TL;DR: Customer marketing focuses on engaging existing customers after the first sale to increase retention, lifetime value, and revenue. Because it’s far more cost-effective to sell to current customers than acquire new ones, strategies like personalized onboarding, journey mapping, segmentation, and ongoing value-driven communication help reduce churn and drive sustainable growth.
Introduction
Lead generation is on the to-do list of most marketers. And sure, you might have some successful strategies in place, but wouldn’t it be nice to capture some easier wins? One of the best ways to land these wins is through customer marketing. Why?
Companies have a 60% to 70% chance of selling to an existing customer, compared to a brand-new one (the latter is only 5% to 20%). Research also shows existing customers spend 67% more than new customers.
The bottom line is that existing customers are easier to sell to, and they buy more. So, if you want to capture more of that revenue, a great place to start is customer marketing.
What is customer marketing?
Customer marketing is the strategy of continuing to actively market to your customers after you’ve made the initial sale by building relationships and improving your brand experience. Customer marketing helps promote customer retention, and foster upsells and cross-sells. The customers who know, love, and use your products are much more likely to purchase additional products and services in the future.
And if they don’t love your products (yet), you want to provide a better value proposition and help continuously, so when it comes time for renewal (or shopping the competitors), staying with your product will be the clear choice.
Why is customer marketing important?
The cost of acquiring a new customer is roughly four to five times the cost of retaining an existing one. And yes, customer acquisition is important for growth, but if you don’t balance that with marketing to your existing customers, you can end up in a vicious cycle of churn and burn.
Here’s what that looks like:
- You onboard customer X.
- You lose customer X.
- You spend 4-5x more to replace customer X.
- And the cycle grows longer and more expensive…
Customer marketing helps you to correct this imbalance to retain more customers, upsell, and cross-sell to achieve a higher customer lifetime value (CLV).
Customer marketing strategies that work
As you create your customer marketing strategy, most organizations have a couple of primary goals:
- Create happy customers. Why would they want to switch to a competitor? They love you!
- Grow lifetime customer value. They love you so much that they’re presold when you recommend other products and services.
Here are a few customer marketing strategies for reaching these goals:
1. Personalize onboarding
Onboarding email: “We’re really great. Our product is really great. Us, us, us… {continues with corporate speak and canned messaging}.”
The customer’s response: Delete.
Oops, that didn’t go so well. Let’s try again.
When your customer buys your product or service, you want to send them a personalized welcome email and onboarding series. The content should be specific to the product they purchased and give them resources, guides, and training that help them successfully use the product.
And remember, once you create this email, don’t set it and forget it.
Continue to talk to your customer service and salespeople. Ask about the problems that customers have during customer acquisition and then use that intelligence to improve the customer journey.
2. Map your customer success journey
Create a customer journey map and map out the specific journey your customers take after purchase. The first step, which we mentioned above, is that welcome email. Now, you’ll want to target a few more touch points. Here are several to consider adding to your list:
- Adoption and training. Your customer is brand new when it comes to using your product; what do they need to know? Again, chat with your sales and customer service teams and ask questions about where new customers get stuck. Use the answers to these questions to create training and resources to solve common problems and support your new customers.
- Help customers understand the overall value. Continue showing customers the great ways to use your product, and reinforce its value. For example,
“Hey, customer, did you know you can do this cool thing? Customer X just recently grew revenue by Y% using this exact feature. Give it a try! Let us know how it works for you.”
And here’s a pro tip: You can use marketing automation to set up these experiences.
- Expand the relationship, cross-sell, and upsell. Once your customer has some wins with your products, consider telling them about complementary products and upsells. Explain how these solutions can help them continue to grow their success.
- Ask for feedback. Don’t wait until you’re close to renewal to ask for feedback. Ask early and ask often. Then, take that feedback to your team, look for ways to improve the product or service, and let the customer know how you’re using their feedback.
These are just a few potential options, but the point is to start thinking about the customer journey and then set up touch points along that journey to create stronger relationships.
3. Segment users with similar characteristics
We can’t answer the question “What is consumer marketing?” without mentioning segmentation.
That’s because it’s the framework that allows you to personalize at scale.
Remember that welcome email we mentioned earlier? You can use it to setup automated customer segmentation help them reach their goals. For example, if you sell marketing automation, you might ask the new customer about their goals during that first welcome email.
Let’s say you learn their primary goal is to grow revenue through email marketing. You can use that data to segment new customers by interest and then provide personalized training, tools, and resources targeted to email marketing. Or you might discover a top interest is improving email deliverability.
When your customers reach their goals faster, your retention strategies will be more effective, and they’ll naturally want to grow their relationship with you. How about segmenting the successful ones into a customer rewards program?
Measuring your results
As with any customer marketing strategy, you’ll want to show results, right? And while some marketing metrics are tricky to track since programs happen over a long period, you can still track them. A couple of metrics to consider include:
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): CLV is the total revenue generated from a single customer throughout your entire relationship with them. For example, if a customer spends $100 per purchase, makes five purchases per year, and has been with your company for three years, their LCV would be $100 x 5 x 3 = $1,500.
- ROI: With ROI, you measure the profitability of your customer marketing efforts as related to their cost. For example, if a customer marketing campaign costs $10,000 and generates $50,000 in revenue, your ROI would be ($50,000 – $10,000 / $10,000) * 100 = 400%.
New customer acquisition will undoubtedly be part of your marketing strategy in the future. But when you balance that strategy with powerful customer marketing efforts, you can make faster strides toward growth because you won’t be battling churn.
Summary
Customer marketing is the practice of continuing to market to customers after conversion in order to strengthen relationships, improve retention, and drive upsells and cross-sells. Since existing customers are significantly more likely to buy again — and spend more when they do — customer marketing is one of the most efficient ways to grow revenue.
Rather than focusing solely on acquisition, customer marketing emphasizes personalized onboarding, ongoing education, and tailored messaging throughout the customer lifecycle. By mapping the post-purchase journey, segmenting users by goals and behaviors, and regularly asking for feedback, marketers can deliver more relevant experiences that increase satisfaction and loyalty.
When measured through metrics like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and ROI, customer marketing proves its value by reducing churn and maximizing long-term growth. A balanced strategy that invests in both acquisition and retention helps companies avoid costly churn cycles and build stronger, more profitable customer relationships.
Do you want to know more tricks for keeping customers? We’ve shared our favorite strategies for using marketing automation to boost retention with your existing customers.