01 - marketo · “i see kissmetrics customer engagement automation as a breakthrough and essential...

The Three Main Components of Kissmetrics CEA Platform Analyze

Populations Campaigns

01

02

03

04

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT AUTOMATION BY KISSMETRICS

USING KISSMETRICS CEA TO DRIVE ENGAGEMENT AND GROWTH

Conclusion: Continuous Improvement for Driving Growth

ITS ALL ABOUT CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

The New, New Funnel There’s a New Sheriff in Town Introducing Customer Engagement Automation New Jobs Require New Solutions

Guidelines for Good Customer Engagement Automation 1. Use Data to Stay Relevant 2. Mix Up Message Styles within your Campaigns 3. Create the Appropriate Cadence 4. Go Beyond Opens and Clicks

Customer Engagement Automation: The Playbook Messaging Framework

PLAY #1: CONVERT HOT PROSPECTS TO SIGN-UP PLAY #2: ACTIVATE FREE TRIAL USER

PLAY #3: ACTIVATE FREEMIUM USER PLAY #4: DRIVE UPGRADE OF FREEMIUM USER PLAY #5: ONBOARDING NEW USERS TO EXISTING

ACCOUNTS PLAY #6: NEW FEATURE ADOPTION PLAY #7: RE-ENGAGEMENT PLAY #8: REWARD CAMPAIGNS

CO

NT

EN

TS

4

17

1819

20

2221

24

27

30

32

34

3739

42

5

78

910

1315

IT’S ALL ABOUT CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

Anyone who has run or been involved with a software business in the past 10 years knows — this game has changed. And not just a little bit. We have experienced what amounts to a seismic shift in the way software products are bought, sold, tried, and used — and it’s affecting us all. Gone are the days of the huge, expensive, perpetual software license as well as the our-customers-have-no-idea-that-we-are-still-charging-their-credit-cards business models. We all know that customers who aren’t engaging with your service, simply won’t pay you for very long. They will go home … and take their monthly fee with them. That means death to any software business whose profitability and growth depends on keeping users paying monthly fees for many, many months (i.e. years). Or better yet, increasing these monthly fees over time. And, yeah, also referring friends, co-workers, colleagues, and Twitter followers to your service. As it turns out, engaged customers stay longer, actually pay for your service, upgrade more often, and refer more customers.

This is why, in many ways, customer engagement has become the most important metric for any modern software business.

“In the subscription world, customers who aren’t engaging

with your service simply won’t pay for your service for very long.”

— Lincoln Murphy

For a long time, when a software marketer referred to “the funnel,” it looked something like this: This “old” funnel ended when a sale closed. Corks were popped, parties were thrown, and huge commission checks were blown on fancy suits and fast cars.

But to a modern software marketer, this old funnel looks like something out of Mad Men. This funnel was predicated on the fact that customers would have to purchase a piece of software before they could use it. And when they purchased it, they did so for a long guaranteed period of time.

But that was then. This is now. The funnel for a modern software company extends well beyond an “initial sale”. In fact, “initial sale” isn’t even a concept for most software companies today. The new, new Funnel looks more like this:

As you can see, this new, new funnel covers the entire customer lifecycle. While the old funnel optimizes for pipeline generation, the New, New Funnel optimizes for lifetime value. And it requires a dramatically different process and approach to growing your business. In many ways this new, new funnel is much more difficult to optimize. It takes a unique set of marketers that think more wholistically, creatively, and have the unique ability to tie data to action.

Enter the Growth Marketer.

THE NEW, NEW FUNNEL

Awareness

Interest

Consideration

Evaluation

Purchase

Old Funnel

New Funnel

Awareness Activation

Engagement

Retention

Advocacy Interest

IT’S ALL ABOUT CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT 4


“They think marketing begins at awareness and ends at qualified lead. Today, in fact, much more

of the importance of marketing is after that initial sale- especially in the world of SaaS where the model only thrives when you’ve got retention and upsells and

expansion...and word of mouth.”

- JD Peterson, CMO Trello (former)

THERE’S A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN

Growth marketing has emerged as one of the most important roles in the modern software business. This is driven by the fact that customer engagement has become a key success metric with the need to drive marketing activities across an entire customer lifecycle.

The role is sometimes marketing, sometimes product, and sometimes a blend of the two. Regardless, it’s a role with a massive job to do — with much responsibility and accountability.

5

Just about everything we do as consumers and users is digital. From researching to trying, buying, and beyond, we interact with companies through websites, SaaS products, and mobile apps. And we have developed extremely high expectations for our experience from start to finish. We expect it to be an easy, smart, and well-presented experience. Our attention spans are short and our tolerances low. Blow it and we’ll go elsewhere in a click.

