At the Good to Great Marketing Nation event last week with Marketo, we conducted a survey with 75 marketers regarding their customer marketing initiatives. It was a pretty successful event and marketers were drawn in by our messaging on listening-understanding-engaging. We also had a great turnout for the “Don’t just sell, create engagement throughout the entire marketing lifecycle” panel with Get Satisfaction. Here are the results from our survey (and don’t forget to scroll down to see our infographic summarizing them):
Do you have a dedicated person for marketing?
Do you have a dedicated budget for customer marketing?
What percentage of your budget goes to customer marketing?
Are you able to trigger campaigns based on product usage?
What percentage of your revenue comes from existing customers?
Conclusions
We are encouraged by the fact that a majority (52%) of companies now has a dedicated marketing team for customer marketing. Most companies (57% or more) however spend less than half of their marketing budget on existing customers. In fact, on average the respondents spent only 21% of their marketing budget on existing customers, whereas these customers make up for the majority of revenues (61% across the respondents). Only a small (31%) percentage of marketers could trigger campaigns based on real-time user actions. If you read our trial and signup process benchmark report, you’ll remember we had negative experiences with those who were sending irrelevant content (like inviting us to conferences when we had barely done anything with the account). The smart way to engage your customers is to engage based on usage behavior. Personalization in that effect has been proven to increase engagement 4 times, which could lead up to 40% more sales (in case that was one of your goals with marketing :)).
It’s time to start monitoring how happy (or not) your existing customers are using your products or services so you can better serve them (through e-mail marketing and otherwise) and have lifelong advocates!
Here’s the intro video we made for our booth!
3 steps to engage your customers better from Totango on Vimeo.
Also check out our partner page with Marketo LaunchPoint.
