Spring has sprung and our customers’ programs continue to deliver creative campaigns, innovative recruitment strategies and buzzing community discussions this past month. We’re proud to share significant growth in the 3R’s (referrals, references and reviews) along with social share activity and nearly $12M in generated ROI in March.
Read on to dig into March’s data and customer examples.
Recruitment and Engagement
Last month, our customers welcomed over 10,000 users to their programs, more than 43,000 have been engaged over the last 30 days, generating nearly $12 million in ROI through more than 360,000 acts of advocacy. Compared to February we’ve seen nearly double-digit growth in all areas, with ROI seeing an astounding 33% increase. Also, while the vast majority of our customers operate invite-only and exclusive programs, recruitment of new members grew over 29% month-over-month.
When it came to engagement, raffles and virtual events were top of mind. “We had a raffle to get a super cool branded cooler and almost 15,000 points were put into the raffle!,” said Kaelie Lund, Community Engagement & Advocacy Specialist at JAMF. “We also had our first virtual volunteering and had 22 members show up for two hours of volunteering each which is a great metric to be able to report on.” “For engagement, we were focused on the events that we were running and creating an awesome experience in the hub,” added Jessica Mitchell, Customer Advocacy Program Manager at Wiley. “We created event experiences for two accounting events, Wiley’s Wicked Spring Break and Knerd Camp.”
Challenges and Acts of Advocacy
When it comes to recognition, our customers’ users have earned over 7.5 million points and redeemed over 7,000 rewards. To help make this happen, they completed over 320,000 challenges! Despite a decrease in reward redemptions, we see a 16% increase in challenge completions and 26% increase in points earned. Perhaps users are saving their points for something big?
Users completed 47,000 social shares (generating more than 125,000 clicks), and responded to over 25,000 survey and feedback challenges. Both social shares and clicks grew more than 50% month-over-month – now that’s something to tweet about! Other notable acts of advocacy include making nearly 800 referrals, writing over 1,400 reviews–on sites such as G2, TrustRadius and Gartner Peer Insights– and acting as a reference more than 600 times. Each of these acts of advocacy also grew more than 50% percent month-over-month.
So what kinds of campaigns drove these activities? “We ran an International Women’s Day challenge, where over 70 members talked about the women they love in their life,” said Lund. “We recently launched a testimonial video challenge and quickly received 5 submissions,” added Olga Zavrazhnova, Customer Advocacy Manager at InterSystems.
One customer in the cybersecurity space focused on driving online reviews through a cross-channel campaign. “We activated advocates to share a report our researchers created,” they shared. “Our advocates love to share our research, so the social sharing went really well.”
Discussion and Community
When it came to discussions, we saw over 1,400 topics posted and more than 53,000 replies logged. Nearly 9,000 users were engaged in discussions last month.
One of our customers in the computer software space created nostalgic content. “We posted a photo of a very old software and asked if our members recalled what it was – it brought back a lot of great memories for them,” they shared. “We ran specific discussion threads to support our virtual events, all focused around wicked problems that impact our customers (higher educators),” said Mitchell. “We kicked off a new “suggest rewards idea” discussion post that asked members to vote on each others’ ideas,” added Zavrazhnova. “We hope to turn the top-voted ideas into redeemable rewards in our catalog.”
For Renaissance, March brought new life to older discussion content. “We continue to see our discussions about “Celebrating the Wins” be successful over the past year,” said Sue Reukauf. Senior Manager of Customer Marketing and Advocacy at Renaissance. “These are where our educators share small and big successes and support each other. The National Honor Roll discussion posts are always popular with the members who participate”.
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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.
