Customer advocacy is an opportunity to elevate the customer experience to make it more memorable and remarkable for your customers.
Customers want to be successful and they need your guidance to achieve it. Therefore, your advocates will advise them on how to resolve their issues while using your products and services.
This interaction can also serve as a new opportunity for you to learn more about the preferences and needs of your customers.
As your B2B SaaS grows, it is ideal to lean on your advocates to help improve your customer service and lower churn rates. They will also ensure that you retain new customers, build long-lasting relationships and drive adoption.
Therefore, it would be best to keep your advocates consistently engaged and involve them in decision-making activities, which increases loyalty and trust.
We have gathered 5 strategies to maximise customer engagement with your advocates:
Offer frequent educational content
Advocates need to have access to important information which will help them give better advice to your customers and help tackle their challenges. Hence, it is ideal to offer frequent educational content to advocates, which helps them connect with your company and learn about any new features and updates in your offerings. Consistently educating advocates leads to better customer retention and revenue growth through cross-selling and up-sell opportunities.
Highlight their achievements
We are all aware of how important it is to recognise your advocates’ participation with your company. But what many seem to miss is the opportunity to celebrate their milestones and highlight their accomplishments. Host award events that recognise customers that have shown growth and improvement in their profession and have successfully implemented your product within their organisations. Honour an advocate per month or even present them with small gifts to congratulate them. Do what’s needed to keep your advocates motivated.
Experiment engagement strategies
It never hurts to do a thorough review of your advocacy activities (referrals, references, campaigns and so on) to experiment with different engagement strategies that will suit your customers.
Get their opinion of what works and what doesn’t and outline what is missing from their programs to keep customers engaged. Updating advocacy activities gives your customers the motivation to keep promoting your product and services.
Sales reference calls
Leverage your customer advocates in sales calls to help build trust and credibility.
Your customer advocates will help prospects better understand how your products help to solve specific problems in the industry. When customer references are done right, you won’t just add a new customer but also augment relationships with your existing customer advocates.
Win back inactive advocates
Advocates can become inactive if they lose interest in your company or are no longer interested in advocating for your products. You need to strategically re-engage them by creating peer-to-peer engagement opportunities that will encourage advocates to communicate and share their ideas.
It’s important to survey your advocates regularly to get both qualitative and quantitative feedback on your engagement with them. Use the insight learned to build more meaningful relationships with both new and existing customer advocates.
Conclusion
The best way to increase customer engagement with your advocates is to keep them active and educated with the relevant news and updates about your new offerings.
Experiment to discover different ways to nurture and mobilise your customer advocates to drive word of mouth and increase customer engagement and retention.
