Customer service marketing involves including your customer service team in your marketing teams. Involving customer service in marketing is effective because your customer service team understands customer issues.
Take advantage of that fact in today’s social media-driven world. Most modern consumers prefer social media for contacting brands over the phone and text.
So positioning your customer service team behind your social media handles is strategic. They’ll simultaneously answer customer questions and improve your brand’s image.
Customer service marketing is successful for that reason. All the biggest brands do it. How? Keep reading to learn how to launch a customer service campaign.
Why Customer Service and Marketing Must Collaborate
You have to provide your customers an enjoyable and streamlined experience. Today’s consumers don’t just appreciate receiving positive experiences, they demand them!
Positive customer experiences improve your customer’s chances of returning to you in the future. That’s because a positive experience improves your customer’s satisfaction with your brand.
Conversely, providing bad experiences to your customers hurts your business by causing them stress.
How do you provide positive customer experiences?
You can start by ensuring your customers receive a positive end-to-end brand experience. You’ll do that by training your marketing and customer service teams to better communicate and work with customers.
You want to start with these two departments because they’re the most customer-facing. So when they improve how they treat customers, you’ll immediately see improvements.
Start by building customer personas. Create detailed customer personas to illustrate who your business serves and how. This information makes it easier for your marketing and customer service teams to better understand your customers.
Another benefit of building customer personas is that you’ll set realistic goals for your marketing teams. Customer personas make it easier for your marketing team to understand your product’s value proposition to customers.
Customer personas also help keep your organization’s internal teams stay in the loop regarding customer experiences. When your marketing and support teams perform better when they understand your customers better.
This approach reduces repetition and ensures your marketing and customer service teams don’t skip any steps.
Remember the goal is to improve your customers’ experience by having customer service provide marketing support. When done right, it’ll provide you with excellent returns.
Key Strategies for Customer Service Marketing
These are the 5 best strategies for your customer service campaign.
1. Segmentation and Personalization
Customer segmentation is one of the best ways to tailor your marketing to specific groups. Categorizing your customers according to qualities like demographics and behavior makes it easier to target each group.
That way you’ll only prove relevant content for each group, ensuring the chances of conversions are maximized.
Suppose you have an e-commerce company for example. It can segment its customers as ‘luxury buyers’ or ‘economy buyers’. Naturally, the former are less price sensitive than the latter. So you’ll only show price-relevant content to each group.
You could target luxury buyers with exclusive discounts and promotions on luxury products. And you could provide loyalty rewards and coupons for economy buyers.
This way you match each customer type with the right content for them.
A marketing segmentation approach works for both small businesses and massive corporations. Both Amazon and Netflix use it. Amazon has a complex algorithm that recommends products to customers based on their browsing history.
Similarly, your business will also benefit from segmenting your customers and optimizing marketing content for each segment. With proper segmentation, you’ll improve customer satisfaction and improve business growth.
2. Social Media Engagement
Use social media to provide customer service and engage with your audience. But don’t have your social media manager provide the customer service part of the equation. They’re great at marketing, but they shouldn’t handle customer support.
That’s because your customer support team has the right training and resources to solve your customer’s problems. That makes them the best people for the job. Customer service consistency is key, and only your service team can provide it.
Engaging your marketing team for customer support work will provide a subpar customer service experience. So your best bet is to introduce your customer service people to your social media.
Thankfully, you can make that process easier by using third-party management tools. These tools streamline the transition for customer service reps to social media queries.
Your marketers will simply use the tool to direct customer-related queries to the customer service team. That way you’ll optimize communications with customers by appointing the right people for the job.
So acquiring a system for letting customer service members participate in social media queries will massively improve your customer experience.
3. Content that Educates and Resonates
One of the cornerstones of modern marketing is creating educational content. You’ll use such content to address your customer’s concerns and provide them educational information.
The goal of educational content is to address your customer’s challenges and provide them with solutions, too. You’ll also establish yourself as an industry expert by demonstrating your knowledge base.
For example, suppose your business provides cybersecurity services. You’ll want to position your brand as an expert in cybersecurity. You can do that by publishing content that educates your audience about cybersecurity.
An example of such content is whitepapers. Your cybersecurity firm can produce whitepapers that educate businesses on potential new cyber threats. This information is both helpful and practical. It’ll also establish your brand as a thought leader.
Hence the effect of your whitepaper is that you’ll improve your brand’s reputation and benefit your audience.
Essentially, educational content provides the dual benefits of improving your brand’s reputation and benefiting your audience. Posting empathetic and useful content differentiates your brand and enhances your customer relationship.
4. Feedback Integration
Incorporating your customer’s feedback into your marketing campaigns will improve your marketing and make it more customer-centric. Customer feedback provides valuable information and guides a brand on how to better meet customer needs.
Acting on customer feedback also improves customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Taking customer feedback seriously also increases your brand’s credibility and authenticity. You can showcase customer stories, reviews, and testimonials to humanize your marketing campaign and build trust.
After all, customers trust messages backed by real experience more. You may even get customer service campaign ideas from customer feedback.
Here are two great examples of how incorporating customer feedback improves customer experience.
- Airbnb
Airbnb used customer feedback for their Experiences feature. Initially, Airbnb only connected travelers with accommodation. After receiving customer feedback, they launched their Experiences feature to offer activities like tours.
- Starbucks
Starbucks has its ‘My Starbucks Idea’ platform to receive customer feedback. Customers can submit suggestions over the platform. Starbucks has used feedback from the platform to implement things like mobile payments and free Wi-Fi.
Your business can take advantage of customer feedback too. Start listening to what your customers say about your marketing material. That way you’ll build relevant and customer-focused strategies, just like Starbucks and Airbnb.
5. Collaborative Campaigns
Create collaborative campaigns between your marketing and customer service teams to boost long-term customer engagement and brand loyalty. The benefit of these initiatives is that you’ll deploy both teams’ expertise.
An example of such a campaign is Hilton Hotel’s ‘Hilton Suggests’ campaign. Hilton Hotel’s customer service and marketing team jointly provided travel recommendations to Twitter users.
The Hilton Suggests’ campaign achieved three things. It answered customer queries, increased customer engagement, and positioned the brand as a travel expert.
Another example is Zappos’ Customer Service Week campaign. Zappos is an American clothing and shoe retailer. So their campaign consisted of showing light-hearted customer interactions on social media.
The campaign reinforced Zappo’s image as a customer-service-oriented brand.
Your business can benefit from similar collaborative campaigns. Create collaborative campaigns to provide a unified brand experience and better connect with customers. Customer-centric marketing always improves brand loyalty.
Your goal is to share expert insights that appeal to viewers and establish your brand as a genuine partner to its customers.
Synergize The Power Couple For Sucess
Is customer service marketing effective? Absolutely. A customer service strategy in marketing is the best way to hit two birds with one stone. You’ll provide excellent customer service and improve marketing.
All the biggest brands use customer marketing solutions because they’re effective when done right. Use the key strategies we’ve provided you to create awesome customer-centric content for your brand.
As always, knowledge is power, so keep learning about how customer service marketing will benefit your brand.
