April showers brought rich content, enticing discussions and over 15,000 new members to our customers’ programs. With it came significant growth in survey and feedback activity completions, the number of engaged members and nearly $16 million in generated ROI

Read on to dig into April’s data and customer examples. 

Recruitment and Engagement

Last month, our customers welcomed over 15,000 users to their programs, more than 60,000 have been engaged in the previous 30 days, generating nearly $16 million in ROI through more than 470,000 acts of advocacy. We once again saw double-digit growth in all areas compared to March, with ROI seeing a 36% increase and new membership growing by an astounding 54%. This is incredibly impressive, as the vast majority of Influitive customers operate invite-only and exclusive programs.

Many of our customers focused on refining their recruitment strategies in April. “We worked on refining our invitation strategy for new potential advocates,” said one customer in the cybersecurity space. “We worked with our customer experience team to pull a list of customers who have had positive help desk experiences to invite into our program.” “We’ve made an effort to include join links for other teams to share at the end of their webinars and emails, who we know are targeting the same audience as us,” said Alice Yuan, Associate Marketing Specialist at SAS. “This has enabled us to recruit a good number of new advocates to our program”. 

Others focused on new audiences. “We are in the process of inviting customers from Freckle and Lalilo to our Royals community,” said Sue Reukauf, Senior Manager of Customer Marketing and Advocacy at Renaissance Learning. The Pendo pop-up notification has helped us point to the first activity users need to complete with onboarding and we’ve had 71% go to the activity and only 28% dismiss it; it’s our best performing Pendo to date!” “We’ve made a renewed push to source mentors for our mentorship program since we had too many mentee volunteers and not enough mentors,” said a customer in the financial software industry.

When it came to engagement, customers looked to campaign-specific efforts. “We are doing a review marathon with a raffle, along with leveraging Influitive’s Challenge Notification feature to drive engagement to one important challenge each month,” said Olga Zavrazhnova, Customer Advocacy Marketing Manager at InterSystems. “We hosted a webinar to launch a new product feature, and customers who attended received pizza as an incentive for attending that they had to redeem in our hub,” said Jessica Mitchell, Customer Advocacy Program Manager at Wiley. “This improved both engagement and recruitment.” “We ran a campaign called ‘Life’s a Zoo’ where we highlighted how members can use data for good,” added Yuan. “Because it was themed and had a story woven into the campaign, it was well-received by the community.” 

Challenges and Acts of Advocacy

When it comes to recognition, our customers’ users have earned over 7.6 million points and redeemed over 8,600 rewards. To help make this happen, they completed over 440,000 challenges! Compared to March, we saw a marginal increase in points earned, a nearly 20% increase in rewards redeemed and 37% growth in challenge completions. With warm weather on the horizon, perhaps an uptick on seasonal rewards redemptions? 

Users completed nearly 40,000 social shares (generating more than 45,000 clicks) and responded to over 40,000 survey and feedback challenges. April welcomed a new fiscal quarter, so feedback surveys were in season with a 65% increase from March. Other notable acts of advocacy include making over 800 referrals, writing over 1,400 reviews–on sites like G2, TrustRadius and Gartner Peer Insights–and acting as a reference more than 400 times

So what kinds of campaigns drove these activities? “We had two important product feedback surveys in April, and our goal was to get 100+ responses for each, which we achieved,” said Rachel Lurie, Senior Customer Advocacy Marketing Manager at Emburse. “The product team found the feedback very valuable and will be used to help inform some enhancements they are currently working on.” “Our CEO will be creating short thank you videos for our Doctors segment and we’re creating GIFs to walk them through how to create discussions and search our hub for content,” added Blu Nordgren, Manager of Marketing Communications at Cloud 9 Software. “We were able to source two new customer stories this month that are already approved and live on our website.” 

Reviews were also top of mind for many customers. “I relaunched initiatives for TechValidate and Gartner Peer Insights,” said Jennifer Susinski, Global Customer Advocacy & Experience Manager at HPE. “To drive engagement, I built a Discovery campaign to help explain each site and what users access them, and a Nurture campaign to explain why those reviews are important for HPE and what makes for a compelling review.” “We set a goal to get new reviews across Software Advice in the eLearning industry, as well as get votes for an industry report called ‘The Bakers Dozen,'” added Jen Salazar, Senior Customer Advocacy and Engagement Program Manager at Cornerstone OnDemand. “We needed 10-15 reviews and were able to garner over 20! We incentivized them by saying that if we got mentioned in the report, we’d award them extra points.” “The goal of our Reviews Marathon is to get at least 20 reviews for applications on the InterSystems Open Exchange marketplace,” said Zavrazhnova.

Discussion and Community

When it came to discussions, we saw over 2,200 topics posted, and more than 52,000 replies logged. Over 10,000 users were engaged in discussions last month. 

“We added a ‘Tips & Tricks’ and ‘Our Data Footprint’ discussion area and were able to generate good discussions around how we can use data for good,” said Yuan. “Advocates could share insights that they got from the blog article and discuss how they can contribute to these efforts in their own ways.” “We have a Developer Community forum outside of the hub for all professional discussions, but I’m happy to see our advocates starting to create discussion topics in the hub,” added Zavrazhnova. “This included fun discussions like ‘what is the most beautiful word in your language’ and ‘what is your favorite movie.'”  

“We are preparing to launch our new Solution Suggestions forum in May, which will be a new space where customers can submit product enhancement ideas or requests, and the community can upvote the ideas,” said Lurie. “Our product team will monitor and moderate this section and close the feedback loop by rewarding members who submit product ideas that get added to the roadmap.” 

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.