Making your customers feel special is necessary for building stronger relationships and increasing advocacy.
And that doesn’t come just from building moments of delight into your product (although that’s important).
We’re talking about taking time out of your day to make the real people behind your “logos” feel known and appreciated—which we did this holiday season by filming nearly 100 personal videograms.
A true gift for customers—no strings attached
Instead of doing a typical holiday campaign video (or sending paper cards—so last year), we decided to give our customers, employees and partners a way to delight their customers and advocates.
We had them fill out a simple form where we collected their recipient’s name and Twitter handle, and let them choose one of three fun characters to deliver their message.
We then tweeted out the final product. The choices were:
1. Ellie the happy elf
2. Gingey the gingerbread person
3. Frank the grumpy snow person
Our only objective: to bring a smile to our customers’ faces and help them do the same for their customers this holiday season.
That’s right; there were no campaign goals, and no traditional demand gen metrics to hit.
So, why did we do these videograms?
We felt that taking 30 seconds out of our day to personally address both the sender and receiver would be well worth the time we put into creating each one—and pack a bigger emotional punch with them.
And that’s something we couldn’t have achieved with all the marketing personalization technology in the world.
Seems we might have been right:
The value of delighting customers
You might be thinking: “This sounds great, but I don’t have the time or resources to do this. There’s no way my boss would go for this without clear ROI.”
1. Delighting your customers doesn’t mean blowing your budget.
We spent a few hundred dollars on costumes, decor and a few new video cards. We could have easily spent more creating an elaborate video that didn’t make our customers and their advocates feel as special.
What’s more important is the time we put into showing our customers we care.
2. In regards to your boss’ expectations: it’s becoming increasingly difficult (especially in the B2B SaaS space) to keep and retain customers.
Going the extra mile to forge a personal relationship with them is worth more than another lead in the funnel—unless your company doesn’t consider advocacy, retention and increasing customer lifetime value important.
People buy and champion your software, not corporations. And they could become a lifetime advocate and take your software/relationship wherever they go. (Second order revenue for the win!)
How to do customer delight right
There are many occasions when you can delight and surprise your customers:
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- Birthdays
- Holidays
- Anniversaries (business or personal ones)
- After a successful launch or campaign
- Any day of the year
We didn’t do this just to make our customers smile. We wanted to help them accomplish something important to them: building better relationships with their own advocates.
Here’s a list of helpful articles and resources to get you start truly delighting and engaging your customers:
- A list of the most meaningful ways to recognize and reward your customers
- The Advocate Marketing Playbook—a complete, how-to guide for building strong customer relationships
- 10 thing companies should know about their customers
- Advice from marketing mastermind Taylor Swift on building a rabid fan base
- A webinar about the most powerful motivators you can deliver to your advocates
Next time you need to ask your customers for a favor (reference, referral, media request, etc.) remember how much easier it would be if you built a personal relationship with them first.