The Art of Community Relationship Management

"You're asking them what book they're reading. Anyone can do that." ??

If you’ve ever received a comment like this, congratulations! You’ve made customer marketing look so easy that anyone thinks they can do it. Let’s talk about the art of relationship management.

Hi, I’m Kristin Blye, a customer marketing leader who designed a collaborative environment where I surpassed my annual community discussion goal by 20% and nurtured relationships that resulted in a 420% increase in account value. I’m writing a series on optimizing your marketing strategy to enhance the health and value of your customer community. These thoughtful and respectful relationship-building strategies will ensure your community is built on a foundation of trust and authenticity, supporting the nurturing and evolution of customer advocacy.

1. Establishing a Safe Space Through Discussions

The truth is, this active book recommendation thread was over two years old, ranked in the top five most engaging topics in our forum, and was designed to achieve two goals at once: activation and retention.

96% of our new members gravitated towards friendly icebreaker threads to test the waters of a new discussion forum.

As the manager of an edtech SaaS customer community, I knew my audience, primarily educators, checked out between May and July and were at risk of not returning to our community for the August back-to-school timeframe. This would absolutely destroy any momentum I had built and jeopardize my community engagement during a peak time of the year. Frontloading my customer engagement strategy with fun, easy-going ideas applicable to their needs during their out-of-office time, such as book recommendations for summer reading, was part of our annual “Summer Campus” campaign—a strategy that made our customer community sticky during summer break when our customer base wanted nothing to do with our product.

“They’ll come back, they always come back,” said no community manager ever. Pack a bag because you’re going on vacation with your audience. Make your community a destination throughout the customer lifecycle.

I’m not managing an anonymous community. This is a company-run social experiment where consumers log in with their trackable corporate email addresses and expose their vulnerable side by sharing tensions, testimonials, and ideas for our market research disguised as a peer networking bonding session. They’re representing their business, their managers, and their professional identities. There is a nuance to relationship building and management. And sometimes that means a product recommendation survey takes a backseat to an authentic conversation about the best Stephen King novel.

Bends down to pick up microphone

Icebreaker Discussion Thread Ideas and the Organic Conversations That Resulted

1. How are you spending your summer vacation? Members bonded over shared destinations and new travel plans and commiserated about summer school or celebrated the lack thereof.
2. What is your mid-week go-to recipe? This thread got a lot of callbacks during the holidays when we reminded members to check back for Thanksgiving side-dish inspiration. Understanding our audience was overworked and time-poor, this relatable conversation provided ideas to solve outside-of-work problems, and the light-hearted comments like, “no time to cook, take-out is my go-to recipe” created a sense of fellowship.

Casual conversations build confidence for using the platform and interacting with strangers on a message board. So when you launch a series of market research questions where you’re expecting to extract some valuable VOC (voice of the customer), your community members will be more comfortable sharing thoughts, more interested in their peers' responses, and more willing to participate in back-and-forth discussions. This tactic allowed me to surpass my annual discussion goal by 20%.

2. Small Profile-Building Questions with Big Impacts

Persona-building challenges help create detailed member profiles and save preferences for better personalization later on. For instance, when I asked, "Do you prefer coffee or tea?", it allowed me to segment my audience. This way, I could exclude those who said "neither" when offering a Starbucks gift card as a reward for advocacy. It made the experience more relevant and boosted engagement rates.

Attention to detail demonstrates the sociability and thoughtfulness of your community. An eccentricity about my audience, uncovered through a marketing swag brainstorming session of all places, was that educators are very particular about their pens. Makes sense, they grade papers. The most engaging challenge in my community was a radio button question: “What is your favorite pen color?”. We offered an array of colors to choose from, a space for write-ins, and made the answers public. Science teachers prefer blue, purple, and green if you’re curious. Another playful query was, “If you didn’t become a teacher, what would your profession be?” The answers ranged from small variations of their actual job (is a science teacher, would be a lab technician) to artist, veterinarian, and chef. Small facts that contributed to the overall picture of our audience’s tone and attitude.

