A new year welcomes new opportunities for customer advocacy managers and their community members. From new campaigns, recruitment strategies and new goals to achieve, our customers’ programs have been buzzing with activity this past month.
Customer advocacy programs continue to be a single source of truth for all things customer experience. It’s also where forward-thinking teams make huge strides by connecting and engaging in ways that others within their business cannot. With that, let’s dig into last month’s data.
Recruitment and Engagement
Last month, our customers welcomed over 8,100 users to their programs, more than 45,000 have been engaged over the last 30 days, generating over $7 million in ROI through over 370,000 acts of advocacy. It’s important to note that the vast majority of our customers operate invite-only and exclusive programs, so recruitment is typically strategic and less broad than public communities.
A new year inspired new recruitment strategies for Wiley. “We ran a t-shirt campaign, where we gave new t-shirts to all advocates who recently joined the program,” said Jessica Mitchell, Customer Advocacy Program Manager at Wiley. “We also ran a successful ‘Good Riddance 2020’ campaign, which aimed to educate customers and help them prep for the semester.” For that campaign, Wiley provided $10 gift cards for advocates who completed 10 challenges. “Our engagement and hub metrics were on fire,” added Mitchell. “We added an annotation to all on-demand webinar recordings that would introduce and invite customers to join our community,” said Kathleen Orazio, Customer Advocacy Marketing Manager at Viewpoint. “We also just launched a new product help site and added The Viewpoint Network to its main navigation which also made it available in-product to all customers.”
Other customers took on new initiatives to engage their community members. “We just launched ‘functional advisory boards’ where our product team will meet with customer volunteers every two weeks during the sprint process,” said Storey Sheriff, Advocate Marketing Manager at Greenway Health. “I built a #incaseyoumissedit campaign, which featured the top 4 challenges from each community to encourage participation from our less active members,” added Jennifer Susinski, Global Customer Advocacy & Marketing Manager at HPE. “The performance was better than expected and most people said they would like to see the campaign once a quarter!” Many customers also took advantage of Influitive’s pre-built campaigns, including one themed around building and maintaining healthy habits and celebrating Lunar New Year.
Challenges and Acts of Advocacy
When it comes to recognition, our customers’ users have earned more than 6.8 million points and redeemed over 9,600 rewards. To help make this happen, they completed over 330,000 challenges! Users completed 39,000 social shares (generating more than 93,000 clicks), and responded to more than 20,000 survey and feedback challenges. Other notable acts of advocacy include making over 440 referrals, writing more than 1,200 reviews and acting as a reference over 600 times.
So what kinds of campaigns drove these acts of advocacy? “We wanted to drive more Gartner product reviews,” said Ting-Mei Chong, Advocacy Manager at Quadient. “Our VP of Customer Transformation created a video to promote this ask, which appeared on all of our customer-facing channels. They all lead back to our program.”
“We asked for a lot of quotes and testimonials this month, which came from time-sensitive requests from our marketing team,” added Kaelie Lund, Community Engagement & Advocacy Specialist at Jamf. “We fulfilled each one, which ranged from videos, interview requests and beta-testing opportunities. In fact, it was our second highest month of engagement ever!”
Discussion and Community
Everyone was quite chatty last month! We saw over 1,600 discussion topics posted and more than 80,000 replies logged. More than 11,600 users were engaged in discussions last month.
One of our customers in the student education space reinforced the importance of community with refreshed badges and levels that rewarded discussion activity. “With our focus being education, advocacy means keeping our community engaged so we focused more on rewards and discussions,” they said. “We added quite a few new badges to allow different ways to level up and that garnered a lot of feedback and discussion.”
Others took time to reflect on 2020 while looking ahead at the coming year. “We posted topics to help our advocates engage with their students in this new environment and reflect back on what went well for them last year,” said Mitchell. “In our ‘New Year, Renewed Commitment’ campaign, we had customers share how they would like to see our community evolve, how we can make it more valuable to them, what they like best about this community, or what they are looking most forward to in construction in 2021,” added Orazio. “This is still a great conversation with a lot of valuable insight for us moving forward.
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We hope you enjoyed this brief look at these key customer insights and trends. We’ll be bringing these trends to you throughout the year to help benchmark your customer marketing and advocacy programs.