Growth marketing is responsible for delivering that great customer experience. Growth marketers need to eliminate the sticky points and unpleasantries in the experience. And if customers should get confused, have trouble or start to hesitate, they need to be right there to guide them back on track.

Growth marketers have more accountability than ever. It’s no longer just about delivering better qualified leads, but now it includes getting people to try products, buy them, use them — and to become a longtime customer and advocate of your brand.

HERE’S WHY GROWTH MARKETING IS SUCH

A BIG DEAL

Growth marketers are becoming the most responsible and accountable teams for improving their companies’ bottom lines.

6IT’S ALL ABOUT CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

Today delivering a great customer experience requires two big components: behavioral analytics and engagement automation. We call the combination of the two “Customer Engagement Automation.”

Customer Engagement Automation (CEA) is exactly as it sounds: the automation of behavior-based communications with your prospects and customers. It’s designed to help you deeply understand what people are doing on your website and products, and to deliver timely, contextual and valuable interactions that make their experience better and mutually successful.

Of course, automating customer engagement is easier said than done. We humans are unpredictable creatures, so engaging us with helpful interactions at the right time is tough. Automating it at scale even tougher. You need to understand how people behave and interact with your brand digitally, and then improve the interactions. If you’re armed with the right tools you can in fact do a great job of understanding what people are doing, and engage with them in a helpful, welcome way that guides them along their journey.

EASIER SAID THAN DONE


INTRODUCING CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT AUTOMATION

1. Find your best users

2. Discover what makes them great

3. Make more of them

“Action without vision is only passing time,

vision without action is merely day dreaming, but vision with action

can change the world.”

-Nelson Mandela

With the right CEA platform, you will be able to:

7

Typically, marketers find behavioral analytics and engagement automation in separate tools. That forces you to pass data back and forth in order to effectively segment, initiate engagements, and measure results — it’s frustrating, cumbersome and ineffective.

For example, you may use Kissmetrics to identify a dropoff in your funnel, then export a list to an email or marketing automation tool. Then you’d send the email in that other tool and return to Kissmetrics to track its results. It’s doable, but time consuming, and inefficient and you’re probably not getting the whole picture on what really drives conversions.

And while email and engagement tools provide “analytics,” they’re generally too light. Those tools are good at creating and delivering messages but lack the deep behavioral analytics required to understand, segment, or measure effectiveness through a conversion. They don’t have the power required to understand behavior much beyond opens and click-throughs.

Marketing automation remains a great solution for lead capture and nurturing, but it is not the right solution for behavior-based email engagement. You need broad behavioral data to segment and automate the targeting across the customer lifecycle.

If you already have a marketing automation product, don’t worry. You can keep using it for top of funnel lead-capture and nurturing. But, we recommend augmenting it with CEA to drive better customer engagement further down the customer lifecycle. In fact, CEA compliments marketing automation tools and fills the behavioral targeting gaps they leave behind.

If you don’t have a marketing automation tool in place, CEA can drive top-of-funnel engagement and conversion rate optimization as well. You supply the landing pages, and CEA can do the rest.

Behavioral analytics and engagement automation are required to drive engagement, and to do it effectively it’s best if they’re in the same platform.

NEW JOBS TO BE DONE, REQUIRES NEW TOOLS

AND WHAT ABOUT MY MARKETING AUTOMATION

8

“I see Kissmetrics Customer Engagement Automation as a breakthrough and essential tool for growth marketers

and product teams. Having deep behavior analytics and email campaign automation in the same tool makes it way

easier to continuously measure and optimize your key growth initiatives.”

-Sean Ellis, Founder and CEO of GrowthHackers

Kissmetrics Customer Engagement Automation has three main components that all work together seamlessly so you can analyze, segment and engage all in one place:

THE THREE MAIN COMPONENTS OF KISSMETRICS CEA PLATFORM

Let’s take a deeper look at each component and then will talk about how to use them.

ANALYZE Behavioral analytics to understand what people are doing on your website and products.

POPULATIONS A way to define and monitor the segments that are key to your growth cycle.

CAMPAIGNS Create and send emails to segments of people based on behavior. Email campaign automation.

CEA by Kissmetrics combines behavioral analytics, segmentation, and email automation in one solution. Having one platform that does it all will certainly save time, money, resources, and reduce frustration. But more importantly, it will enable you to drive great engagement, deliver a great experience, and hit your growth targets.

CEA is designed to send behavior-based emails throughout the customer lifecycle. The goal is to engage the customer at points where their behavior indicates that an engagement would help them with what they want to do. Maybe they’re stuck, confused, unsure, or just distracted, but with a little more information, guidance, tips, or just a nudge, you can get them moving in the right direction and on their way toward a trial, purchase, power user, upgrade, etc.

10CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT AUTOMATION BY KISSMETRICS

Kissmetrics Analyze tracks everything people do on your website and products. It includes a suite of reports so to help you understand what’s going on, what’s working, and what’s not. You’ll get all the insights you need to take action with confidence.

Analyze presents high-level insights so you can quickly spot issues — or opportunities — in your KPIs. And you can dive deeply into your data to identify the precise strong and weak points in your funnel or product engagement. Here are the Analyze reports:

METRICS

See your company’s KPIs at a glance. Define the metrics you want to track and we’ll automatically keep them refreshed and ready for you to dive deeper. Color-coded alerts will help you focus on the metrics that matter.

FUNNEL

Identify leaks in your funnel. Understand the chronological flow of any user behavior you want. Funnel reports make it easy to spot bottlenecks in your customer journey.

ANALYZE


ANALYZE

A/B TESTING

See how tests are performing all the way through to conversion. Understand the true impact of your tests on signups, activation, sales, cancels, or anything you choose.

COHORT

Understand how any segment behaves over time. Track how any event or behavior grows or diminishes so you can engage people at just the right moment to keep things moving the way you want.


Modern software businesses are defined by the way people interact with your website and product. Any groups from Hot Prospects to Power Users get defined by their behavior.

POPULATIONS

The Populations component is not only a great way to define and monitor key segments, but it can also leverage your Populations across the CEA platform. You can use Populations when building reports in Analyze or setting targets in Campaigns (discussed in the next section). The Populations feature is essentially the homebase of your day-to-day growth initiatives.

Populations is a great way to define and monitor key growth segments over the life of your business. With Populations, you can monitor the performance of your growth segments in a single view — effectively allowing you to discover what needs attention and determine if your key growth initiatives are working.

These are examples of the groups that define a modern software business. They define the full growth cycle. The new, new funnel. With Populations, monitoring these groups is not only possible, but easy.

Populations makes it easy to define and monitor any segment so you can see the health of your growth cycle.

UNDERSTANDING AND DEFINING YOUR BEHAVIOR-BASED GROWTH SEGMENTS

DEFINING AND MONITORING KEY GROWTH SEGMENTS WITH POPULATIONS

THE POWER OF POPULATIONS IN CEA

HOT PROSPECTS: Visited site more than three times AND viewed

pricing page more than once in last 30 days

ACTIVATED TRIALS: Signed-up for trial in last 14 days AND uploaded

contacts

ACTIVE USERS: Have logged in last 7 days

SELF-SERVE UPGRADES: Signed-up AND upgraded in last 30 days

INACTIVE USERS: Signed-up more than 30 days ago AND have not

logged-in in last 30 days

POWER USERS: Have done X feature more than 3 times AND Have

done feature Y more than 2 times AND Have done feature Z more


POPULATIONS GROWTH

The Growth page displays a collection of your Populations and how they’ve performed over time. It’s a powerful way to compare your Populations to each other.

POPULATIONS SEGMENTATION

The Segmentation page shows a breakdown of the properties that are contributing to the Population. This makes it easy to understand what is having the biggest impact on the growth (or shrinking) of the Population.

POPULATIONS OVERVIEW

This Overview page displays all your Populations with growth metrics. You’ll use it to see what’s going on at a high level — to see what’s growing or shrinking. If something piques your interest, you can drill down to get more details.

14

POPULATIONS


Creating a campaign is simple. Define your audience, create your email and go.

CAMPAIGNS

Here’s what makes Kissmetrics CEA unique: you don’t have to leave Kissmetrics to engage these people and then attempt to track them again. You just visit the Campaigns feature.

See all your active campaigns in the Overview dashboard to see how all your campaigns are performing.

The Campaigns feature enables you to create and send behavior-based emails. So, after using Analyze and Populations to understand and segment people, you use Campaigns to create and send beautiful, personalized, and perfectly-timed emails.

With Campaigns, you can tie behavioral analytics with your engagement email programs. Gone are the days of cobbling together multiple solutions to ensure that you are targeting the right people with the right message … and then wondering how your messaging is affecting actual engagement.


USING CEA TO DRIVE ENGAGEMENT AND GROWTH

1. USE DATA TO STAY RELEVANT

Customer Engagement Automation is rooted in data that allows your engagement to be highly relevant. This is important for several reasons.

First, being relevant in your communications shows that you respect your customers as individuals. For example, you wouldn’t send people advanced tips about a feature that they’ve never used.

Relevant emails also drive more engagement. Period. If your ultimate goal is stronger, sustainable engagement with your product, then being relevant in your communications is essential.

