Customer Marketing: Part 3 – Sentiment
How customer marketing teams use sentiment to drive programs: surveys, Voice of Customer initiatives, and a marketing-specific NPS survey that fuels advocacy.
TL;DR
- Customer sentiment isn't just a CS metric; it can also drive customer marketing programs through surveys, Voice of Customer initiatives, and NPS.
- Sending surveys at different stages — post-sales, post-onboarding, renewal pulse — to different stakeholders gathers well-rounded, unbiased feedback.
- Creating a separate NPS survey specifically for marketing turns customer responses into product roadmap input, advocates, and a starter engine for broader marketing efforts.
When it comes to working with customers, any CSM worth their salt understands the value of customer sentiment. From checking in with clients during weekly calls to ‘scoring’ accounts in your CRM, customer sentiment drives many of the strategic projects and growth initiatives for your customers. But did you know sentiment management can also be a customer marketing focus?
In Part One and Part Two of this series, we focused on building customer advocacy and creating powerful customer content. In part three, we’re looking at initiatives that can help drive all of your customer marketing projects: sentiment.
Surveys
Surveys are a great way to collect customer sentiment and feedback throughout their journey for multiple reasons, the most significant being that they provide a distanced (aka not face-to-face) channel to deliver straightforward, unbiased input. To optimize and enhance your strategy, it’s a good idea to send out surveys at different points throughout the customer relationship – post-sales, post-onboarding, renewal pulse, etc. Sending these different surveys to different stakeholders can ensure you’re gathering well-rounded data and that your team can respond effectively to feedback where necessary.
Voice of Customer
CSMs have long been known to be the ‘voice of customers’ within an organization, and they need the correct information to ensure they’re sharing the right customer story. Customer marketing programs can be instrumental in supporting Voice of Customer initiatives, in addition to:
- Usage Data
- Support Tickets
- Social Media
- Reviews
- Surveys
- Customer Engagement
Collecting data and insights from each of these channels – and then sharing it with the necessary teams – ensures that your team can proactively act on the information you have and be a true Voice of the Customer.** **
NPS
While many customer success teams use NPS as a performance metric to gauge team members' success, there is potentially even more value in the data from a customer marketing angle. A best practice is for customer marketing to create a separate NPS survey specifically for marketing purposes. Customers and their responses can feed the product roadmap, serve as advocates, and support additional customer marketing efforts. The responses you garner from your NPS can also help serve as a starter engine for your broader customer marketing strategy.
You can learn more about customer marketing initiatives to try in your organization with part 1 and part 2 of this series. For more ways to leverage customer sentiment to drive customer marketing programs, you can check out these additional resources from ClientSuccess:
Frequently Asked Questions
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