4 ways PMMs can drive engagement post-sale

One inalienable truth for SaaS is that regular product active usage is the most revealing signal of having achieved product-market fit (PMF).

In previous blogs, I’ve looked at active-use strategies that PMMs can take hand-in-hand with product management, as well as with customer success.

Here, I’d like to drill into strategies that PMMs can use to collaborate with other arms of the larger marketing organization – especially**** customer marketing**_._**

Most will sound obvious… but if you view these initiatives through the metrics lens of spurring installed-base active-use, you’ll rethink how (and where) you can use them to generate results:

1. Customer testimonials and advocacy

Overall, I believe that customers crave knowing about (and learning from) other customers. Call it a bit of FOMO, but it’s an effective approach to education… not to mention a great way to build customer loyalty.

Here are some of my tried-and-true approaches PMMs and Customer Success teams have used customers’ successes as ways to build deeper active use:

Case studies

Create detailed case studies showing how others have successfully used your product for various applications or solutions. Focus on quantifiable outcomes, such as revenue impact, time saved, or efficiency gains… and tie them to specific use cases your ICP cares about.

Structure each case study around the problem-solution-result framework, and make them searchable by industry, company size, or use case so prospects can self-select the most relevant examples.

Customer-led webinars or co-presented conference sessions

Opportunities where customer advocates tell their own story in greater (and interactive) depth. If you record these, you can re-purpose them as video testimonials and even tutorials.

Testimonials and reviews

It’s clear to me that satisfied customers are key to building trust and showing value. Solicit reviews at natural moments of delight… for example, right after a successful onboarding milestone, following a support ticket resolution, or following a renewal. Then, syndicate reviews across your website, G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, and other social channels (see below)

Video testimonials

Feature the customer's own team walking through their experience, their outcomes, and their genuine satisfaction. BTW, I’ve found that videos consistently tend to outperform written case studies in engagement.

Peer review site optimization

Use G2, TrustRadius, Capterra, etc. as dedicated channels with their own programs and KPIs. Nearly all of these review sites offer turn-key programs to incentivise and encourage customers to leave candid reviews.

** Popular tool examples:**

• UserEvidence – Automates customer evidence collection through surveys and turns responses into verified proof points, case studies, and ROI calculators.
• Testimonial.to – Collects and displays video and text testimonials with embeddable widgets for your site.
• Wynter – Runs message testing and B2B buyer research panels to validate which customer stories and value props resonate most.
• Birdeye – Manages review generation, monitoring, and response across multiple platforms.
• Influitive – A customer advocacy platform that essentially gamifies customer engagement to drive reviews, referrals, and references.
• TrustRadius, Capterra, G2 – The dominant B2B software review marketplaces; They also provide intent data showing which prospects are actively researching your product categories.

2. Customer content marketing

Next, consider using content – thinking from an educational and engagemen t perspective – not for a demand-gen purpose. Educate customers about the product’s use.

Remember, they’ve already bought the product, and now it’s about continually educating them to discover more value and new use-cases. Build the following approaches, measuring their consumption and their perceived benefits:

Educational content

This should include blog posts, whitepapers, e-books, and videos specifically for existing customers… each of which educates them on best practices, tips, and advanced features.

Go beyond surface-level "how to use Feature X" content, instead, teaching the workflow, use-case, or strategy that the feature enables. Link to deeper assets like whitepapers to nurture your customers along.

Interactive product academies or certification programs

Think HubSpot Academy, programs that build user competence and loyalty simultaneously. These can even be gamified to encourage users at each customer to grow from proficiency to expert-level. Ensure that your customer success teams are aware of participation – even as an indicator of “customer health”

Content clusters

Organized content around core topics, problems, or jobs-to-be-done by your ICP. For example, create “pillar” pages that link to groups of supporting/informative articles.

** Popular tool examples:**

• Skilljar – Focuses heavily on customer education, onboarding, and partner training
• Loom – Quick video recording for product walkthroughs, tips, and feature explainers that can be embedded anywhere.
• Docebo – helps businesses create, deliver, and track training for product education, customer onboarding, and external certification.

