In 2022, we decided to bring back a program built and designed specifically with our customers in mind, Act-On Customer Power-Ups, a dedication customer webinar series. We’ve seen great engagement and are building out even more programming for 2023.
When you launch or relaunch a customer program, it’s not guaranteed to be successful. We’ll walk through the process of our relaunch and how working cross-functionally helped Power-Ups take-off.
Getting buy-in makes for long-term success
Our Customer Success Program Manager, Owen Fox, lead the effort to relaunch the Power-Up program and worked closely with Customer Marketing to create a joint mission to put out content specifically made for Act-On customers. This became the foundation, with the spotlight on customers gaining insights into specific areas of the platform. Additionally, partnering with Support helped to identify the most frequently asked questions, and looking at the 2020 Power-Ups, we were able to generate our list of Power-Up topics.
Identifying topics is one thing, making sure we have speakers is another. We also partnered with the Customer Success (CS) leadership team, they were able to provide speakers for each topic. They knew which members of their team were strong in specific areas and which members of their team would be open to presenting.
On a side note, this program provides internal development opportunities to members of the CS team to work on their presentation skills, count that as another win for customer facing programs!
There’s more to promotion than emails
After determining the topics, confirming the speakers, and building a calendar, it was time to launch the program. To ensure a successful launch we checked all the boxes for promotions, sending dedicated emails, banners in the product, and cross-promoting in newsletters and webinars. But what made this launch most successful was the internal buy-in and promotion through personalized outreach by the account managers and customer success managers.
“Excitement from the AMs and CSMs made all the difference and drove our registrations for the first Power-Up,” said Fox. At Act-On, our customers come first, and providing them with a new learning opportunity to better themselves in the platform is a win for everyone. The Account Managers and Customer Success Managers knew the Customer Power-Ups would provide them with an opportunity to connect with their customers and open up new avenues of conversation, which helped to drive the excitement.
Give them something new, give them something different
We wanted to do something to make the Power-Ups more than just webinars since we all have endless webinar invites in our inboxes. For the relaunch of Power-Ups, we created dedicated landing pages that served as information hubs. Not only was the recording of the webinar hosted on this page for easy access, but additional videos, tutorials, and articles were included on the page as well. This made for easy access and adoption for any customers wanting to make changes or updates based on what they were inspired by in the Power-Up.
The information hubs have collectively received thousands of views, and every time we look at the reporting, the numbers go up. It’s gratifying to see that we’re making useful content that is relevant to customers.
Measuring success by the numbers
This leads to a border conversation around reporting. Any program you build needs to have reporting behind it to determine its reach and overall success. For Customer Power-Ups we did much more than look at registration and attendance. As mentioned previously, we looked at the information hubs as well when looking at overall engagement.
Another way we looked at the program was to look at the overall reach. How many customers registered, how many open opportunities were influenced, what topics gained the most interest both live and via the information hub.
On average we had over 100 customers register for each Power-Up. And when you look at the information hub stats, we’re well over 2,000 views. That is much higher reach than just the initial registrants. The information hub landing pages were not only promoted in our follow-up messaging, but included on the Act-On Connect site. This makes them available to all customers at any time. This is perfect for new customers looking to expand their use of Act-On, anyone who missed a session, or anyone who wanted to share with a co-worker looking to make improvements in a specific area.
When you have a successful program you can still improve it
Looking forward to 2023, our planning has already begun. We have a survey going out to all Customer Power-Up participants and plan to use these insights and interests to build out the programming calendar for 2023. We’re also going to test shorter format video sessions, we’re playing with the name “Extras from Experts.” These would be great for anyone with a few minutes of free time looking to learn something new about Act-On. Plus, they are easy for our team to pre-record and our hope is they will be easy to digest for our customers.
It never hurts to have a little fun, so we’ve got a few things up our sleeve to keep both internal stakeholders excited and customers coming back. Be sure to look for some fun promotions in early 2023 around Customer Power-Ups!