Creating captivating content is crucial and with Valentine’s Day as the common backdrop, our customers delivered stellar results. Without further ado, let’s dig into last month’s data and examples.
Recruitment and Engagement
Last month, our customers welcomed over 7,900 users to their programs, more than 41,000 have been engaged over the last 30 days, generating over $8.7 million in ROI through 304,000 acts of advocacy. While compared to January acts of advocacy have decreased, ROI has seen a 20% increase. Customers are seeing higher valued acts of advocacy completed and are achieving more with less. Also, 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.
Many customers worked on refining their recruitment strategies. “We are continuing to refine our Royals onboarding to improve our percentage of customers who completed the ‘Welcome to Royals’ challenges,” said Sue Reukauf, Senior Manager Installed Base Marketing and Customer Advocacy at Renaissance. “We added a Pendo notification to the first ‘Welcome to Royals’ challenge and sent an email to new members, encouraging them to complete the five ‘Welcome to Royals’ challenges to win a $20 gift card.” “I’m working on creating discussion channels targeted by region so that our sales team can engage with advocates in their region,” added Caitlyn Johnston, Student Success Program Manager at Wiley. “Our advocates can feel like they’re getting to know more of us on a personal level.”
Cloud 9 Software used a live customer webinar as the launchpad for more program recruitment. “The business day after the webinar aired, we sent emails to all of our customers who have not joined our hub, telling them that the webinar recording was now available on-demand in our hub,” said Blu Nordgren, Marketing Communications at Cloud 9. “It generated a huge amount of new members for us!”
Other customers found creative ways to engage their community members. “We are running a new Charitable Match initiative for FY21Q1 where the first 50 advocates who redeem a charitable donation will have it matched in full by HPE,” said Jennifer Susinski, Global Customer Advocacy & Marketing Manager at HPE. “In the first 48 hours we had 23 redemptions, providing proud moments for both our advocates and community leads.” One of our customers in the student education space ran Influitive’s pre-built Lunar New Year campaign and created a design challenge for the community to help design a new icon. “We were still using the default hub loading icon and our community loved having a direct impact on the hub,” they said.
Challenges and Acts of Advocacy
When it comes to recognition, our customers’ users have earned nearly 6 million points and redeemed over 10,000 rewards. To help make this happen, they completed over 276,000 challenges! Users completed 28,000 social shares (generating more than 78,000 clicks), and responded to more than 17,000 survey and feedback challenges. Other notable acts of advocacy include making over 440 referrals, writing more than 890 reviews and acting as a reference over 400 times.
So what kinds of campaigns drove these acts of advocacy? “We started a ‘Trivia Thursday’ campaign as we had received a lot of positive feedback from advocates who wanted to see more of them,” said Ella McKown, Senior Customer Marketing Specialist at Calabrio. “Just a lot of fun and a tip of the hat to Alex Trebek!” “We launched a ‘Club Nine Hotline,’ which let’s advocates call us, hear a recorded welcome message giving them some guidelines, and then they can leave a testimonial as a voice message for us,” added Nordgren. “In the end we plan to put together a short animated video featuring the actual voice recordings as the audio track.”
Some customers also ran with Valentine’s Day themed campaigns. “We ran two campaigns in February. The first, ‘Love our Royals Educators’, was created to tell advocates how much we love them along with some asks for testimonials, NPS score and to invite a friend to the program,” said Reukauf. “The second campaign, ‘Literary Quest’, came with heavier asks like linking their social accounts, joining a reference campaign and others. Both have netted solid engagement and even inspired a new Renaissance Royals Spotify playlist.” “We ran an ‘All You Need is Love’ campaign and also looked to our community to boost registration for an upcoming event,” added Jessica Mitchell, Customer Advocacy Program Manager at Wiley. “Our registration numbers went from around 125 to about 480 registrants after we engaged the community.”
Discussion and Community
The conversations continued in stride last month! We saw over 1,400 discussion topics posted and more than 68,000 replies logged. More than 9,800 users were engaged in discussions last month.
One of our customers in the information security space posted a PDF of advocate-sourced recipes which was a big hit in their community. “I asked advocates to go and read their work from home tips and tricks post from last year (at the beginning of the pandemic) and share what they’ve learned since working from home for a year,” said McKown. “We created a discussion thread for three events we’re running: ‘Wicked Spring Break’, a ‘Canadian Accounting Event’ and a ‘Community College Event’,” added Mitchell. “We also ran discussions that we knew would be popular with our advocates, with one in particular getting users to share their tips on engaging students in Zoom.” “We always have two new honor roll discussions and have a discussion about celebrating the wins as part of ‘Love our Royals campaign’,” said Reukauf. “We’ve had 4 discussion posts, 517 replies, and 128 engaged in discussions.”
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We hope you enjoyed this brief look at our key customer insights and trends. We’ll continue bringing these trends to you throughout the year to help you benchmark your customer marketing and advocacy programs.
