Aligning Marketing and Scaled CS

@tmnovello I recently joined a new company and need to do the same/similar exercise here. I probably won't start this work till January 2025, but happy to share the framework and process I use then. In short, the place to start is with bucketing/categorizing your comms. Often I find having categories and subcategories is most helpful, but start with overarching categories - and set clear definitions for each category that can be widely understood across the organization. This will allow you to better understand what categories of communications do/don't conflict.I'll give a over-simplified, brief example of how I think through this, and hopefully helps give you some direction.

1. Lifecycle - These are timed based on the customer's tenure, actions, risk triggers, expansion candidacy, etc. These emails happen all the time and shouldn't ever be trumped by other comms. Think of these as what make the customer journey happen, while other emails capitalize on that customer journey.
   1. I Like to break these down by:
      1. Onboarding
      2. Adoption & Best Practices
      3. Risk
      4. Expansion
      5. Renewal
      6. Billing
      7. Etc.
2. Product Bulletins - These are Need To Know updates that should go out when they need to go out. Period. These are things like "X is broken, here is a work around", "Y is slated to be fixed by EOD", and "Z is fixed, and data will be refreshed over the next 12 hours for all software instances"
3. Product Releases/Updates - These need to be timely relative to the deployment, but likely can be more flexible.
4. Adoption Campaigns - These are email blasts about a certain feature to those who already have it. These should be scheduled strategically to be sent out when there is the least conflicts, and should take less priority to the ones above. However, these are ultimately not tied to the customer journey. Note I recommend as many of these being more customer-journey-centric as possible (ie. Customer achieves X, so we email them about feature Y that is a great next step toward pursuing the goal of Z). Nonetheless, there’s gonna be times where you just need to blast an email out about a feature for whatever reason.
5. Expansion Campaigns - Similar to Adoption Campaigns, make as many of these as possible based on the customer journey. However sometimes you’ll need to just blast some of these out without the context of an exact customer journey step.
6. Advocacy Asks - Again, best to bake these into the customer journey and make them a lifecycle event. But sometimes you need more reviews by a certain time - it happens.
7. Event Attendance - These are email blasts all about attending some in person or virtual event.
8. Recurring Newsletters - No need to explain, we all know what these are. These are great, and it’s important to keep them consistent regarding when they go out. Try and time them well, but also look at the data of what %age of customers are subscribed. If most/almost all your customers, be mindful what it overlaps with timing wise. IF very few customers remain newsletter subscribers after the initial sale, it’s less of a worry to time correctly.

There’s some more categories, but you get the point, and hopefully this is a good stepping off point for you to get the mental gears going on what tailored categories make sense for your business.

Okay, so now what do you do with all this? Lifecyce - There’s no conflict, just send these when they need to go out. Don’t even worry about coordination with this.

Product Bulletins - Ditto. There’s no conflict, just send these when they need to go out. Don’t worry about coordinating this, just send it. However, what bulletins go out should be factored into other comms - ie. don’t send an expansion email on the same day/right after an outage bulletin.....

Product Release Updates - Try to make these as consistent as possible. Is there a release cadence? If not, is there a day of the week, or even time of day that you can consistently plan these to go out? Even if you’re at a very young start up shipping things all the time, a consistent time of day will be better than no consistency at all. “better” primarily for your own scheduling efforts and ensuring you aren’t stacking back-to-back emails on folks.

Recurring Newsletters - Pick a day and time of the month/week that has the least overlap with when other scheduled comms go out, then stick to that diligently.

Adoption, Expansion, Advocacy, and Event Campaigns - These should be as planned ahead as possible. These are the ones you really want to try and coordinate your efforts between Marketing and Scaled CS. Try and develop the muscle of planning these. If this is a mess today, start small, planning two weeks in advance, then a month, then  months, then a quarter. Much beyond a quarter gets tricky, but by all means, keep improving and getting further ahead.

So what tool to use for this? Great question. I have yet to nail this. I’ve used Google Calendar/Outlook and Spreadsheets... neither are perfect. Both are manual. Color coding helps, but invariably, things don’t get logged. Best advice to make either of these solutions work:

1. Ensure an owner is tasked with updating for each function.
2. Set a schedule for when these owners will update these so folks know when the latest version was updated.
3. Set an SLA for A. how soon something is logged after the comms are scheduled, as well as B. targets for how far in advance external communicators are planning their comms.

Sound like a lot? It really is. I’d love to know if there’s some tool out there that could help with this. I think Hootsuite does, but I’ve only ever used the solo version back when it was free. Happy to sync back up after I dive into this exercise for myself and the team. Curious to hear what others have done to tackle this challenge. Hope this helped.