The Case for Merging Community and Customer Marketing with Nicole Saunders

Community and customer marketing share the same goal: building strong, lasting customer relationships. But too often, they operate in separate lanes, missing opportunities to amplify each other’s work. Nicole Saunders, Senior Director of Customer Experience Marketing at Coupa, is changing that. She’s bringing these teams together to create something bigger, better, and way more impactful for customers.

With over 20 years in tech marketing—and eight years leading Zendesk’s community program—Nicole offers a rare perspective on what it takes to unite these two functions.

In the latest episode of “Power of Connection” podcast, hosted by Paul Schneider of Higher Logic, Nicole shares the strategies, insights, and lessons behind breaking down silos, aligning goals, and delivering a customer experience that inspires loyalty.

Here’s a recap of her biggest takeaways.

Note: Elements of this content have been lightly edited for concision and clarity.

Why Community and Customer Marketing Need Each Other

Nicole’s career has touched nearly every corner of marketing—social media, event production, content communications—but the throughline has always been community building. At Zendesk, she took this ethos to the next level, scaling a community program from a two-person team into a seven-person operation with a full ecosystem of engagement initiatives.

But as Nicole sees it, community building doesn’t stand alone; it’s deeply intertwined with customer marketing. “At the end of the day, it’s all about customer relationships,” she said. “It’s just a difference in the channels you use to engage people, and to an extent, the level at which you engage them.”

Despite this natural overlap, these teams have historically worked in silos, often reporting to different parts of the organization. Nicole views this as a missed opportunity. Now at Coupa, she’s rethinking how these teams can work together, merging them into a single function, aptly named Customer Experience Marketing.

Building a Unified Customer Experience

This new structure is designed to establish a customer-led lifecycle marketing motion, focusing on engaging customers from their first interaction and nurturing them into advocates. “It’s about owning the entire customer experience,” Nicole explained. “What resources are you offering? What engagement points are you creating? How are you helping customers grow, not just with your product, but in their careers? Traditionally, no single team has been responsible for all of that.”

By uniting community and customer marketing, Nicole is discovering new opportunities for collaboration. “The sparks that happen when community and customer marketing teams collaborate are incredible to see,” she said.  For instance, a community program might spotlight a customer who frequently answers questions—a perfect lead for customer marketing to nurture into an advocate. Likewise, customer marketing campaigns can amplify community programs, funneling new members into spaces where they can engage more deeply with the brand.

Nicole saw this dynamic play out during her time at Zendesk, where the community and customer marketing teams co-developed a customer advocacy program. “We launched it and ran it together,” she recalled. “The more I’ve worked in customer marketing, the more I see just how much overlap there is. These team should collaborate much more frequently than we see in the industry.”

While this alignment is a critical first step, turning it into measurable impact takes more than good intentions. It demands a clear and intentional strategy.

The Three C’s Framework: How Coupa Cultivates Customer Success

At Coupa, Nicole has developed a simple framework to guide her team’s efforts: Connect, Cultivate, Celebrate.

1. Connect

For Nicole, building relationships is the foundation of everything. “It’s connecting users to each other and to the brand,” she said. Think about your entry points: webinars, user groups, events, or organic discovery through the community. These are moments to welcome people into the ecosystem, show them why it’s worth being part of it, and connect them with things like advice from peers, tips from experts, and hands-on support.

As engagement grows, patterns start to emerge. Who’s asking the most questions? Who’s consistently sharing insights? These are the people to nurture into advocates.

2. Cultivate

Building long-term relationships starts with understanding what success looks like for your customers. Nicole’s team focuses on helping customers succeed with the product while also supporting their broader professional growth. To do this, they offer tailored resources, from onboarding guides to advanced educational content, all designed to help customers achieve their goals. “What’s the job to be done? How do we help them accomplish it?” she explained.

Nicole compares it to the communities she values personally. “I don’t always visit branded communities to ask about software. I go because my peers are there, and we can talk strategy. That’s the key—connecting people in ways that make them more successful, not just with tools but in their day-to-day lives and careers.”

When customers succeed, advocacy becomes natural. Their success becomes yours.

3. Celebrate

Celebration is where everything comes full circle. For Nicole’s team, this means spotlighting customer achievements to genuinely honor their success.

Advocacy programs play a big role. “I’m a big fan of advocacy programs that are community-focused,” Nicole shared, “meaning it’s a community they join and identify with. It offers them benefits, not just perks for participating in various acts of advocacy, but where those acts of advocacy are seen as benefits in themselves.”

Shared Metrics Drive Shared Goals

To make this framework successful, Nicole’s team relies on shared metrics to track progress and prove impact. A tool she relies on is the customer commitment curve which maps how customers move from initial engagement to advocacy. “We look at how successfully we’re moving people across that curve and what percentage of customers we have in each stage,” Nicole explained.

The team also measures business outcomes like cross-sell, upsell, and deal closures. “It’s not just about happy customers,” Nicole added. “You need to understand how those relationships drive growth. Are you supporting sales? Are you increasing lifetime value? That’s the lens you use to measure success.”

A New Paradigm for Customer Relationships

The integration of community and customer marketing is a shift in how brands think about customer relationships. By aligning these two functions, companies like Coupa are building ecosystems that support customers at every stage of their journey.

This approach also signals a broader trend in how companies measure success. It’s not just tracking sales or engagement in isolation; it’s understanding the interplay between different touchpoints and how they contribute to the bigger picture.

For companies looking to follow Coupa’s lead, the path forward is clear: break down silos, focus on shared goals, and create a unified vision for customer engagement. By doing so, you’ll create a competitive advantage that sets your brand apart.

Join the full conversation

For Nicole’s full take on why community and customer marketing are better together, subscribe and catch the full episode. She and Paul also dive into the role of AI in community management—exploring how it’s uncovering intent signals and pushing communities to own the industry conversation.