How To Use Your Customer Service as a Marketing Strategy
Creating an efficient marketing strategy always requires using all sources of profit. Integrating support into this strategy is somewhat difficult at first glance.
On the other hand, what place is better for building a positive brand perception? In 2018, 62% of customers contacted support. It is usually what people do the moment they need help. And providing some right away is certainly going to affect your marketing strategy positively.
No matter how much effort you put into writing amazing blog posts, recording engaging podcasts, or publishing awesome Instagram photos; if your support fails to deliver the expected, it’s all in vain.
So, how do you exactly integrate customer service into your marketing strategy? There are some professionally proven tips.
Use Customer Support Automation
Personalization is always the best. However, as the numbers of your customers start growing, you’ll notice the lack of time for demos and calls. For example, being a startup with only 10 people, it’s hard to communicate with every single subscriber.
Just to be clear, we support the idea of customer support being as human as possible. It’s just that if you are not able to keep things that way, automation is a game-changer.
You can craft a long tutorial video and split it into one-minute parts. Then send it to all of your email subscribers once a week. This simple move will help you educate customers and save your support team from the hustle of explaining the same things over and over.As for marketing benefits, customer support automation is perfect. Take the described example of short tutorials. You can create text versions of those and insert calls-to-action (CTA) there. According to Campaign Monitor, a CTA button can help you get 28% more conversion rates. Regarding tutorials, this can mean more large-payment subscriptions.
Educate Your Clients and Let Them Trust You
How hard is it to make a regular subscriber your brand advocate? The answer certainly lies somewhere in the follow-up and customer education phase. As we have mentioned in the previous paragraph, educating your clients helps save time for the support team and increase the number of paid subscriptions.
If your client asks something specific, answer that question immediately. And then send a concise article regarding the issue in a follow-up email. In this way, you will both educate your customers more and show them that you care. In the 21st century, people expect top-notch support and personalized approach.
The most important thing in this regard is planning all those actions and implementing them in your marketing strategy. Content creation, social media posting, and even live events should be deeply integrated into customer service activities. How is it done? Let’s dig deeper!
Use Your Email Campaign the Most
With all the growing numbers of Instagram and TikTok users, people still prefer email communication the most. It is a simple yet boundless way to communicate and share any kind of information. Marketing strategy does involve the usage of the email channel. However, how often does a support team use it to promote the brand?
Customer service is directly involved in email communication. All the support tickets, payment confirmations, or any other kind of messages are sent via email. So, instead of writing plain text, let your support representatives apply more creativity.
Use email templates
In terms of brand awareness promotion, consistency is the key. Thus, create email templates for all the situations. Include your company logo, brand colors, and social media links to it. Make sure your support team always uses these templates. It adds up to your professionalism and increases trust.
Use email signatures
Email signature in modern marketing is much more than simple ‘Best regards.’
HTML allows adding any type of content to your email footer. So, use it for your best. Make sure your customer support team uses similar email signatures that contain the following.
- Sender’s photo (if you want to increase personalization and trust) or company logo (if you want to promote your brand above all).
- Sender’s name, phone numbers, email and physical address of the company.
- Social media icons linked to corresponding corporate profiles.
- CTAs with links (you can use buttons as well).
- Promotional banners linked to your website, call schedule tools, webinar bookings, etc.
Of course, it would take a lot of time coding all these with HTML yourself. Even if you have a developers team. One could argue that you can make an email signature with a simple visual editor. But it might make your emails get spam flags, as images are often treated like one.
If you want to make corporate email signatures that look the same and take little time to create/install, use an online email signature generator, like Newoldstamp. It has a simple editor and a powerful dashboard. These allow you to create a master signature with all the described elements (using ready templates from a gallery) and send it to your employees just for inputting their names.
In addition, the Departments feature allows creating different signatures for different teams. Marketers may want to advertise the recent blog post, and your customer team is better to include a demo scheduling banner in their signatures.
So, make sure your support team uses email signatures that clearly represent your brand and let people contact your company ASAP.
Setup live chats
As you should make contacting your support as easy as possible, don’t forget about a live chat on your website. If your visitor finds something on a website difficult, being able to reach out for help from this very page is certainly going to increase customer satisfaction.
Bottom Line
Customer service is the last link between positive brand awareness and clients’ satisfaction. If you set it up wisely, people will love addressing your support team. And your representatives will have an opportunity to promote your company (directly and indirectly). The trick is keeping things comfortable and simple for customers. This is our essential advice. If you follow it, you will be able to use customer service for marketing purposes.