3. You Catch More Flies with Honey: Design an Attractive Destination

WIIFM - What’s in it for me? The golden question that should be guiding your customer marketing strategies. Time-poor customers are a universal hurdle for community managers, so how do you make your program attractive enough to get exclusive face time with your audience? By providing relevant, impactful, and refreshing content and experiences, of course! Once you don the hat of a customer marketer, you’ve quietly switched teams, migrating to the customer’s side of the field and gaining their perspective of your overall program experience and offerings. Your ability to understand customers’ goals as well as your business goals creates a mutually beneficial partnership for both parties involved.

Example - Working your way through the educational career system is a professional triathlon. I knew my customer base dedicated their lives to earning degrees, conducting research projects, and vying for highly competitive positions. It takes humility and the ability to read the room to understand hitting them over the head with product-centric communication isn’t effective or wanted. We set out to create a customer-first community. I collaborated with my content marketer to develop value propositions that aligned with my customer’s goals:

• Troubleshooting-based peer networking
• Professional development
• Exclusive business partnership opportunities to grow their clout

Using Influitive* as a core community management platform, I designed a space that nurtured conversations based on these three pillars, offering educational articles with follow-up questions, leveraging the discussion forum to generate peer engagement, and invitations to exclusive partnership opportunities with the organization through beta testing recruitment, case studies for customer storytelling, and speaking engagements. Once we established a rhythm, we extracted the customer feedback needed to support our content development and market research. We tested ideas, shared early product announcements, and offered first-class customer support to our members. We cast a wide net of opportunity when we launched the program and focused our ambition after observing customer activity. As the community evolved, so did the trust in our customers.

Success - While I maintained a predictable engagement cycle that ebbed and flowed with the demands of our audiences’ schedules, our email engagement remained consistent with an average open rate of 45%. Naturally, the community was part of my omnichannel marketing campaign to promote a two-day, 12-session, 30-speaker customer virtual event. Analyzing post-event attendance data, I uncovered that 47% of our attendees were community members. The powerful insight here was that not all these community members engaged with our program weekly, monthly, or even quarterly…but they were listening. They opened and read our weekly newsletter. By understanding my email engagement rate didn’t align with my community engagement rate (the former being higher), I assumed there was some sort of barrier between the user’s inbox and the program; whether that was due to technical issues or disinterest was unknown at the time, but I was interacting with them on some level. Rather than gatekeep the registration and force my audience to register for this event on our platform, I offered the direct registration link in the email with options, “Register in the community and earn points (insert link to community destination) or skip straight to the sign-up form to save your seat now (insert registration landing page link).” The awareness and compromise on my part allowed customers to get what they needed in a method that was accessible to them, contributing to our record-breaking registration number (which increased a tremendous 179% YoY) and our attendance rate of 41%, exceeding our industry benchmark.

4. Be Your Customers' Champion and They Will Be Yours

While gift cards and leaderboard bragging rights are mildly intriguing, sometimes the real incentives are more heartfelt and thoughtful. Recognition goes a long way, exemplifying the achievements of your most active advocates and providing an attainable end goal to the other members of your community. Continue to engage and you too can be on a pedestal.

Example - What is a gamified program without a trophy? Our members, who were primarily science educators, were affectionately called “Lab Partners” (because “A teacher is more than an amazing customer, they’re a partner” - shoutout to my content marketer for that one). In my program’s first year, I established an end-of-the-year award called the MVLP (Most Valuable Lab Partner) Award designed to spotlight customers who went above and beyond, demonstrated true acts of advocacy, and formed a deep relationship with the company. In the first year, we championed 10 customers and gave them:

• A $100 VISA gift card
• A certificate of achievement (signed by me as the community manager and our CEO/Co-founder)
• Custom-made appreciation videos by our CEO/Co-founder praising each winner for their unique achievements as advocates
• A personalized letter to the account decision-maker delivered by their CSM (customer success manager)

This last artifact was clutch because I understood my product had multiple personas and while the daily users were my primary audience in the community, the enterprise persona was the one holding the wallet and deciding to expand or renew the subscription. An authentic note of appreciation for their patronage and announcement of their employee’s recent accomplishment of winning this prestigious award demonstrated our product’s value and offered transparency into the user’s interest and engagement with the software. Having the message come from their CSM maintained their relationship with the familiar line of communication.

