How to Achieve Success with an Effective Customer Marketing Manager Onboarding Plan

As your customer portfolio grows, hiring a customer marketing manager can be a strategic game-changer in improving your customer satisfaction and overall customer journey. Whether it be updating case studies, hosting customer events, or collecting user testimonials, such a key marketing member can strengthen business success.

This article discusses the importance of onboarding your new customer marketing managers. To help you plan properly, we also included a comprehensive 30-60-90-day plan template.

✈️ Why is onboarding important for customer marketing managers?

"Smart companies have realized that customer loyalty is the most powerful sales and marketing tool that they have." Bill Price, Founder of Driva Solutions.

The role of any Customer Marketing Manager involves leveraging the current customer experience to improve retention and ultimately scale growth. 

Successful customer marketing also requires ongoing customer advocacy and effective customer engagement to build trust.

The onboarding experience for customer marketing managers will heavily impact your company's relationship with its customers.

Arriving at a new workplace is challenging on its own. Plus, getting familiar with different customer segments makes it necessary for customer marketing managers to have a smooth onboarding process. A thorough onboarding process will help new hires:

• Achieve role clarity through understanding processes, tools, and stakeholders they'll be involved with.
• Get a feel for the workplace culture, core values, and team structures.
• Help them feel welcome, supported, and ready to contribute.

📝 Customer marketing manager onboarding 30-60-90 day plan template

Enhancing your customer marketing manager's onboarding experience can help decrease customer churn and expand your loyal customer base.

So, how do you make sure their experience is supportive and impactful?

The most practical way is to develop a plan to lay the foundations for successful onboarding and job training. This plan should set milestones and expectations clearly and concisely, helping them contribute early in their new role within the onboarding schedule.

Here's a checklist for an effective 30-60-90 day onboarding plan for any new customer marketing manager.

Preboarding preparation (Before Day 1)

• Get the paperwork out of the way—to prevent delays, share any onboarding documentation that captures details regarding legal paperwork, payroll, and benefits information.
• To expedite setup on the first day, share an updated, formal work-from-home policy for the new hire to read through in advance.
• Notify the marketing or customer service department about their new member. You will help facilitate smooth introductions to stakeholders, customer contacts, or external vendors.
• An employee onboarding portal may serve as a one-stop-shop to house and streamline all the relevant documents and processes.

🏆 Check out the five benefits of using onboarding software for new hires.

Learning phase (First 30 days)

During the first month of onboarding, help your new hire become proficient by guiding them to absorb as much information as possible about their responsibilities and goals.

• Equip them with appropriate account access, tools, and software for them to do their job (e.g.,  software tools for customer acquisition, contact center software, etc.)
• A solid IT onboarding process is critical for avoiding blockers to productivity and helping employees ramp up.
• Invite them to project discussions and share product training material to study and internalize, e.g., buyer journey framework, email campaigns, and overall marketing strategy, guidelines for promoting your affiliate program. 

• Make sure you have tutorials and training courses for all tools in your marketing tool stack (such as a Power bi course online).
• Educate them about the current customer base, including personas, updates, and pain points.
• Demonstrate your team's values and culture so they can learn how to champion and foster culture as an employee at your business. 

➡️ Check out ten ideas to welcome your employees and create a lasting first impression. 

Collaborating phase (Days 30-60)

During the second month, your new customer marketing manager should collaborate with their teams and other stakeholders. Here are some ways they may be involved:

• Encourage them to understand the customer onboarding process. Invite them to jump on some customer check-ins, write a follow-up email, or job shadow a fellow customer marketing teammate.
• Ask them to complete an audit of your existing customer onboarding template to collect their ideas and early impressions around the current workflow and customer segments.
• Deepen their knowledge of the customer lifecycle by sharing case study material and practicing answering outstanding questions.
• Make sure they're experiencing a positive work relationship with their supervisor and teammates by promoting continuous feedback. You could send them an onboarding questionnaire to ask them about their thoughts on your organization's customer success framework and invite suggestions for future improvements.

🆘 Conflicted over when and how to give 360 feedback to your new leaders? Discover 44 sample questions for leadership to evaluate your managers and executives. 

Contributing phase (Days 60-90)

After three months, your new hire should be ready to roll up their sleeves and start working independently. 

Project execution may look like this:

• Crafting a new marketing campaign to collect customer satisfaction metrics through surveys and refining outdated case study material.
• Setting up kick-off calls to introduce and interview different client accounts when relevant, building relationships, and sharing educational content.
• Delivering a client onboarding checklist and allocating dedicated time to improve the user journey.
• Extracting insights from client questionnaires and customer conversations to provide product feedback to team leaders and relevant members.
• Implementing new meetings to ensure better cross-departmental alignment.
• Developing a dashboard or a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to keep track of customer retention.

