It’s no surprise that highly engaged customers tend to be happier, longer-lasting customers. But there’s a catch: It can be a challenge to reach every customer as your business scales.
Enter Digital Customer Success (CS). With Digital CS, teams can leverage data and one-to-many communications channels to ensure successful customer experiences and outcomes at scale. Sounds pretty cool, right?
Armin Pop, Onboarding and Product Specialist, Gainsight, says, “With all the things we do, whether we like it or not, we generate data. And it behooves us to use that data to improve customer journeys—and also to pre-empt problems and stay ahead of things that may ultimately get in the way of Customer Success.”
So how exactly can you use these digital outreach strategies to effectively communicate with customers in a way that drives both engagement and success? Pop sat down with Gainsight customer Juan Del Rio, Community Manager, Devo, to find out. Specifically, Pop and Del Rio discussed how to use Gainsight Customer Communities to increase engagement throughout the customer journey, from onboarding to product adoption and expansion (yes, you read that right—this strategy feeds upsell and cross-sell motions).
Without further ado, here are our top three highlights from our recent webinar, Strategies for Effective Customer Communication With Devo.
1. Leverage Existing Content to Meet the Needs of Your Users
Your customer community is filled with helpful answers and knowledge base content. There are FAQs with great answers. You’re already spending a lot of time populating content, like events, announcements, product updates, etc. So why duplicate your efforts?
Getting as much mileage as possible from your existing content is critical to your customer community efforts.
How Devo Does It: Custom Landing Pages
As a company offering cybersecurity products, Devo realizes their customers have specialized needs. Del Rio describes the Devo Connect community as “the watchers on the wall.”
He continues, “these are the people that are constantly in the background defending corporations and even the country from cyber attacks. It’s a highly stressful job. They need information quickly and they need some anonymity.”
In order to answer his customers’ unique needs, the Devo Connect community member posts are not open to the public. However, community content on product updates and company information is available to the public. “So the community can serve all of the different sections of the company,” says Del Rio.
Devo also uses the new Custom Pages feature to build unique landing pages that enable the team to curate relevant content and provide a destination for different segments of users:
“Whenever I find that there’s a common thread, [like when] we had people asking for a reference document for all of the programming operations that we have, we build something really quickly and have a Custom Page to be able to share with it. [The page] becomes its home and the people reference it all the time; they can just walk back to that page, which is great.”
By feeding the Devo Connect community with existing content, the team is able to provide answers to urgent real-world cyber security problems in real time. “Self-service is naturally growing with the more content that gets connected,” says Del Rio.
2. Build Dynamic Segments Based on Customer Attributes
Gainsight Customer Communities captures helpful data around your customers—and you can use this to both your and your customers’ advantage. For instance, you can leverage customer data to build detailed User Segments that drive smart email segmentation practices, so you always know which customers need what guidance and when. That way, you’ll always be able to show up for customers with the right messaging, at their point of need—at scale.
You can create email outreach to community members based on registration data, custom role assignment, last activity, etc. And that’s exactly what Devo did.
How Devo Does It: Regular Data Check-Ins
“Every community is different,” says Del Rio. “Ours has manually approved registration, so I’m able to see and add information to each member as they join the community.” Being in the cyber security space, this helps Del Rio maintain a community users can trust. It also helps him build customer segments.
Del Rio routinely updates user profile information to include CRM, product usage, and activity data. Ensuring that this information is accurate and up-to-date makes it easy for Devo to segment and target users throughout the community.=
3. Proactively Trigger Personalized Email Outreach to Segments
Whether it’s a monthly newsletter or a one-off email, data-driven segmentation allows you to create personalized and compelling outreach to your clients.
To rise above the noise of email outreach, it’s critical to nail the timing, segmentation, and message. Bottom line: For success with email, it’s gotta be personalized.
How Devo Does It: Targeted Email Campaigns
Once you have your community member data organized into segments, you can craft targeted email campaigns that have the greatest impact. That’s because you’re able to personalize your message to cohorts of users that have similar goals, needs, and community activity—or lack of activity, when it comes to re-engagement campaigns.
Devo’s Successful Re-Engagement Campaign
When done right, a re-engagement campaign can win over users who stopped being active in the community. This can be a game-changer, since engaged customers tend to be happier customers.
Here’s a look at Gainsight’s Playbook for Re-Engagement Campaigns.
Using this playbook, Devo saw incredible results. Del Rio describes how a re-engagement email campaign at Devo connected inactive users with resources they showed interest in:
“We targeted people that were interested in one of our applications and showed interest in another part of the CRM … So we were able to target them quickly using [Email Campaigns in Gainsight Customer Communities] and send them additional information and resources.”
Del Rio shared that, during this email campaign aimed at re-engaging inactive users, the team achieved a 41% open rate and 90% delivery rate—which are incredible metrics and demonstrate how powerful personalization is!
Once you have an engaged community, it’s easier to keep them engaged throughout the customer journey, from onboarding to adoption and even expansion.
Gainsight Playbooks for Onboarding and Adoption Campaigns
If that sounds complicated, don’t forget you’re not alone. Gainsight has already designed playbooks to guide you through the process. Check out a snapshot of our Email Campaigns playbooks for Onboarding and Adoption below:
When relevant, you can go a step further and promote premium features throughout these email campaigns to drive upsell opportunities.
The Benefits of Engaging Customers Through the Devo Connect Community
During the webinar, Del Rio shared some of the benefits the Devo team has enjoyed by investing in this strategy. With Gainsight Customer Communities, Devo was able to:
- Unify information sharing through one community platform, Devo Connect
- Keep clients informed of new developments
- Create opportunities for upsell and cross-sell
- Decrease support ticket volume
- Increase response time to customer questions
- Increase customer happiness
These results speak to the impact of simple, scalable strategies that deliver the information users need, when they need it.
What’s Next for Devo Connect?
According to Del Rio, Devo’s Community efforts are picking up speed. Pop asked him, outside of Email Campaigns, what’s next for Devo Connect:
“I want to do more focus groups,” says Del Rio. “We’re planning on doing some personal live events, and I’m very active in the [Gainsight] community, so I’m aware that there are new tools coming from [Gainsight Customer Communities]. As soon as they’re ready to go, I get access to the beta features, and I can start playing with ’em.”
We can’t wait to see what you achieve next with Devo Connect!
Learn more about Gainsight Customer Communities
Ready to create a single community destination for your customers to connect, share best practices, provide feedback, and build a stronger relationship with your product? Check out Gainsight Customer Communities today.
