Apr 25, 2023 · 28m · saastr
Customer Marketing Strategies Guaranteed to Grow Your Business with Bitly CMO Tara Robertson
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Bitly CMO Tara Robertson presents five actionable customer marketing strategies—spanning deep customer research, intentional team scaling, intelligent segmentation, product education, and VIP-level human connection—to drive retention and sustainable SaaS growth.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
Jason as informed peer 0.0 Guest teaching 0.0 Guest disagreement 0.0 Jason pushing back 0.0
speaking balance: gold is Jason, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 2:30 Challenging the premise of marketing as demand gen
Robertson pushes back against conventional marketing wisdom, asserting that marketing is about generating value rather than just generating demand.
Hardest push from Jason ▶ 0:00 No host pushback presentThis is a solo keynote talk where the host does not verbally intervene or challenge any points.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 3:36 Highlighting the neglected upside of customer researchRobertson presents data showing a 10x NPS gain and 20% upsell increase from customer research despite 65% of marketers neglecting it.
Jason holds their own ▶ 0:00 No host demonstration of expertiseThe presentation is delivered solely by the speaker without host commentary or technical counterarguments.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Jason as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Jason pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strategy 1: Know Your Customers Through Deep Research | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | This is a solo conference presentation segment where Tara Robertson outlines Strategy 1: Know Your Customers. The host does not participate, resulting in zeros across all interaction metrics. | |
| Strategy 2: Scaling Intentionally and Prioritizing Team Focus | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Robertson breaks down organizational structuring, hiring priorities, and KPIs for scaling customer marketing. Because this is a keynote monologue, host interaction and combativeness scores remain at zero. | |
| Strategy 3: Building Strong Segmentation and Stage-Based Communications | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Robertson discusses stage-based customer communications, segmentation frameworks, and real-world case studies from Sprout Social and Teamwork. There is no host involvement or disagreement. | |
| Strategy 4: Driving Product Adoption Through Customer Education | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Robertson highlights how customer education combats product churn and drives feature adoption. The presentation format features no host pushback or dynamic sparring. | |
| Strategy 5: Treating Every Customer as a VIP | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Robertson wraps up with tactical ways to humanize B2B customer relationships and treat every customer as a VIP. The session concludes without direct host questioning. |
Statements from this episode (12)
Robertson: Customer marketing lacks the established playbooks of demand generation
“And the reason is, is that there actually is no playbook. There's not a lot of information out there on what is customer marketing? How do you work on that? How do you create the right KPIs? What should your team look like? If you look at marketing in general,…”
Robertson: Customer research can boost NPS 10x and upsells by 26%
“If you look at the impact of customer research, you can see 10 X of an increase year over year. Sorry if that's not showing up appropriately there. That is a 10 X, not an I. An increase in customer satisfaction or NPS. A 20% increase in upsell and cross sell r…”
Robertson: 65% of marketers fail to conduct ongoing customer research
“65% of marketers admit to not actually conducting customer research on an ongoing basis.”
Robertson: One day mining reviews matched 70% of a nine-month survey
“Customer survey was a nine month project in one day of mining data. We got to 70% of the same amount of information that was accurate just by going in and understanding from review sites how people were responding and interacting.”
Robertson: Sprout Social found its highest funnel drop-off during early onboarding
“When we first started building this out at Sprout and went through a lot of our customer research and a lot of our insights, what we were actually able to find is the number one area that we saw the most drop off happening in the funnel was in the early stage …”
Robertson: Prioritize customer onboarding and education before building advocacy programs
“A lot of businesses will come in and a customer marketer and say, we need advocacy. We need a community. We need X, Y, and Z. You need great onboarding. You need great content that educates your customers, and you need to think about campaigns in the same way …”
Robertson: Never send upsell or advanced emails to struggling onboarding users
“The most important thing for segmentation is to actually make sure that as you're sending out different communications, you know where your customer is and what their level of happiness is. If someone's in onboarding and activation, And they're doing well and …”
Robertson: A Sprout Social re-engagement email recovered 62% of dropping-off users
“This one email saw 62% of users that were dropping off logging back into the app and becoming sticky again.”
Robertson: Prompting primary users to onboard colleagues boosted adoption by 25%
“This is an example of a communication that we rolled out where we said, help your customer or your user get started, And from there we saw a 25% new user adoption from early stages.”
Robertson: On average, customers only use 61% of a software product
“On average, 61% of your product is actually used across all of technology.”