Writing to share some best practices around an often forgotten group within Marketing campaigns: the existing client.
With marketing teams focused on their top KPIs, which are usually traffic, conversion rates and new qualified leads, we underestimate the power of the existing customer. They are one step away of becoming your advocate, (and therefore be responsible for bringing more leads in). You just need to keep delighting them.
So besides having a stellar Service team, here are a few tips on how to market for existing customers with HubSpot:
- Welcome them: B2C companies tend to have a transactional email to thank clients for their purchase, but why not have a proper welcome email to your new acquired customer, even if they signed up for a consulting service or a software subscription? You can use a lifecycle-based email workflow to never again forget to welcome a new customer.
- Offer value post-purchase: They've seen all of your blog posts before proceeding to sign a contract, now it's the time to continue giving support on how to best use your product or service. Send them how-to guides or explainer videos or even share social posts from other users about that particular theme. Remember to use HubSpot lists, Products or your custom properties to make sure your content is relevant based on the data you have about this client.
- Foster a referral environment: Think about creating campaigns to encourage your clients to refer a friend. You may offer discounts or prizes is a social competition to drive referral leads. Use the Hubspot Analytics and Campaign tools to measure your efforts and results.
- Recognize loyalty: Your existing customer is saving your company tons of acquisition money. They deserve some recognition. It could be a badge, a discount or as simple as a thank you message. You can use a closed won deal stage in a renewal pipeline, a worfklow based on 'entered customer lifecycle stage date' or number of deals closed.
- Ask questions: Ask them what they want from you. If you offer a newsletter, ask the themes they're interested in knowing about. If you send them a survey, ask them what you could do better. You can use forms, subscription types and NPS surveys for that.
Now it's your turn, how do you market to your existing clients?
Legally we don't have to include an unsubscribe message when emailing existing customers, as per GDPR rules. Can you confirm that the additional cost to send 'transactional emails' definitely applies? Thanks, Emily
Hi Emily. To be able to send transactional emails with HubSpot you need the transactional email add-on which is an additional cost - you can find it in the pricing page here.
Note you need to have Marketing Pro+ to be able to purchase it, so make sure to add that to the bundle so you can see the add-on price.
Unfortunately, you can't remove these unless you've purchased the transactional email addon from HubSpot as technically, these emails are still marketing based.
Is there anyway to remove the 'unsubscribe' links when emailing existing (b2b) customers? We are predominantly using HubSpot at the moment to send important service updates to existing customers but fear some may unsubscribe (a handful have!) and they will therefore miss out on future updates (i.e. changes to opening hours, etc). Thanks, Emily
I wanted to ask if there was a good way to make sure that we're not mixing customers and leads in the contacts page. Is the best way to create a new lead status "Customer" and tag those contacts as customers? I find it strange that a "LEAD" status would be customer... I know that the lifecycle stage changes to "customer" once a deal is closed but what happens to the "lead status" of that contact?
Lead Status is a way to help you segment the leads in your sales funnel better. I like to think of them as the milestones you have in between MQLs, SQLs and Opportunities.
I don't think you need create a 'customer' lead status because you already have that information in your lifecycle stage (although you're free to do that if it fits your process and data segmentation better) but the easiest way is just to filter out the customers by lifecycle stage. You can use a filter in your Contacts dashboard and select Lifecycle stage is none of 'customer' or 'evangelist' - that will leave only leads not yet converted in your view.
Hey @Mike_Eastwood , @karstenkoehler and @Bryantworks , I wanted to tag you guys in here😀 Is there anything you do to the exisiting client as a Marketing campaigns? I'd love to hear your tips!
One of the biggest value adds that we did was a general welcome sequence and a task to our CSMs to reach out every X days with just a friendly check-in. It's also super valuable to send out any ungated ebooks/deliverables to these clients as well.
Another item that I've personally made sure of, is when I see interesting information - think on which existing clients do I know of that it would be beneficial for them to check it out? Not only does that show you're thinking of them, but it's also a good opportunity for upselling with putting some of the highlighted practices into place.
This is great advice, @Bryantworks , thanks for sharing! Strengthening the relationship with our clients is key for CS and I think these are great ways to do that. 🙂