There are two flavors of customer data that you can use to drive relevance in your communications: behavioral data and person data.

Behavioral data is data about a person’s interaction with your site or product. What they did, when they did it, and the details of that interaction. Person data is information about an individual like their name, title, role, company, or location.

You need these two flavors of data to make the most relevant emails possible. For example, a VP of Marketing who signed up five days ago, but hasn’t used any of the features, should have received a different email than a VP of Sales who signed up at the same time, and has been very active.

Use both of these data vectors to stay as relevant as possible with your automated engagement campaigns.


Now that we have a solid understanding of the three key components of CEA, let’s look at how to apply CEA to drive growth. Using the three components in a continuous improvement loop is what makes CEA so powerful and unique.

CEA is designed to send behavior-based emails throughout the customer lifecycle. The goal is to engage the customer at points where their behavior indicates that an engagement would help them with what they want to do. Maybe they’re stuck, confused, unsure, or just distracted, but with a little more information, guidance, tips, or just a nudge, you can get them moving in the right direction and on their way toward a trial, purchase, power user, upgrade, etc.

We’re all trying to make each experience better for the customer, and make them more successful in what they want to do. That’s why we built CEA.

GUIDLINES FOR GOOD CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT AUTOMATION

Like we said earlier, a world-class Customer Engagement Automation practice is part art and part science. In this section, we will discuss some of the core guidelines and considerations for your engagement efforts.

17

The world of email design is wide and varied, with many possible styles to choose from. But there’s a simple way to get started. At a high-level, you should choose between:

Highly-stylized, ‘marketing’ emails with images, background colors, full-width gifs, beautiful buttons and CTAs, etc. These emails can be coded up by hand or they can be created in a drag-and-drop HTML email editor.

Simple, ‘personal’ emails that are, essentially, just text — made to look as if they were composed in an email client like Gmail or Outlook.

Both options are effective in their own ways. Some companies tend to only send one type, but we recommend that you use both in your engagement campaigns in the right circumstances.

Typically, stylized marketing emails are good for:

Promoting product usageRewarding usersEducating users with visualsDelivering an elevated brand experience

Simple-text, personal emails are good for:

Generating a response — like gathering user feedback — from a customer

Scheduling something, like a training session

Connecting someone from your team, like sales or CS,

directly with a customer

Eliciting action when your marketing emails don’t work

2. MIX UP MESSAGE STYLES WITHIN YOUR CAMPAIGNS

For example, you can send stylized instructional emails to new users that help them take their initial steps, and then trigger plain, personal text emails from your CS team that offer one-on-one training. One of the most effective emails we use during onboarding is a personal email from our CEO — a simple text email among other, stylized marketing emails.

This area is ripe for experimentation. You should play with these different message types in different situations and see what drives the engagement for which you’re looking.

USING CEA TO DRIVE ENGAGEMENT AND GROWTH 18

3. CREATE THE APPROPRIATE CADENCE

One of the biggest challenges when building engagement campaigns is deciding on timing. Broadly speaking, cadence can encompass:

When to kick-off an engagement campaignHow many messages to include in a campaignHow often and at what frequency the messages should

be sent

Each one of these will be different based on the campaign you are building, its goal, and your customers’ expectations. But some general guidelines for your engagement campaigns include:

No engagement campaign should have only one message. The most common offender is a new feature announcement. Teams generally send out one single new feature announcement email and think that this is enough to get adoption of the feature. It’s not.

Have ~25% more emails than you think you should have in any campaign. Too often, teams are too nervous about over-emailing their customers that they end up under-emailing

them — at the expense of engagement. Teams are too afraid of people unsubscribing from their emails, but the reality is

that anyone who is interested and sees value in your product will not unsubscribe from your emails. The people that do

unsubscribe are very likely not your target customers anyway. Be more aggressive with the frequency of your emails early

on and taper off over time if the customer isn’t responding. For example, a good new user sequence could look like “Day 1, 2, 4, 8, 15, and 30.”

4. GO BEYOND OPENS AND CLICKS

This is an obvious point, but one that needs to be reiterated. You must measure the effectiveness of any engagement messaging program against actual engagement with your product.

This is not to say that opens, clicks, and any other message-specific metrics are not helpful. After all, people must see a message for it to have any impact. But you should never use these metrics to define a campaign’s success.

Any campaign you execute should have an engagement goal, such as:

Sign-up for a trial accountBuild out a profileConnect data with your productInvite a team memberWrite a post

These are the kind of outcomes your messaging programs should be driving. Therefore, you should be measuring your messages against these goals.

1.

2.

3.


