How We Revived a Churned Customer Base and Optimized Journeys to Boost MQLs & Drive 40% Revenue Growth for an Adventure Cruise Company

The company had been using Salesforce Marketing Cloud for the past 3 years, but did not have any clarity on their user journeys, data, conversion rates, churn and user disengagement. Their data and user journeys were scattered, and the only activity they were using Salesforce was- newsletters.

Our challenge was to collate the data, figure out the data sources, figure out which all Marketing Cloud Journeys had been used in the past, and to build out their customer journeys for better engagement and re-engaging existing and churned customers.

Our biggest problem was- the executive who was earlier working on Salesforce Marketing Cloud has moved on from the organization. Moreover, the current workforce had no idea what was built on Marketing Cloud, or what the data intake sources were.

Journey Builder:

• Journeys were earlier used, but there was no documentation or intent (or audience segmentation) for different journeys.

Scattered Data:

• There were lists built out with inconsistent nomenclature and lacked mapping of data sources.

Customer Journeys:

• Until now, the CEO was the main source of revenue, and even then, customer journeys for existing customers was not mapped out. The marketing team had never sat down to build out customer journeys through the funnel.

Under-utilization of Marketing Cloud:

• With a data of over 20K, their Marketing Cloud instance was only being used for sending newsletters every month. No other functionality of SFMC was being utilized.
  
  

We divided the entire project into five different phases:

• Audit and Customer Journey Mapping
• Data Sorting, Cleanup and Mobilization
• Building out Journeys on Marketing Cloud
• Reporting and Training

We understood that the entire CRM was being ignored massively, and the only reason that they were still using Marketing Cloud was because it had been convenient to continue using it.

Audit and preparation

The first step was to have multiple conversations with their marketing team and high level executives to understand the different touch points before a lead became a customer. Then, an audit of the data led to multiple discussions on where the data might have been imported into Marketing Cloud.

• Customer Journey: Multiple discussions with the client led us to build out a customer journey for their existing and prospective customers.
• Data Audit. Auditing the data helped us segment it and build out journeys for each customer segment

The Client now finally had a single source of truth to define their customer journey and funnel stages. This would help them optimize each stage of the customer journey for better conversion.

Building Out Journeys on Marketing Cloud

The data audit and customer journey mapping allowed us a better understanding of how the new journeys would look like. We also defined a clear entry and exit criteria to adhere to the GDPR laws and remove unwanted contacts/unsubscribes. We discarded the previous journeys and focused on building the pipeline for engaging existing customers and prospects.

• Customer Journeys for Existing Customers: We built out flows for re-activating and re-engaging existing customers. This helped reduce churn rate, and improve revenue from existing customers. This also helped us in retention.
• Customer Journeys for New Customers: We finally had customer journeys to nurture accounts and deals in the pipeline and convert them into paying customers.
• Customer Journeys for Preferred Partners: We also started engaging preferred partners to start nurturing them and getting new leads from them, along with building campaigns for rewarding them.

Reporting

We built out reports for visibility into their existing campaigns, leads and contacts. The Client finally had an insight on different data intake sources, the revenue pipeline, leakages and improvement metrics.

This also allowed for mapping out KRAs and KPIs for their marketing and sales team, and a plan for nurturing and closing contacts in the existing pipeline and prospects.

1. Creating the blueprint:

• One metric created two blueprints
  1. 1 for nurturing the existing database of 440K contacts,
  2. 2nd for net new demand generation from marketing motions
• These blueprints mapped end-to-end sales and marketing processes, including what marketing assets to utilize, which marketing channels to initiate these motions on, nurturing of these contacts, scoring them and qualifying them from contact >> MQL >> SQL >> conversion.
• Once they were qualified for the sales team to take over, there was a nurturing drip for sales qualification as well, along with a sales playbook.
The blueprint also contained a cold sales outreach process.
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2. Nurturing

• The blueprint also included a newsletter nurture for existing database and getting a buy-in from these contacts for a marketing nurture.
• Upon subscription to these newsletters, these leads would be nurtured through marketing emails, thereby qualifying them for sales motions.

3. Lack of Marketing Assets

• The team had close to no marketing asset in their armory. It came upon One metric to work closely with their subject matter experts (SMEs) to create ebooks, blogs, customer success stories and infographics to be shared along with the newsletter.

• As the initial marketing assets generation was slow, there was massive repurposing of existing content. Ebooks and customer testimonials used as blogs, social media content and infographics.
• But then One metric took upon the onus, and ran these nurture and newsletter campaigns with little or no input from the Client.
  
  

4. Marketing and Sales Sync

• One of the biggest challenges (and achievements) that One metric was able to pull off was to create a two-way communication between their sales and marketing team.
• The sales team could now demand their desired number of qualified leads from the marketing team, and the marketing team could ask for feedback from the sales on the qualification.

A few months into the project, we were able to achieve the following:

• We were able to increase the revenue generated by 40% in the first five months, by building Journeys for customer flow and nurturing contacts.
• We achieved 32% re-engagement and re-activation of past customers, and brought them again into the revenue pipeline.
• We were finally able to give them complete visibility into their data, their CRM, and the metrics which they needed to optimize their revenue pipeline.