Fast-growing companies share one thing in common: they don't treat the sale itself as the goal. Instead, they focus marketing on getting customers to use the product more often and more deeply. For these companies, a sale isn't the end of the relationship — it's the beginning.
The logic is simple: the more a customer uses a product, the faster the repurchase cycle, and satisfied customers naturally refer others. So these companies invest as willingly in making existing customers dependent on the product as they do in acquiring new ones. This is marketing that supports customer success — and seven real cases illustrate how.
Airbnb faced low booking rates early on because of poor listing photos. Founders personally traveled to multiple cities offering free photography, and booking rates rose — that photography service is now a paid offering. It's a case of removing the bottleneck customers hit while trying to use the product.
Medicube faced a problem where customers bought a beauty device, used it briefly, and then abandoned it. The company built an app with community features, check-ins, and weekly challenges as a reward program, surpassing 1.5 million cumulative downloads and 300,000 monthly active users (as of 2026) — lifting usage frequency after the sale.
Williams Sonoma sells specialty kitchen tools like stand mixers and ice cream makers, and publishes recipes on its site that dramatically improve when made with those tools — content that nudges customers who find manual prep tedious toward a purchase. Nespresso similarly offers recipes using two or three capsules per drink, accelerating capsule consumption and shortening the repurchase cycle.
Midjourney curates outstanding AI images made by users and publishes them as a print magazine — inspiring customers who'd hit a creative wall, and turning selection for the magazine into loyalty and additional credit purchases. Claude supports meetup costs and credits for top customers' city-based communities and gives them direct access to staff via a private Slack channel, granting loyal customers a sense of status. Clay runs an online university for sales performance, complete with enrollment, weekly live sessions, assignments, 1:1 feedback, and 200 bonus credits — turning educational engagement into higher product usage, real results, and ultimately loyalty.
The throughline across all seven cases is clear: customers don't pay for the product itself — they pay for the ideal outcome they expect from using it. Marketing's role, then, extends beyond driving conversion to helping customers actually reach that expected outcome. In practice, that means managing post-purchase usage frequency, retention, and repurchase cycle as core marketing KPIs alongside conversion rate and CAC.
One more pattern stands out: most of these cases lean on content, apps, community, and education — "supporting assets" that drive product usage. As the source material concludes, marketing isn't built by marketers alone — it's built by the whole organization. Partnering with product, CS, and community teams to design the customer's success experience is what becomes the engine of sustainable growth.
If you want help designing a customer-success-driven marketing strategy, Best Partner's services can help, or get in touch.
It built an app with community features, check-ins, and weekly challenges as a reward program, growing to 1.5 million cumulative downloads and 300,000 monthly active users, lifting post-purchase usage frequency.
Poor listing photo quality was hurting booking rates, so founders personally traveled to multiple cities offering free photography — booking rates rose, and the service is now a paid offering.
It means focusing marketing on getting customers to use a product more often and more deeply after the sale, since higher usage shortens repurchase cycles and drives referrals — treating usage frequency and retention as core marketing KPIs, not just conversion rate.
To apply what you just read to your own site, start with a free audit of where things are now.
A strategist replies within 24 hours on business days.
In CreatorIQ's survey of 5,095 creators, suitability topped the creator selection criteria and follower count came dead last. Yet follower count still predicts pay better than anything else.
Brand equity comes from accumulation, not novelty. How a Korean travel platform kept the same jingle for six years without stagnating.
Chipotle turned a 16-year-old YouTube star's order into a limited Kid's Meal, extending a custom-order tactic that worked on Gen Z to a younger cohort.