If this represents the major steps of your growth funnel, you should plan to have behavioral email campaigns for each of these steps. Each email’s goal is to convince people to take the next step. Eventually, you will have multiple campaigns for each step in the funnel (because you are likely breaking down each step into more granular elements), but as a start, this serves as a very good reference.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT AUTOMATION: THE PLAYBOOK The best way to build a customer engagement automation program

is to organize it around your business’s growth funnel.

ACQUISITION

ONGOING ENGAGEMENT

RE-ENGAGEMENT


ACTIVATION

This flowchart shows a series of emails, sent over a period of time, that drive the customer from a specific event or stage to a second event/stage — what you might consider a “conversion.”

In its simplest form, this flowchart asks whether or not a customer has taken the second action after a certain period of time before sending a follow-up email. This can be made much more robust by using other behavioral rules for each email. It could also become more sophisticated by creating and customizing the content of the emails based on specific customer traits.

We will use this flowchart as a starting point for most of the plays outlined in this next section.

MESSAGING FRAMEWORK

We use many engagement email campaigns to drive customers from one stage of engagement to another.

DID EVENT B?

A

DID EVENT B?YES

NO YES

NO

EVENT


CONVERT HOT PROSPECTS TO SIGN-UP01At the top of this growth funnel is Acquisition. How you define “Acquisition” is different than it was defined even 10 years ago. Today, “Acquisition” can mean getting a prospect to sign up for your product, or for a free trial of the product, or maybe requesting a demo. Regardless, this play is about converting a hot prospect to this acquisition point.

Obviously, you need someone’s email address before you can email them, so for these campaigns you will target prospects who have become engaged enough to provide you with an email — whether by signing up for your newsletter, downloading an ebook, or signing up for a free trial of your product.

Goal of Campaign: Move a hot prospect to a sign up event.

Start Campaign When: Person has visited the site more than twice AND has visited your product page at least once AND has visited your pricing page at least once all in the last 30 days.

Campaign Strategy: You are targeting people who have shown interest in your product, but have yet to pull the trigger. It’s likely that they are collecting information to help make a decision between you and your competitors. Inject yourself into this decision making process by providing them with information that differentiates you from the competition.

PLAY


EMAIL

Message 1: Thank you note

Start of Campaign rules Thank person for interest and help them understand WHY they need your service

Follow-Up 1: More info

2 days after Message 1 AND has not signed-up

Follow-Up 2: Founder/CEO note

Follow-up 3: Decision checklist

Personal Feedback

1 day after Follow-up 1 AND has not signed-up

Offer more specifics about why your solution is better than the others

A nice note from the CEO thanking prospect and explaining the company mission. This email should be simple text and have no CTA.

2 days after Follow-Up 2 AND has not signed up

15 days after Follow-Up 3 AND has not signed up

Provide prospect with a list of things they should consider when deciding on this kind of software — highlighting, of course — your advantages.

A personal follow-up from your head of marketing looking for feedback on why the prospect never signed up for your product

RULES CONTENT

EXTRA CREDIT: You get bonus points for this Campaign if you customize these emails’ content based on where the user first entered your site. If they came from specific ads you have running regarding specific features or benefits, you could highlight those specific benefits.

02PLAY ACTIVATE FREE TRIAL USER

Free trial models are designed to create a time-based (14 days? 30 days?) sense of urgency for new signups. The goal is to get people to “first value” within the time frame of the trial — ideally far before that.

The good news about a trial period is that it has a built-in time frame. This means the content of your emails, as well as the timing, can utilize this fact to drive action.

Goal of Campaign: Get a trial user to get enough value to convert to a paid user before trial ends.

Start Campaign When: Person has signed up for the trial.

Campaign Strategy: You can be aggressive with the timing of these emails given that the trial user is aware that they are “on a clock.” You can switch up message types in this type of campaign; don’t be afraid to sprinkle in messages from important members of your team along the way.


Message 1: Free trial sign up Congrats on signing up for our free trial — here are the X things you need to see value during next X days.

Follow-Up 1: Focus on first step to value

Has signed up exactly 1 day agoAND has not completed ‘activation’

Follow-Up 2: Founder/CEO note

Follow-up 3: You’re almost there!

Follow-up 4: Sooo close

Has signed up exactly 2 days agoAND has not completed “activation”

Good idea to promote core value of the product here — reminder of why they signed up. Let them know how many days they have left on trial!

A little bump from the founder/CEO is always good during onboarding. Express gratitude and talk about why he/she started company.

Has signed up exactly 3 days agoAND has not completed ‘activation’


Encourage any progress made and become very tactical about how to execute the next step. Don’t forget to remind user about the number of days left on the trial!

Make another effort to nudge here. Make sure to highlight time left on trial to generate urgency.

