10 Essential Customer Relationship Marketing (aka Growth) Tips

My first “growth” role was many years ago at Xbox and back then it was called Customer Relationship Marketing. I never thought much of the name, but in recent years as new terms like growth hacking and performance marketing have popped up, it dawned on me how much these terms have strayed from the central player: the customer.

Growth thinking, a term I prefer to growth hacking, is an essential part of customer relationship marketing. You know a great growth person when you meet one (they’re really keen to test and optimize everything, I mean everything), but I identify more with the broader name and skill set that customer relationship marketing embodies. It puts the user and your relationship with them at the center. This is tremendously important because it ensures that your growth tactics don’t stray too far from the value that you want to bring to your users. After all, your growth efforts are usually meant to help you get more customers using your product more readily. They’re not and should not (in most cases) be a product unto themselves.

So keeping the customer or user in mind, I’ve gathered my top ten customer relationship marketing tips :

#1 Start by saying Hello.

Introduce yourself early on whether in your onboarding or in a welcome email and ask them to introduce themselves then or soon after. It’s kinda like dating. You say hi and a bit about about yourself, they say hi back. It’s a good way to reinforce the value you plan to bring to your customer and start a relationship with them especially if you plan to do a good job with #2; start with hello, then move on to the information gathering.

#2 Use information and data to build your relationship.

Like any relationship, information is key to making experiences better. If your friend says she likes orange flowers, get her some orange flowers on her birthday. She’ll be way more stoked than if you get her white ones. This works the same for the relationship you have with your customers, and it’s why personalization and progressively building up a user profile are so important. Data gathering and how well you use it to personalize and hone a customer’s experience is the basis for good relationship management. When and how you gather this information is where the execution and testing can vary.

#3 Build communication channels and include engineers early on.

You’ll need these channels (in-product education, email, notifications, SMS, etc) and you’ll need engineers to help you build them if you want them to scale with the product, or even if you want to integrate outside services. Trust me. Building these too late is one of top growth issues I have seen at startups.

#4 Get them to that magical moment fast.

Several top growth leaders from Andrew Chen to Andy Johns have covered the importance of getting your users hooked or to that Aha! moment as early as possible, so I won’t beat that horse. It’s clear that effectively getting people to see the value of your product early on is key to getting them to come back over and over again, but those moments also play a role in building brand loyalty. They can spark an emotional connection and the loyalty you gain from that is the kind of gold that gets you both referrals and forgiveness when things like inevitable bugs or product changes might cause a less loyal customer to abandon your product.

#5 Study your key user flows regularly & talk out loud when you go through them.

Seriously, do this. If you want people to share a lot in your product or if you need more newly activated customers, walk through your share and onboarding flows regularly. Talk about what you are experiencing out loud. Sounds weird, but it is an amazing way to find pitfalls and friction in your flows. Better yet, have customers do this in front of you either by setting up your own user studies or using a service like usertesting.com.

#6 Be a good guide without getting in the way of the journey.

Product education (in and outside of your core product) is useful, but don’t overuse it or you’ll get in the way of the actual value your product is supposed to be delivering. For example teaching more obvious things like how to swipe up on a phone may end up impacting retention because you delay the users own product exploration without adding much perceived value. However teaching users about less intuitive aspects like a unique or hidden navigation or icon in your product adds more perceived value and can result in higher use of that feature as well as overall retention. It requires a lot of testing and measuring to get the balance right so you aren’t under teaching or over teaching.

#7 A/B test key flows and communications.

Set aside a control group whenever possible. This is where we really get into the growth mindset. It’s an addictive one and it’s useful, but…

#8 Focus. More tests are not necessarily better.

Especially if you are a small team, don’t make the number of tests you run your metric of success. You risk spreading yourself too thin and having a hard time parsing through all the data. Focus. Focus. Focus.

#9 Vary the level of complexity of your experiments.

There is a time and a place for simple tests that just tweak a single variable like the color of a button and big tests that blow up an entire flow. Often by running a sequence of small tests you can eke your numbers up in small increments over time, while less frequent bigger tests will have more dramatic results, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. That’s the rub, if you go to the trouble of building a whole new experience and it has a bad result, that can feel really bad, but it’s worth it. Why? See #10.

#10 Your failures are your friends.

It sounds cliche, but it’s true. What fails will often lead you to insights about what will work better. So be open to big changes that might fail, of course, in moderation. Everything in moderation. Did I say focus?

I hope you find these top-level tips helpful and that you remember to keep your customers, your brand and the value of your product in mind as you think about growth. Moving the numbers can be addictive, but be careful not to get sucked into short term gains at the expense of long term retention and loyalty. Your customers will thank you, literally.

PS: If you liked this, tap/click the ❤ below and share it with all your growth hacking, growth thinking, customer relationship marketing and product loving friends. And stay tuned for more posts.