This guide will get you started building your gifting strategy for post-sale accounts including during key milestones like customer onboarding and renewal management.
Applies to: Professional Services, Customer Success, Account Management
What You Will Learn
- Why customer touchpoints are essential post-sale – the battle for attention
- How to drive user adoption with Postal in customer onboarding & implementation
- How to get ahead of renewal conversations using Postal
The Competition for Attention
We talk a lot about catching people’s attention at the top of the funnel to drive interest and excitement in the problems that your product solves and ultimately holding your prospects’ attention long enough to sell them your solution! When a prospect becomes a customer, we know the whole GTM rejoices!
We enter the new stage of the customer lifecycle: onboarding them. However, even after they’ve signed the deal, we all know that competition for attention doesn’t disappear.
Your champions, your users, the decision-makers - their attention, their time is just as scarce a resource. And from the moment they become a customer, it’s your job to delight and keep them… to prove their investment is worthwhile.
The goal is always accelerating their pace to ROI, and to keep them on this path, you need to hold their attention & keep them accountable through the onboarding and implementation stages of your solution.
Typically tactics used in an onboarding process might be video calls, self-led learning, email…but to truly keep them moving forward and develop that trust, you can build targeted offline touchpoints into their immediate post-sales experience. Using the offline channel and tailored gifts through Postal as an additional form of communication with your customers is a must have for customer-facing teams.
How to drive User Adoption with Postal in Customer Onboarding
A gift at the beginning of the onboarding process is a no-brainer, and these can even be sent out from Postal in an automated way with a Postal “trigger.” We recommend sending a custom kit that includes relevant and themed branded items, a hand-written note, and perhaps even collateral or best practice documentation. Your Postal CSM can help you get started creating New Customer Welcome Kits or necessary Triggers if desired!
Based on how your customer onboarding journey is defined, there may be significant milestones your customers reach through the process – specific conversations, trainings, implementation stages, etc.
“Research shows gamification strategies increase engagement by 47%, boost brand loyalty by 22%, increase brand exposure by 15%.” (Snipp Survey)
You may consider sending rewards to your key contacts or champions in these moments. You might also facilitate sends of direct mail or other sends for a few months to ensure user adoption is effective with your solution.
Getting ahead of Renewal Conversations using Postal
“78% of B2B buyers said renewing a contract with an existing supplier was easier than finding a new supplier.” (Hubspot Report)
…But that doesn’t mean we sleep on prioritizing these conversations. There is no process that 100% guarantees that a customer will renew. There are, however, intentional behaviors and habits you can implement to keep your customers happy (and more likely to renew). To ensure your renewal conversations are successful and your partnerships will continue to grow for the long term, consider leveraging Postal in specific and effective ways!
First of all, growing your brand awareness and allowing your happy customers to be a part of that process through their own reviews and surveys can be facilitated easily with Postal using unique Marketplace items.
We know that when we engage with our customers and hear them out, they feel valued. This leads to increased satisfaction levels, increased loyalty, and lower rates for customer churn. Quarterly customer surveys can give us a pulse check on a customer health score & how likely they are to come back to products/services time and again, how likely they are to explore additional product offerings, how likely they are to renew. Below you can see a sweet chocolate package with a custom message which we have used when generating G2 reviews.
One of our favorite tactics at Postal in order to gather additional feedback and insights from our customers is by leveraging “Customized Fields” in your recipient landing page experience.
You can require your customers to answer set questions, multiple choice checkboxes, and more with these fields! It’s a great way to gather both business specific insights as well as get-to-know-you details from your customers!
Consider building 3 key questions into the gift redemption process to gather valuable feedback & help frame your conversations with members involved in various parts of the customer journey or specifically the renewal process.
Lastly, to ensure you have the right people join you in the “room,” in-person or virtual, for business review conversations and make these “must attend” events, consider WOW-ing your stakeholders with a Postal favorite in advance. You may send different items or spend different amounts depending on attendees personas.
Our team is happy to share some of our favorite vendors for recipient unboxing experiences! A few include Coup champagne, ONEHOPE Wine, Tasty Ribbon, and more! You can even thank your attendees after the business review for their time with an additional touch and ensure contracts moved to signature and closed won status!
Next up: Relationship Management & Upsell Opportunities >
Postal is always looking for ways to make our Flight Academy better. Use this feedback form to submit ideas!