EMAIL RULES CONTENT

Follow-up 5: Trial about to expire

Follow-up 6: Trial expired

Personal Feedback

Long-term Nurture





Be aggressive with this one. Try to create sense of loss for upcoming cancellation of account.

Inform them that their trial is over. Encourage them to talk to sales or CS. Create fear of loss by mentioning some of your great features.

A note from your CMO or Head of Sales to ask why User didn’t move forward with your product. Answers here are like gold for your growth.

Anyone who didn’t convert from a trial should be on a long-lead nurture campaign. They should be aware of new features, updates, etc.

EXTRA CREDIT: Score more points here for customizing the messaging in your email based on the role of the user who signed up. You should have different messages for engineers vs. marketers vs. designers, etc.

03PLAY ACTIVATE FREEMIUM USER

The play for activating Freemium users is very similar to activating Free Trial users, except you won’t have the “urgency” of the free trial period with which to work. With that said, free trial users typically need to see value quickly to become active users. When people pay for a service, they are more likely to use it.

Goal of Campaign: Get free users to start using product regularly.

Start Campaign When: Person has signed up for the free account

Campaign Strategy: Because the retention rate of freemium users deteriorates significantly with each day after sign-up, this activation campaign should have a pretty aggressive cadence — most likely daily — to get customers down the path of activation. For many products a “what you’re missing” strategy works very well here.


Message 1: Thank you note

Free sign up Welcome email. Super important time to introduce the product — and your brand — to your new users. Offer a high-level view of the value your service provides.

Follow-Up 1: Focus on first step

Same day as sign-up AND has not completed “activation” DELAYED 4 hours

Follow-Up 2: Social proof

Follow-up 3: You’re missing out!

Follow-up 4: Promote secondary feature

Has signed up exactly 1 day agoAND has not completed “activation”

A quick follow-up on the same day of sign-up encouraging user to take the first step toward activation.

For a freemium product, showing how other people get value is very helpful. Even better if you can show that thousands of people are getting value.



Show user what he or she might be missing by not using your product.

If after a few days, a user has not activated, it may not have been the right time. Wait a bit and try to promote a secondary feature that may generate interest.

EMAIL RULES CONTENT

Follow-up 5 :Win-back?


A note that asks for feedback on the user’s experience should help gather insight.

Follow-up 6: Long-term nurture


Anyone who didn’t activate during should be on a long-lead nurture campaign. They should be aware of new features, updates, etc.

EXTRA CREDIT: Score more points by personalizing the content in these emails (i.e. highlighting person networks, local recommendations, etc.)

04PLAY DRIVE UPGRADE OF FREEMIUM USER

You can’t force someone to upgrade before they see value. If you try to promote an upgrade too soon to a freemium user, you may lose them forever. So this is a more subtle play that has to be closely tied to behaviors that align with the value you are asking users to pay for.

Upgrading campaigns are very much dependent on the nature of your product and the upgrade triggers. They can be volume based, feature based, account-sized based or some combination. Either way, you should only be starting to push for an upgrade once a customer has been “activated” and has shown interest in your premium features. Ideally, you target the most engaged users with these messages.

Goal of Campaign: Get free users to pay for your “premium” offering.

Start Campaign When: Once customer has been “activated” and is showing interest in premium offering.

Campaign Strategy: This is very much a promotional campaign. If your premium option is feature-based, then promote the features’ values. If it’s volume-based, it will definitely be worth creating urgency around a customer approaching (or passing) that limit. Generally, these emails should be spread out more than an activation flow. You should also coordinate these campaigns with messaging in the product that calls out premium features.


Message 1: Subtle introduction to premium features

Has met “activated” criteria AND has logged-in today

This is a very gentile “did you know you could get X with our premium offering?” message.

Follow-Up 1: Social proof

5 days after Email 1 AND has not upgraded AND has logged-in more than one time less than 5 days ago

Follow-Up 2: Top 10 list

Follow-up 3: Long-term nurture


Give user some social proof and/or specific valuable use cases for premium offering.

Offer a “Top 10 list” of reasons why someone should use your premium service.


Anyone who hasn’t upgraded to premium should be on a long-lead nurture campaign. Make them aware of new features, updates, etc.

EMAIL RULES CONTENT

EXTRA CREDIT: Grade your free users on their engagement, and send upgrade messages only to those with a high engagement score.

05PLAY ONBOARDING NEW USERS TO EXISTING ACCOUNTS

If you have a multi-user product, it’s likely that you’re ignoring additional users’ onboarding experience. For many products, this is a huge blind spot and a significant contributor to churn. This is because users that are added after the initial sign-up (or purchase) are, most likely, going to be the ones charged with actually using your product.

