StrongMail Spark: Engaging Customers in an Online Community

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Apr 18, 2011

We talk a lot about how you can engage your customers via external communities. StrongMail's Spark Community is a good example of how to do this. Let's take a look.

Kristin Hersant, StrongMail's VP of Corporate Marketing took some time to discuss the work the email marketing and social media solution vendor has been doing to support and engage with their customers and employees.

Growth Means More Support

In line with the increasing talk of web engagement management (WEM) over the last couple of years, StrongMail has experienced tremendous growth for their email and social media solutions. They had a support portal for their customers, but it wasn't getting used. Instead most customers were calling the 1-800# for support.

In addition to this growing customer base, StrongMail also recognized that internal collaboration was siloed and the tools used to support collaboration were not what they could be (of course email was one of these).

They needed to do something, so the company purchased a Community platform that would help resolve both challenges.

Now let's put aside the actual technology used — we'll get to that at the end — let's look at what StrongMail did with the platform they implemented.

Spark — Online Customer Community

Spark is StrongMail's Online Customer Community. Hersant says it has started as a closed community to encourage adoption in their customer base. They also wanted the community to be very support focused initially, so they integrated their Case logging framework.

Within Spark is the Knowledge Exchange which is made up of 4 stages:

Stage 1 — Getting Started: documents and collaboration features with others just starting out
Stage 2 — Using Your System: supports ongoing usage of the solutions
Stage 3 — How You Can Grow: Guidance and strategies to grow business
Stage 4 — Trends & Best Practices: Tips and Strategies for how users can grow personally

In any stage you can log a support ticket which is integrated with StrongMail's Salesforces.com service.

The customer community contains everything a customer needs to do their job and grow both their business and personal knowledge.

So how has it been received? According to a survey of their customer base, 93% of respondents find Spark helpful. 60% use the Knowledge Exchange while 40% use Support. A few more stats:

57% of members go to Spark first to find answers to their questions
41% of members go to Spark for assistance in troubleshooting an issue
41% of members prefer to read solutions docs and user guides to find answers to their questions
Only 6% of members that visit Spark, go to file a support case ONLY
50% of members indicated that their use of technical support has decreased as a result of using Spark to find answers

Overall, there is an 89% adoption rate for Spark, with 56% logging in on a regular basis. These numbers are fairly strong, and I wondered what StrongMail did and still does to drive engagement within the community. Hersant told me that the community is tightly integrated with all aspects of their business. From their own email newsletter (Sparkplug) to the StrongMail Maven which highlights active customers who are participating in the community, to taking the community offline for SparkUps (think Tweetups), StrongMail does a number things to drive engagement.