Keeping customers is the long game every business needs to play—and win. Starting new relationships that end fast is costly, time-consuming, and terrible for your business health. Maintaining relationships, however, is of great value.
So, how do you keep those relationships going? The answer is churn management.
Now, what is churn management, exactly? It’s all about identifying potential churn-risk customers and fixing your relationship's flaws. The good news is that this strategy can work for any relationship, including your ambassadors.
What is Churn Management?
Churn management is the final step after lead gen and customer relationship management. Think of your churn strategy as your backup method. It identifies at-risk customers, uncovers why they intend to leave, and then uses proactive strategies to keep them instead of saying goodbye.
Of course, you can use it to manage other relationships, too—like your ambassadors.
Ambassadors promote your brand when you build an authentic community experience, which is a mighty important ingredient to business growth in today's world. However, if these advocates don’t feel supported, valued, or like the relationship works for them, they’ll be out the door.
Not only that, but all those affiliate sales and all that social engagement they were bringing in will vanish. The good news is that boosting your churn management can help you effectively improve your ambassador program.
The Importance of Churn Management
In the past ten years, the subscription economy has grown by an incredible 435% and is expected to be worth $1.5tn USD by 2025. However, despite these big numbers, many businesses are losing out on potential revenue. You can easily boost revenue by investing in customer satisfaction over customer acquisition. The same principles apply to your ambassadors. Managing healthy relationships with a select few can help bring your brand reputation and generate more sales while driving down acquisition costs.
How to Use Churn Management to Improve Your Ambassador Program
Ambassadors play a huge role in customer retention, especially in more niche markets or for brands testing new waters. For example, if you’ve recently switched from B2B to D2C, chances are you know how to generate B2B leads. Many of these tactics are similar for D2C brands, with two of the biggest recommendations being to use customer referrals and target high-value leads on LinkedIn.
Where do these two recommendations intersect? Brand ambassadors.
A great ambassador can help increase customer loyalty while lowering customer acquisition cost, but they can also come and go. That’s why expanding your churn management software strategy to include your ambassadors is so important. You want to keep the high performers happy, so you need to understand if and why they might leave.
Ready to get started? Here are our top tips to sidestep common churn patterns and build a healthy ambassador program.
Separate Customers from Ambassadors
Segmenting your ambassadors, just like you do with customers, is essential in identifying where issues are in your program and fixing them where they are. To start, separate your ambassador base into these categories:
- Customer ambassadors
- Experiential brand ambassadors
- Social media influencers
- Content creators
- Industry expert ambassadors
- Revenue-driving ambassadors
Segmenting ambassadors can help you focus on the aspects of your program that need the most help. For example, if your social media influencers keep leaving your program but your customer ambassadors are staying strong, you need to focus on your social program. Emphasising influencer marketing within this segment can significantly enhance engagement and loyalty, which are crucial for reducing churn and maximising ambassador impact.
Use Account-Based Marketing for Specific Ambassador Partnerships
While you may think that any ambassador is a good ambassador, this isn’t the case. You want everyone you partner with to open new doors to your target customer base.
A good way to do this is to use the same principles of account-based marketing (ABM). Just have a look at these top ABM marketing examples. In them, brands identified key personnel working at target accounts and then personalized a marketing strategy to boost sales.
A tailored landing page for each type of ambassador partnership can enhance this approach by providing a customised experience and making it easier to track engagement and performance. Using the same strategy to find ambassadors can help you partner with the right people, boosting your ABM approach even further.
How does this tie into your churn management strategy? Simple. Ambassadors who fit into your brand family work better with your brand family. It’s also easier to manage a smaller (but stronger) ambassadors program that brings in a higher percentage of customers than a wide network, allowing you to understand why ambassadors might leave and work to stop it.
Leverage Analytics to Improve Efficiency
Monitoring any ambassador relationship is the same as monitoring loyal customer relationships — it requires detailed analytics. Knowing your churn rate is great, but you must dig deeper to understand which ambassadors to invest in and what issues they may have so you can keep them around.
Additionally, tracking campaign pacing in social media advertising is important, ensuring that your micro-influencers receive consistent and strategically timed content to maintain their engagement and loyalty.
Enter, analytics. You need to track aspects ranging from user experience to technical issues to sales. Integrating corporate finance analytics into your churn ambassador management strategy can help you understand how ambassadors perform. You can also see how much they bring in, making it a cinch to determine which relationships are worth keeping versus cutting out entirely.
Track Your Wider Affiliate Network with Metrics
When it comes to understanding the churn rate of your affiliate program, you need to consider the period of time they signed on for (some just try out affiliate marketing but don’t want to continue) and their performance health.
Using these metrics to track affiliate program health can help you better monitor how effective each affiliate is at their job. It’ll also tell you when there’s a big drop in their revenue (a key sign they’re planning on leaving). Reaching out personally can help you understand exactly what happened, allowing you to support your high earners one-to-one through your customer success team.
Send a Churn Survey When an Ambassador Leaves
Even with the world's most proactive churn management strategy, sometimes an ambassador will leave. Before they go, however, you’ll want to take the time to find out exactly why.
With unhappy customers, you can look at metrics like usage patterns or indirect feedback like reviews.
When it comes to ambassadors, you can easily rework your customer satisfaction surveys into ambassador satisfaction surveys. Then, if there’s interesting information in the survey, you can arrange an exit interview to get more valuable insights—so long as your ambassadors trust you. After all, 19% of polled employees state they refuse to participate in exit interviews because they don’t trust their management.
Ambassadors are key drivers for your business. You’ll need them to succeed in this competitive landscape, so you must go the extra mile, just as you do with customer retention rates.
To keep your key ambassadors around, use proactive churn management strategies and analytics while working on continual refinement. This approach will help you manage and keep those top-notch ambassadors who do amazing work for your brand for longer.