If these users can’t figure out how to use the product and get value quickly, then the customer account will not get the value they expected and churn out quickly (usually within six months). Therefore, it’s very important to have campaigns dedicated to these new users on existing accounts.

Goal of Campaign: Get new users on existing accounts up to speed and activated. Get a trial user to get enough value to convert to a paid user before trial ends.

Start Campaign When: New user joins existing account.


Campaign Strategy: This is a pretty hard-core educational campaign. It doesn’t have to be too “value-based” because the account has already been “sold” (in most cases). Use this campaign to land training sessions with your CS team. It’s not always possible to know what part of your product this new user will want to use, so you should take your cues from what features they try to use.

32

Message 1: Welcome

New sign-up to existing account Welcome user and point to some “getting started” documentation. A video is also very helpful. It is likely this user will want to start working right away. Also give them a way to sign-up for a training session with your CS team.

Follow-Up 1: Personal message from CS team

Has signed-up today DELAYED 4 hours

Follow-Up 2: Promote help around specific feature

Follow-Up 3: Personal follow-up if inactive

Follow-Up 4: Long-term nurture

Has signed up exactly 1 day agoAND has done Feature X

A personal message from one of your CS team members welcoming new user and setting up time for a training.

Whenever one of these users tries a specific feature, you should send them an email helping them use that feature to its fullest.

Has signed up exactly 6 days agoAND has not logged-in less than 5 days ago

30 days after signing-up AND has not “activated” AND has not logged-in less than 15 days ago

If one of these users hasn’t logged-in since signing up, you should continue to offer training.

Any of these users who have failed to become active should be on a long-lead nurture campaign. They should be aware of new features, updates, etc.

EMAIL RULES CONTENT

EXTRA CREDIT: Collect a new user’s role upon sign-up so you can customize the content for him/her.

06PLAY NEW FEATURE ADOPTION

New feature development is important to keep existing users engaged with your product. But getting users to actually adopt and use these new features is essential. Too often, we leave the marketing of a new feature to a single announcement email or, worse, buried somewhere in a monthly newsletter.

When announcing new features, create full campaigns to promote adoption. We recommend breaking down each step of a new feature so you can target users who: checked it out >> gave it a quick test >> actually used it once >> adopted. For example, when we launched our own email feature, we targeted users along four steps: checked out the Campaigns page >> Created Campaign >> Created Message >> Sent Message >> Sent more than two Messages. We set up adoption emails for each step.

Goal of Campaign: Get existing users to adopt new features.

Start Campaign When: You launch new feature.

Campaign Strategy: The strategy here is to make your entire customer base aware of a new feature (assuming it is a feature for everyone) and then selectively follow-up with automated emails to push users closer and closer to adoption of the feature.


Message 1: Announcement

Email blast to entire customer base Introduce new feature. Provide video/example, link to documentation, etc. Give these users a little more motivation to use the new feature — use cases, benefits.

Follow-Up 1: Target users who have “checked-out” feature, but not “tested” it

Has “looked-at” the feature page exactly 1 day ago AND has not “tested” feature less than 1 day ago

Follow-Up 1a: A personal nudge for users who don’t “test” feature after Follow-up 1

Follow-Up 2: Target users who have “tested” the feature, but not “used”

Follow-Up 2a: A personal nudge for users who don’t “use” after Follow-up 2

Has received Follow-up 1 exactly 2 days ago AND has not “tested” feature less than 2 days ago

Give these users a little more motivation to use the new feature — use cases, benefits.

A personal email from the product or CS team — checking in to see if user needs help understanding feature.

Has “tested” the feature exactly 1 day ago AND has not “used” feature less than 1 day ago

Has received Follow-up 2 exactly 2 days ago AND has not “used” the feature less than 2 days ago

Similar to Follow-up 1, provide more motivation to actually use feature.

A personal email from the product or CS team checking to see if user needs help understanding feature.

EMAIL RULES CONTENT

Congratulations Email Has used feature today A congratulatory email to anyone that has used the feature. You can use this email to promote advanced usage and adoption.

Follow-Up 3: Promote improvements to feature

Has ever “checked-out” the feature Around 30 days after the initial release of the feature, it’s a great idea to promote improvements you’ve made to anyone who has at least ‘checked-out’ the feature.

EXTRA CREDIT: Breakdown usage of the feature into smaller steps so that your targeting can be even more relevant and specific.

07PLAY RE-ENGAGEMENT

Yes, it’s true: every software product has inactive users. That makes re-engagement campaigns an essential part of any messaging program. The goal of re-engagement campaigns is to — you guessed it — re-engage customers who have potentially lost interest and become inactive with your product. Ideally, you can target these customers before they become inactive.