3. Newsletters and updates:

Newsletters

No surprise here… Ensure you send regular newsletters with updates, success stories, tips, and tricks. Use email, Slack, Discourse, or other channels that customers regularly refer to.

Treat your customer newsletter as a standalone content product with its own editorial voice, not just a flat source of blog links. Segment content and recipients by user maturity (new, active, power user) so content feels relevant (rather than generic), and track click-through patterns to identify which topics drive the most product re-engagement.

Personalized digest emails

Trigger these using product usage data (e.g., "You used Feature A last week – here are three advanced techniques"). And, if you’re feeling sophisticated, identify features the recipient cohorts should be using, but are not.

"Tips of the week" micro-emails

Essentially short, single-topic, high-frequency messages – that help build a reading habit rather than death-by-content. Again, use this approach to both highlight new features and drive usage of underutilized features by customer cohort.

Popular tool examples:

• ActiveCampaign – Provides advanced, complex automations, predictive content, and CRM integration.
• Appcues – Product adoption platform for building in-app onboarding flows, tooltips, and checklists.
• Beehiiv – Newsletter platform with built-in referral programs, segmentation, and monetization features.
• Customer.io – A messaging platform that triggers emails based on product usage events, ideal for usage-based newsletter segmentation.
• Intercom – In-app messaging, email, and product tours in a single onboarding platform.

4. Communities and user groups

If you believe that customers are your best marketers (not to mention “peer-engagers”), building user communities is a fantastic approach to building trust with customers, trading tips and tricks, illustrating your breadth-of-users… as well as collecting user-based feedback. Here are some starting-point ideas for PMMs to work alongside customer marketing …

User forums

Establish online forums or user communities where users can ask questions, share tips, and engage with each other. Seed the community with your own team's participation early on.

And answer questions fast, highlight great user contributions, and create template posts that model the kind of discussions you want.

Over time, you can cultivate power users as community moderators and even “champions” who reduce your support burden while increasing peer-to-peer learning.

Dedicated Slack or Discord communities

This saves all of the infrastructure-building. Segment them by topic, role, solution, and/or product area. This approach gives customers a clearer path to getting questions answered or to seeing how and where their peers are using your product.

Knowledge base wikis

Similar to above, Wikis blend official documentation with community-contributed tips, tricks, and insights.

"Ask me anything" customer sessions

Offer these with your product leaders or engineering teams… It will help build transparency and trust. Not to mention providing your team with on-the-spot customer and community feedback!

User groups

Similar to general online communities, virtual or in-person user groups and meetups are highly-effective for networking and learning. For example, structure meetups around a specific theme or user challenge (rather than generic "product updates"). Practitioners show up to solve problems, not to be marketed to.

Annual or semi-annual user conferences

Even small, intimate ones, or local meetings that create a tentpole event for your community calendar. Customers feel privileged to be invited, and have a bit of FOMO if they don’t attend (or at least, watch recordings)

Popular tool examples:

• Bevy – Enterprise community events platform (used by Salesforce, Atlassian) for scaling chapter-based user groups globally.
• Circle – Community platform for professional and creator communities, with spaces, events, and member directories.
• Common Room – Community intelligence platform that aggregates signals from Slack, Discord, GitHub, Twitter, and forums to engage users and advocates.
• Discourse – An open-source community forum platform with moderation tools, gamification, and integration capabilities.
• Goldcast.io – B2B-focused virtual and hybrid event platform with engagement features, CRM integrations, and content repurposing tools.
• Luma – Modern event management tool for hosting and promoting both virtual and in-person events with registration, reminders, and analytics.

In conclusion…

Here's my take: Most SaaS companies treat customer marketing as a “feel-good” function, i.e., the team that sends newsletters and books to the customer speaker for the annual conference.

Meanwhile, PMM is pouring energy into pre-sale positioning and launch campaigns, as if the job ends once the deal closes. That's exactly backwards.

The companies that win won't be the ones with the cleverest acquisition funnels – they'll be the ones that figured out how to make every existing customer a little more engaged and more successful. That’s what active use and engagement are all about.