At this point, your new hire has been through 90 days of onboarding. 

Make sure you carve out time to have an honest and thorough probation period review with your new Customer Marketing Manager. 

Discussing achievements and improvement areas with relevant stakeholders will equip your employees with information on what's going well and where to pivot their approach to specific tasks or projects.

As your new teammate settles in as a contributor, here's how you can promote their continued growth with intention:

• Provide an employee development plan to support their professional journey in customer marketing.
• Recognize their achievements to date so they're motivated and encouraged to continue contributing.

Now that you've gone through the entire 90-day process, circle back on onboarding metrics to evaluate your onboarding program's effectiveness and where to adjust for future hires.

➡️ If you need other onboarding templates, we have you covered. You'll find everything from onboarding presentations to onboarding surveys. 

👀 4 Elements For An Effective Onboarding Process For Customer Marketing Managers

The onboarding experience of your new Customer Marketing Manager can lead to ripple effects across your organization. 

Think about it: they're the ones taking care of your customer satisfaction, managing all communication touchpoints, and are likely to work cross-functionally (with sales, marketing, and product teams) in their day-to-day.

That's why it's essential to consider the 4 phases of onboarding and how they can create a compelling onboarding journey for this critical role.

1. Preboarding

Many companies still overlook preboarding, but it's a critical step to set new hires up for a smooth onboarding process. 

Tip: You can send case study materials or supplementary reading to your incoming Customer Marketing Manager to read through if they show interest and initiative before they start.

➡️ Don't forget the preboarding phase! We have a ready-to-use preboarding workflow template for that.

2. A welcoming orientation

Ensure a comprehensive and friendly welcoming phase by introducing your company culture. 

The official orientation should offer chances for new hires to meet teammates via internal networking or check-ins and access general company information, such as an organizational chart. That way, they'll know who they can reach out to if they need further direction. 

For example, they will know exactly who to approach when a customer escalates a complaint.

Tip: To encourage the formation of social bonds, pair your new customer marketing manager with an onboarding buddy. The buddy will help them fit in and socialize within the company and help answer any informal questions.

➡️ Here's a ready-to-use template to set up an onboarding buddy program. 

3. Role-based training

Customer marketing managers are crucial to influencing your customers' experiences, their satisfaction, and the company's reputation. So you need to equip them with thorough knowledge of the brand's products, services, and internal processes throughout the onboarding process.

Defining clear expectations and results, for example, a target customer churn rate or CSAT rating helps manage expectations. These metrics also align with discussions around salary raises, promotions, or internal opportunities.

Role-based training may also provide tone of voice or mannerism guidelines when it comes to communicating with ideal clients or representing the brand. 

Getting your new hires familiar with the tools and software is vital for a smooth experience.

➡️ Automation contributes to effectiveness. Discover how automating employee onboarding can save time and provide a more personalized experience for new hires.

4. Ongoing development

As part of supporting career growth and development for your new Customer Marketing Manager, ensure you provide the following at regular intervals:

• Timely feedback on projects, communication, and process optimization.
• Skill-sharing workshops for customer email communication and objection handling.
• Scheduled performance evaluation and goal setting.
• 1:1s to maintain relationships, boost employee engagement and improve retention.

➡️ Is your marketing team growing at the speed of light? Check out onboarding plans for strategic roles:

• Chief Marketing Officers
• Growth Marketers
• Market Research Analysts

➡️ Say goodbye to lackluster new hire experiences with Zavvy

To ensure your new marketing experts represent your brand and successfully handle customer interactions, you need to onboard them effectively.

Zavvy's mission is to help employees kick-start their new roles confidently and clearly.

Dealing with troubleshooting customer problems and relaying important feedback to leadership, these duties naturally make your Customer Marketing Managers the eyes and ears of your business.

With Zavvy's innovative onboarding software, you can optimize your onboarding program to include:

• 👬 Onboarding Buddies: Assign each new hire a buddy so they can reach out for guidance and help throughout the weeks of onboarding.
• ⚙️ Automations: Send out tasks, content, and reminders with a single click without sacrificing employee experience.
• 🏢 Integrate your favorite tools for maximum efficiency: Engage people through content via Slack and MS Teams, or import relevant employee data through your HRIS.
• 📅 Schedule calendar invites: From notifying new hires when to attend a welcome session with the founders or participate in a team introduction, never worry about missing an important meeting again!

Book a demo to see how an automated tool will take your onboarding to the next level.