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Get startedSocial media marketing and especially Facebook marketing is AdEspresso’s core business. The company is growing it’s customer base exponentially and reached the peak of 4,000+ total users.
Facebook advertising can be tricky for anyone from small business owners to startup founders or even experienced marketers in agencies. Everyone who has already tried to set up an ad campaign can relate to the pain it is to get people to buy your product on Facebook.
Facebook is extremely popular but just not the first place where people go in order to buy products.
With this pain point in mind AdEspresso decided to help everyone quickly create, analyze and optimize Facebook Ads in a simple way.
AdEspresso customers save up to 70% of the manual work needed to setup a Facebook campaign and can improve their performance up to 40%.
At AdEspresso a lot of focus is spent on customer support, and making sure the customers are really productive. In addition to this, users feedback is totally shaping the product.
We had a little talk with Camille Taylor, Customer Success Manager and learned a lot more about the AdEspresso’s success factors:
and basically how they manage to keep their 4,000 users happy.
Smart customer success tactics
The first thing Camille told me is that the support and success team are intermingled. The support team is in charge of recognizing pain points in users, find ways to supplement that and bridge the gap. The team is really small, about 5 people so the customer success is implemented in the support. There is not a dedicated customer success team.
I have to say, this is not what I expected! It was confusing because AdEspresso is clearly rocking it, so a separate, dedicated customer success team seemed more logical.
Yet, Camille assured me that they do have success strategies and pursued her explanation as follows.
“We are closely relating support and success because we want to be intimately aware of the pain points of our users. The best way to do so is to have the people managing support trained to know what would make the experience of our users better.”
And she adds:
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“So our main issue in terms of customer success was to be able to get our clients up to speed so that they can create successful Facebook ad campaigns. If they weren’t able to do this they would not see the value of AdEspresso.”**
Smart and simple and straight to the point!
SaaS customer success, kind of depends on some sort of an outside variable. Companies have to develop a different angle because the clients will not reach their desired outcome only by using the product alone.
In AdEspresso’s case users need to know how to advertise as well, so the team needed to find a way to solve for this problem.
Let’s take a look at how their epic content resonates with their customer success strategy.
How content enhances customer success strategies
Just like Buffer, AdEspresso has a very strong blog readership and almost the entire lead generation is based on content marketing. In other words, a lot of the free trials are generated by content.
The team has been collecting data from their users for a long time. It took a couple of months before realizing through support back-and-forth that a lot of users had trouble just getting a successful campaign out.
Once the team realized it, they came up with this brilliant idea: to develop the University, which is born from the need to educate users so that, in the end, they will have a better understanding of the value AdEspresso provides.
As Camille puts it:
**“We have always been into content marketing: our blog has been a source of actionable insight for advertisers, so we wondered how we could enrich this thing we were already good at, to bridge the gap of this need for our users to learn how to become better advertisers: that’s how the University was born.”
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If an AdEspresso user does not have a good understanding of Facebook and how to create a successfull campaign than they would think the application is flawed.
That’s why instead of focusing on having a customer success team, the company is spending a lot of time creating content and alternative ways for the users to be able to get more skills with Facebook advertising.
The University is only available for AdEspresso customers. There are a bunch of experiments and case-studies, educational material basically. The focus is on how to get the most out of the Facebook advertising budget and help train customers to become better advertisers.
At the beginning the University was supposed to be a free resource that we would be offered to all users. However, the team realized there were a lot of base users that were not spending as much as they could have been under their plan so they turned the University into another subscription plan with a 500$ ad spend limit, making it more like a training subscription.
In addition to that, the company has built an online community through a highly engaged users Facebook group in order to have them help each other become better advertisers together.
How to nurture clients for success
AdEspresso’s Customer Success manager explains:
“We nurture our customers 100% we want to be there for them! When you have a lot of users but the lifetime value is low because they are not that skilled in advertising, they don’t really get the value of the app”
To bridge that gap, the team also implemented training sessions that users can purchase in addition to the subscription.
On top of subscriptions, the company also offers campaign reviews.
A customer can purchase a campaign review and get a video recording review customized for their specific campaign ad. Depending on the pricing plan, the video is provided within 12h up to 48h after the purchase. These are just some of the ways we are set up to help guide customers through the use of Ad Espresso.
The only way to know what would work for them is to actually engage with your users.
How does AdEspresso do that? By getting on the phone with them and asking what would make their life easier, what would make the platform more valuable to them and turn that data into something actionable.
“You never know what your users are needing or wanting from your platform or what would make them stay. Too many entrepreneurs are trying to take a guess at that instead of just asking your users.”
Which is also a very smart tactic. After all, the product is flexible enough to allow to be shaped through customer feedback so that ultimately it provides the most value.
As any other SaaS, AdEspresso’s focus is on general growth. They are heavily monitoring churn, net promoter score and of course customer lifetime value.
“In order to track nps score, we just send out surveys. We collect a lot of qualitative data, we collect surveys from the users that go through the trial and don’t subscribe, and process to isolate the reason why they did not proceed with the subscription.”
Camille Taylor adds.
The support/success team uses Hubspot, Zendesk and lots of Trello boards to track everyone’s feedback and turn it into product suggestions. Also Chart Mogul comes in handy for churn management.
The team also juggles with onboarding calls and follow up email, trial worksflows, forms, discounts on the various stages of the funnel, annual subscriptions to maximize customer lifetime value.
“We want to make users aware that we can have discounts for instance for a whole year committement and let them know what we have in the roadmap for the next forseeble 2-3 months, especially if they are higher buyers. We need to see what they’re wanting to use and what would make Ad Espresso even more valuable to them.”
**Challanges AdEspresso could be facing with the customer success strategy?
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Once again, Camille explains it really well:
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“Scaling the product can be a challenge, as we are trying to make improvements of the products as quick as possible.**
In addition, managing the various communities, not only support but also the Facebook University Group and the variation of the skills of our users.
Camille ads:
Our lowest spent per month plan is the University plan meaning users that are just starting with Facebook advertisisng. On the highest level user with Enterprise solutions people are spending 50k/month. Being able to manage supporting both types of users with their levels of complexity, with their particular questions can indeed get pretty tricky”
Published on July 26, 2016.
