In a B2B, service based business like Milk Street, customer retention is as crucial to our growth as acquiring new customers. At the heart of customer retention is customer engagement. We like to let our work speak for itself. That’s why our customers hired us and it’s why they stick around. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do our absolute best to give them a great experience. So when we have our brainstorming sessions, the work comes first but we always make sure to come up with ideas for fostering our relationship with our customers.
Last week we had a fantasy football draft that featured six Team Milk Street members and six of our clients. It might sound silly at first but when you consider Milk Street’s brand and the way we try to operate it makes total sense. Customer Engagement is not something we simply preach, it is something we invest in and take seriously. We don’t want to just collect a check from our clients. We want to have a relationship with them. We want them to have fun and enjoy doing business with us beyond the scope of marketing services we provide them.
Why is this important? Because more and more customers everyday are preferring experiences and memories to just plain old stuff. Fantasy Football is a great chance for us to interact with our clients outside of our traditional reporting and brainstorming sessions centered around marketing. It is a great opportunity for us to get to know them better as human beings and strengthen our relationship. The informal setting allows for deeper and more open communication.
Even in a B2B sales environment, clients want to feel good about doing business with you just as much as they want you to get results for them. This is especially true in Marketing. Marketing is a field that requires you to understand people’s want, needs, interests, their pain points and what makes them tick. In an informal setting like a fantasy football league, we’ll learn even more about our clients, their businesses and their goals.
The draft was a fun way for all the Milk Street team members to interact with clients they don’t always get to interact with. It shows our human side.
The best part is that fantasy football lasts sixteen weeks so this will facilitate a ton of great interaction between the Milk Street family.
We’ll make sure to update the results we see each week!