of an incentive for customers to stick around.

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value measures the potential amount of money that a particular customer could bring to your business while they remain a customer.

In order to calculate this, you should obtain the following averages:

  • The average order value of one of your products or services
  • The average number of repeat purchases that your customers make
  • The average amount of time that customers stay with your business

Now, all you have to do is multiply all of these averages together.

Customer Lifetime Value = Average Order Value X Average Number of Repeat Purchases X Average Customer Stay

The product that you get from this calculation will tell you how much money you're earning from each customer. This can tell you a few things:

  • How much customers are buying per order
  • How many orders customers are placing
  • How long customers are staying with your company

Of course, you want all of these values to be as high as possible. The higher your customer lifetime value is, the better your customer marketing strategy is.

Customer Acquisition Costs

The customer acquisition cost is the amount of money that your business needs to spend in order to bring in a new customer.

In order to measure this cost, you need to define the time period that you're evaluating. Then, you should gather the number of new customers you brought in during that period of time as well as the amount of money that you spent on marketing and sales during that time.

Then, divide the amount of money you spent on marketing by the number of new customers that you brought in during that time period.

Customer Acquisition Cost = Money Spent on Marketing/Number of New Customers

Of course, you want this value to be as low as possible. In fact, it'd be great if customers just knocked on your door without any effort at all.

But, that isn't realistic. So, you should expect to spend some money on marketing. But, you'll want to make the most of the money that you're spending.

And, the lower each customer costs, the more customers you can bring in.

Your customer ranking with social proof

Net Promoter Score

Your net promoter score tells you how likely it is that a customer will refer a product to a friend or family member. Companies collect their data using a customer survey.

First, you should define the time period that you want to measure this score. Then, all you need to know is how many people would recommend your business and how many people wouldn't recommend your business.

In order to calculate your net promoter score, you should subtract the percent of detractors from the percent of demoters.

Net Promoter Score = Percent of Promoters - Percent of Detractors

The higher the percentage, the better. A large value tells you that many of your customers would recommend your business, while a small value tells you that most customers aren't likely to recommend it.

Average Order Value

The average order value tells you the average amount of money that your customers spend per transaction.

First, define the time period during which you want to measure the average order value. Then, you should gather the total amount of revenue during that period as well as the total number of orders during that time period.

To calculate the value, divide the amount of revenue by the number of orders.

The higher the average order value is, the better. A high average order value tells you that customers don't mind spending that much money to support your business.

How Can I Get Started With Customer Marketing?

Now that you're clear on what customer marketing is and what kind of metrics you need to have prepared for the process, it's time to dive into some customer-focused strategies. There are a variety of strategies and techniques that you can use to enhance customer relationships and grow your entire customer base as a whole.

Your organization should use a combination of several techniques to make the perfect customer marketing strategy for you. Let's talk about some common, effective techniques that you should consider.

Case Studies

Case studies offer a scientific approach towards your business and everything that it can do. More specifically, case studies highlight the problems that your products and services can solve for customers. You'll be able to take a deep dive into a previous customer's problem and detail how your product offering and customer service was able to provide a solution.

To get started, you should choose a few customers to highlight. These customers should be different. They may come from different places, have different uses for your services, come from different industries, or something else.

Then, think about which customers are most valuable to your business. At the same time, your business should be valuable to them.

Once you've chosen your first few case studies, you should be prepared to write about them in detail. And, you should include plenty of statistics, numbers, examples, features, and more.

The more specific you are, the better your case study will be.

Once you've accumulated your first case studies, you should create an entire page on our website detailing these customers' stories. As you write more and more stories, you can then create categories to make it easier for customers to find the case study that is most relevant to them.

By reading these case studies, your customers will get to learn more about your business while seeing whether or not your service will fit their needs. And, hearing what others have to say about your business will make them more confident in their choice.

Reviews and Ratings

Reviews and ratings are opinions of organizations that past customers leave. They are extremely important to the future of your business. In fact, 93% of consumers admit that online reviews influence their purchasing decisions.

There are two kinds of reviews that you should pay attention to: on-site reviews and off-site reviews.

On-site reviews are the ratings and comments that past customers leave directly on your site. These are easily noticeable right next to the service that someone reviewed. These ratings and reviews are important for the individuals who are looking at buying the product or service directly from the website.

To make it easier for reviews and future potential purchasers, you should embed these reviews directly on your pages.

You should make sure to keep a close eye on these reviews. You should be responding to both positive and negative reviews. This is one of the most common customer service mistakes.

