This week, I am returning to my job as a teacher. I am scheduled to teach an online marketing course, which I have done before. But I am also scheduled to teach a course about Customer Relation Management (CRM). Not entirely my expertise, so in order to prepare, I submerged myself in the world of customer retention, customer relationships, and churn. These concepts are essential in CRM. And recently, I found myself asking: how do we actually deal with this in the WordPress community? What is our joint effort to keep people using WordPress instead of any other CMS?

For years, there’s been a lot of focus on the growth of WordPress. We were growing the pie together. And growth, of course, is very important. But growth doesn’t just come from onboarding new users. It also comes from keeping the old ones.

WordPress has a long customer cycle. Someone might build a new site after a few years, or they might stick with the same site for a decade. In all that time, what do we do, as hosts, plugin builders, or the WordPress project itself, to keep our customers engaged? 

WordPress marketing

Marketing and WordPress have always been a complicated combination. The WordPress project has a marketing team, and there have been some wonderful initiatives. We have had some marketing heroes put effort into marketing the WordPress project. But, and this is not for a lack of trying, it never really took off. 

I think that hosts and plugin companies have done a lot of marketing. And in a lot of cases they market WordPress itself, but usually their main focus is on their own brands. When working at Yoast, we created a lot of content about WordPress news or helped people to get started with WordPress. 

However, marketing WordPress as a brand has become tricky lately. For example, according to the current guidelines, hosts aren’t allowed to say they offer “WordPress hosting.” Only Automattic can. 

From a marketing perspective, this feels completely counterproductive. We should want the WordPress brand mentioned everywhere, because it benefits all of us when WordPress as a brand grows stronger. We want to talk about WordPress, WordPress hosting, and WordPress plugins as much as we can. In order to make that pie bigger, right?

Emails

One of the things I’ll discuss thoroughly in my CRM course is email. If someone is your customer, you have permission to email them. And email can be a powerful way to strengthen your brand and your relationship with that customer.

WordPress also emails its users. But the execution? Let’s just say, it leaves a lot to be desired.

Here’s an example I received:

• Plain text.
  
• No logo.
  
• No branding.
  
• “Howdy” at the top.
  
• Signed: The WordPress Team.
  

That’s it.

This is not how you use email to strengthen a relationship. This does not help with customer retention.

And that’s shocking, because WordPress has one of the biggest user bases of any brand on the planet. Sure, Amazon, Google, or Facebook might be bigger, but WordPress is still enormous. Yet the customer relationship management feels broken. It feels unprofessional.

Can you imagine Amazon or Facebook sending such an email to their customers? Of course not. They understand that every interaction matters, that communication is a branding opportunity. WordPress, sadly, doesn’t seem to treat it that way.

Moving forward

If we want WordPress to thrive, we need to do better. Collectively, we need to put WordPress as a brand in the spotlight. We need to create a true relationship with our current users and treasure that relationship. Because we want their next website to be a WordPress site as well.

That means:

• A serious marketing roadmap.
  
• A serious financial commitment from multiple companies.
  
• A recognition that “build it and they will come” no longer applies.
  

Because here’s the truth: we don’t just need people to come. We need them to stay.

And to make that happen, every touchpoint, including something as “boring” as an update email, needs to remind people of the value, identity, and strength of WordPress.