Goal of Campaign: Get customers to re-engage with your product.

Start Campaign When: Before customers lose interest in your product.

Campaign Strategy: There are many different approaches for re-engagement campaigns. Some companies use these emails as a last-ditch effort to try to show an inactive user the value of their product; others use discounts or other offers to entice people back; others try to get inactive users on the phone with a sales or customer success rep; and others accept the loss and use a re-engagement email as a way to gather feedback from an inactive user (in a somewhat subtle way to re-engage them).


Message 1: Quick check-in

Has not been active for 30 days A quick temperature check. It’s ok to be transparent (i.e. “Haven’t seen you in a while”). Try to find out if there is an issue that you can try to solve.

Follow-Up 1: Target customers that are still inactive after Email 1

Has received Email 1 exactly 30 days ago AND has not been active less than 30 days ago

Long-term nurture

This could be a “things you’ve missed since you left” email; or a “we’d like your feedback” email.

Has received Email 1 more than 90 days ago AND has not been active less than 90 days ago

Anyone who remains active after a period of time should be on a long-lead nurture campaign. They should be aware of new features, updates, etc.

EMAIL RULES CONTENT

EXTRA CREDIT: Make your re-engagement emails more relevant by writing messages based on a customer’s past usage of your product, their user role, title, etc.

08PLAY REWARD CAMPAIGNS

Reward emails are often overlooked, but highly effective. Unlike re-engagement emails that target users when they are not active, reward emails target users when they are active. In fact, they are designed to reward users based on their activity. Reward emails make the recipient feel good about their activity. They should generate a shot of dopamine, generating positive feelings toward your product and brand.

Emails within a rewards campaign are often independent. Each one provides rewards for different types of activity.

Goal of Campaign: Encourage even higher levels of engagement with your product.

Start Campaign When: Whenever a customer deserves a pat on the back. This could be for using a feature for the first time; for reaching some kind of usage milestone (100 emails delivered!); based on an event (happy anniversary!); or a positive activity from the product (someone liked your photo!).

Campaign Strategy: Like re-engagement campaigns, the strategy for reward campaigns can vary widely. But remember, these are happy moments. The tone and design of these emails should reflect that. Also...do realize there there is such a thing as “too much of a good thing” when it comes to reward campaigns. For example, an email that rewards people every time someone likes one of their Facebook posts would quickly become overwhelming and produce the opposite reaction to what was intended. So...be mindful of this as you plan your reward campaigns.


Congratulations:Feature usage

Has used feature X today Congratulate customer for using one of your key features. Use the opportunity to educate him/her on advanced usage.

Congratulations: Milestone achieved

Has done something X number of times

Happy Anniversary! Customer signed-up exactly 365 days ago AND has been active less than 30 days ago

Reward your “power users” after doing something a certain number of times.

Thanks customer for loyalty — and offer some kind of reward (like a Starbucks gift card).

EMAIL RULES CONTENT

CONCLUSION

The recipe for your customer engagement will vary from these examples. But hopefully this guide gave you some great ideas on how to drive engagement and growth. One thing to keep in mind: improvement is a continuous process. And that’s a good thing. With the behavioral analytics, you’ll be able to see what’s working and what’s not and make adjustments — big and small — and then rinse and repeat.

Changes to your website and products will also drive changes to your engagement flows. As you add new features, processes, and learn about your customers, you need to change and refine your engagements accordingly. Eventually you could have dozens of engagements that are very fine tuned and optimized to guide your customers along their journey.

Have fun engaging your customers and making their journey better as you achieve your growth targets. And please let us know how we can help.

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT FOR DRIVING GROWTH

42CONCLUSION

Learn more about CEA here:

Request a demo

“Insights from Kissmetrics drove a 30% lift in our conversions. All of our key customer behavior data lives in Kissmetrics, for both our product and our website, so we can quickly identify and take action on any roadblocks across our growth cycle. Kissmetrics is essential to Lucid Software’s growth efforts.” -Spencer Mann, VP of Growth at Lucid SoftwareTalk to a sales rep: 1-888-767-5477

http://grow.kissmetrics.com/request-a-demo?kme=Clicked%20Request%20Demo&km_CTA%20Location=PDF%20CEA%20Guide

www.kissmetrics.com

Get, keep and grow more customers

Learn more about CEA here:

Request a demo

Talk to a sales rep: 1-888-767-5477

http://grow.kissmetrics.com/request-a-demo?kme=Clicked%20Request%20Demo&km_CTA%20Location=PDF%20CEA%20Guide

01 - marketo · “i see kissmetrics customer engagement automation as a breakthrough and essential...

Documents