Success Stories -

Combining the learnings from this article, here are some rapid-fire relationship management success stories (names have been changed for an air of mystery).

?? Jon, one of my MVLPs and top program advocates, hung his certificate of achievement in his office. This kickstarted a conversation with one of his department VPs, who recognized Jon’s passion and commitment to adopting modern technology in the classroom. The decision-maker promoted Jon’s achievements in their internal faculty newsletter and recruited him to be part of an emerging AI task force, where Jon could contribute to a strategy that would keep the business forward-thinking and competitive in a time of uncertainty for higher education.

The greatest joy I have as a community manager is seeing my members grow and evolve. In the three years of managing my educator community, I saw members come and go, shine and fizzle (burnout is real), and transform from wallflower to discussion board leader. Here are three standout moments.

?? Henry was a casual participant. I noticed him nudging his way into the community from the sidelines with increasingly considerate answers and peckish forum comments. I boosted his confidence and facilitated peer conversations by repurposing his usage support questions as community discussion challenges: “Do you have an answer for Henry? Respond to his question and earn 40 points.” I also directed advocacy opportunities his way, providing space for him to stretch his leadership wings by asking for his expert insight into topics he had shown interest in or (knowing he was an NPS promoter) to share his success story as a third-party review. After about a year and a half, Henry went from observer to two-time customer panelist and MVLP. Every time he spoke at an event, he admitted he “Wasn’t good at this, but it’s good practice and a lot of fun.” He was great and as a direct result of his community activity, his interest and confidence grew to the point where he evangelized our product to his institution’s new leadership, expanding his subscription and increasing his account value by 420%.

?? Similar to Henry, Karen was bopping around the community, doing her own thing. She would periodically appear and disappear, but I noticed she provided high-quality feedback. I started hosting monthly 30-minute, informal Zoom meetings as a way to generate more feedback. One monthly chat was about collaborating with the company—open to those who wanted to share their experiences and those who wanted to learn more. Karen dialed in. One week later, she signed up as a knowledge expert customer panelist for our largest virtual event to date. She did fantastic and was excited to volunteer for more opportunities.

?? Misty was a gem. She was feisty in her own right and knew what she brought to the table as a non-traditional educator, specializing in herpetology, a very unique subset of biology, but was also modest about her online presence. It took some compassionate coaxing to get a headshot (which, by the way, was her with a genuine grin plastered on her face while holding a very large snake—absolutely amazing). I tossed Misty several opportunities to participate in public acts of advocacy, and she respectfully declined every time. That’s okay! It’s good to know your comfort level. She didn’t have to be a webinar speaker to earn an MVLP. As an ideal example of a target persona, Misty offered up some great VOC. I’m not sure what exactly prompted the change in opinion. I’d like to think it was the slow-burn coaching on my end, but after a customer speaker dropped out last minute from a very important webinar designed for a large client win-back campaign, Misty answered my urgent community all-call, took a shower, swiped some lipstick, and turned her camera on. Misty saved the day. She later joined Karen as a customer panelist for a webinar that supported a large business growth objective.

In conclusion...community management is like any relationship. There is give and take, and no one owes anyone anything. Make the relationship sincere, the platform reliable, and the experience beneficial. And don’t be afraid to ask them what they’re reading. ??

*This author no longer recommends Influitive as a community platform. Try Insided by Gainsight, Higher Logic Vanilla, or Base.ai instead.

Read more articles in this series: 3 Ways for Community Marketers to Quickly Become Knowledge Experts in a New Industry

Let’s Work Together! Kristin Blye is a member of the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a mom of two little girls, and a Customer Marketing Leader, responsible for launching global advocacy communities, leveraging the voice of the customer to position companies as thought leaders within their industries, and developing customer-centric content, campaigns, and events that empower trust and drive engagement.