And, because other customers are consistently seeing these reviews, you should make sure that your responses are kind, helpful, and personable.

Off-site reviews are listed on other websites. You can find these on websites like Google, Apple, and Yelp.

Although these reviews aren't listed on your website, you should be sure that you're still paying attention to them. You need to still be responding to these reviews as if they were on your website. For most of these review platforms, you may need to claim your business profile in order to respond to reviews.

Just like on your website, potential customers are looking at these reviews to see whether or not they want to buy a product or service. Thus, you need to keep the same kind, helpful, and personable responses that you would use on your own website.

In fact, these reviews may be even more important because new customers are more likely to find you through another website than through your own.

All in all, you should make sure that you're taking care of reviews like they're comments that customers are telling to you personally.

Customer testimonials are the best source of proof

Testimonials

Testimonials are similar to case studies, but they're much shorter. They showcase how customers used your business' services. But, testimonials are usually short quotes or videos from previous customers.

Businesses usually seek out happy customers to leave testimonials on their websites. Therefore, these testimonials are going to be happy, positive snippets about a customer's experience with your business.

When you're asking a customer to provide a testimonial, you should make sure that you get concrete examples from their experience with your product/service.

You should also make sure that the customer sounds natural in their testimony. You wouldn't want prospective customers to think that people were saying dishonest or coerced statements.

You should look for customers who provide positive, specific reviews to give testimonials.

And, when you're showing testimonials on your website, you should make sure that they stand out. You could add a visual picture or video. And, you should make sure that you link to any products or services that the customer talks about in their testimonial.

User-Generated Content

If you have social media accounts, you've likely seen user-generated content without even realizing it. These are a kind of social post that appears to be completely natural.

Of course, the posters of this material are posting it of their own will and want. However, the company behind the post encourages the post in some way. You may want customers to post about your product or service via pictures, posts, videos, tweets, shorts, blogs, and more.

The important key here is that user-generated content is not solicited. You're not paying these individuals to make these posts.

However, you may encourage people to post. You may include a hashtag on your packaging or ask people to tag you when they're opening their new product.

Whatever the case, you should make sure to ask customers to tag and hashtag the post. This makes it easier for others to find out more about your company. They can click on the account tagged or the hashtag page and learn more from the destination.

And, the more attractive your packaging is, the more likely customers are to want to post it.

Make sure that you're taking the time to like, comment, and share these posts. This encourages other customers and future customers to do the same. Everyone wants a shoutout.

Influencers

Influencers are the more serious version of user-generated content. Influencers (and micro-influencers) have the attention of a particular audience. And, you may find that that particular audience is within your marketing target audience.

You can find influencers on social media platforms, like Instagram.

The biggest difference between user-generated content and influencers is that influencers are paid in some way. You may decide on free products, a trial of your service, or a cash payment. As long as the influencer agrees, you should be able to reach a contract-bound agreement.

Collaborations with influencers are beneficial for both you and the influencer you're working with. You get advertising via the influencer, while the influencer gets content to post.

In relation to other customer marketing strategies, influencer marketing strategies are relatively new. So, you should understand that there isn't a specific equation that can tell you what your return on investment may be.

Make sure that you're setting realistic, attainable goals. You can also talk with the influencer you're working with about outcomes that they expect with this kind of advertising.

You should also be using analytic tools to measure and track customer metrics like the ones that we discussed earlier.

Referral Programs

Referral programs are incentive systems that encourage customers to share your business' product/service with others. In exchange, that referring customer may receive certain prizes or rewards.

If you decide to start a referral program, you should make it easy to share information about the business.

Referral programs are a great way to encourage customers to engage in marketing on your company's behalf. To see if the program is working well, you should track metrics consistently.

And, you should make sure to share your referral program clearly if you have one. It should be the center of attention so that customers can find it easily.

Customer Engagement Software

So, what is customer marketing? Well, it's an elaborate and effective strategy for customer-based marketing.

By bringing the focus to your customers, you should be able to improve your marketing outcomes.

And, one of the biggest things you need to do is build customer relationships. That's where we come in.

Our customer engagement software can help you. You can build long-lasting relationships with your customers. This will increase your customer lifetime value and your customer retention rate.

Get started today with a free trial.

Over 10 years in business.

Self-funded. No investors. No bullshit.

More than 3,000 customers worldwide.

Helpmonks - no bullshit customer engagement service

Growth starts with action

Empower your team and delight your customers.

Helpmonks - email management for small businesses