Acquiring customers is addictive. Launching a Facebook ad, sending a targeted email promotion, hosting a webinar, and then witnessing your customer count go up feels really good. There’s that quick dopamine burst validating the effort put into your marketing campaigns.

But acquiring customers is actually one of the least effective levers for growth. In a 2015 study conducted by Price Intelligently, a 1% increase in your acquisition affects your bottom line by about 3.3%. Improving your retention by 1% affects your bottom line by around 7%.

In short, focusing on retention is twice as impactful as focusing on acquisition. Your web-based business doesn’t make money when a customer buys once or when a customer subscribes to your service for the first month. You make money months down the road because that customer is coming back time and time again.

By investing in retaining customers, the money you spend to keep, rather than acquire, your customers turns out to be a key investment.

Upfront CAC means your customer economics hinge on retention

When your business model is subscription SaaS, e-commerce, or mobile app, the customer economics are similar. You’re spending cash up front in customer acquisition cost (CAC)—money which you theoretically make back over time through retention, repeat purchases, and continued engagement.

The amount of time it takes to recoup your initial CAC is known as its “payback period.” For example, when you first acquire a customer in January, let’s say you’re $500 in the hole, and then you don’t drive enough revenue to break even—ending the payback period—until June. After that, however, you’re making pure profit: more than $500 of it in December. And that’s just for one customer.

The problem is that most of the time, customer attention doesn’t stay constant for that long. Even if people are highly engaged upon first signing up for your app, they’ll lose interest very quickly if they aren’t getting value.

According to data from mobile intelligence startup Quettra, the average app loses 77% of its users after 3 days, and 90% within 30 days.

The shape of the engagement curve matches what you see across all kinds of tech businesses, including SaaS and e-commerce:

• Most e-commerce businesses bring fewer than 20% of their customers back to make a repeat purchase in a six month period.
• B2B SaaS trial conversion rates are between 3% and 5%, which means that most businesses lose as many as 97% of their customers in the early trial period.

Most of your customers are leaving soon after you’ve just made a huge outlay in CAC spend to bring them in. That means it’s likely you lose your customer while they’re net-negative to you—before they’ve stayed around long enough to “pay back” their CAC.

This is where high acquisition costs come back to bite you hard. Overfocusing on adding customers can distract you from keeping them, so that when you look at your customer economics, you find that you’re spending money to lose money.

Invest in user onboarding to lift your retention curve

The remedy to poor retention is investing in customer success, especially during the earliest stages of the lifecycle. When you bring on a new customer, your job’s not over yet. After expending acquisition costs and efforts, your next mission is to ensure that new customers get to see the value in your product.

This is your opportunity to drive growth. The period when customers are first active in your product after signup is your best chance to nurture them through subsequent milestones like their activation moment. Improve your onboarding to get more customers activated, and you shift your entire retention curve up. Here’s an illustration of this effect by Dan Wolchonok, who works on product and analytics at Hubspot:

Early investments in user onboarding don’t just improve your active customer count during that period. Early investments in user onboarding have a multiplying effect.

Improvements to Week 1 retention, for instance, will cascade over time. Customers who previously would’ve dropped out during the trial period, now activated, are retained through better onboarding and deliver monthly revenue over an entire year or more. That lifts your revenue for every month throughout the entire year.

For instance, if we apply the above retention curve to a SaaS charging $100/month, they would see a 46% increase in revenue from this cohort alone. Effectively, from just a 15% increase in retention, there is almost 50% more money under the blue curve above than the red. Increase early retention more, increase revenue more:

• a 15% month 1 lift results in a 46% increase in revenue
• a 32% month 1 lift results in an 100% increase in revenue
• a 52% month 1 lift results in an 160% increase in revenue

The beauty here is that these increases in retention not only cascade through the year for this cohort, but for every single cohort. That is, with this improved retention, your MRR will grow at faster rate.

From a relatively small increase in day 1 retention, you gain a huge revenue boost. The upshot is that a small amount invested in early-stage onboarding can pay huge dividends. By increasing your spend here on the cost of keeping customers rather than your customer acquisition cost, you can improve long-term retention and drive growth.

You don’t win when you acquire a customer. You win when you keep customers around.

The first obstacle to doing that is adoption. People have an inherent tendency to stay in the same place—and you’re asking them to take on a new habit. But those habits require maintenance, too. Whether you’re celebrating a successful user’s progress or reaching out to an inactive one to see what’s blocking them, you need to be sure your users continue to see the value in your product over time.

Keeping users delighted over the long-term is hard. It takes work to do it right—more work than it does to simply acquire a whole new batch of them. But if you do, you can build a business that lasts.

You’ve just read an excerpt from our new ebook about how to keep your customers. Now learn more about how to create long-term customer relationships with meaningful engagement from the start!
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Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

That’s the first line of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, but it’s also the basis of an influential concept that’s come to be known to mathematicians and startup entrepreneurs alike—the Anna Karenina Principle: You can fail in an infinite variety of ways—you succeed only by avoiding all pitfalls.

Consider as an example, Apollo 11, the first mission that put a man on the moon. With so much unknown, the mission could have failed in thousands of different ways—equipment failures, miscalculations, human errors, bad weather, and so on. A single one would have derailed the mission and likely killed the crew members. The only way a vessel makes it to the moon and back with everyone still breathing is by avoiding all of those dangers. Each of the five subsequent missions to put humans on the moon all followed the same path in that they avoided every derailment.

identical paths to success

Onboarding new users isn’t quite as hard as putting a man on the moon, but the Anna Karenina Principle applies in the same way. There are loads of obstacles standing between new signups and the value your product has to offer: distraction, apathy, competitors, unclear instructions, hunger, Netflix … just to name a few.

The primary challenge that we face when onboarding new users isn’t a lack of tools or data; it’s a lack of insight. The path to success seems so clear from your perspective, but it’s a minefield for new users— and they’re just one interruption away from abandoning the whole process altogether.

Prepare for User Liftoff

Onboarding is a long process that warrants breaking down into smaller, more digestible sections. Intercom’s Day Zero concept is a helpful place to start. It states that Day Zero is the moment when a new user can start getting value from your product. It doesn’t mean they are getting value, but simply that they’ve overcome enough hurdles that they could.

Let’s think of this as “user liftoff”, the moment when a user starts taking off into the land of possibilities, the breath before the “a-ha!”.

The important takeaway here is that new users are still “pre-success” since they haven’t yet started getting a return on their investment. To get here, you first need to understand what currently stands in the way.

The key is looking at users who have taken a set of actions versus those who haven’t, then comparing their retention curves to understand where action is needed. What opens doors for users to realize your product’s core value after signing up? You’ll know you’ve hit on the right set of actions when the comparison is stark:

sample data showing user retention for liftoff vs non-liftoff

Finding what actions prepare for user liftoff involves asking the right questions.

Is the user stuck with a blank slate?

There’s an important difference between B2C and B2B apps when it comes to blank slate problems. Organizational customers often have to budget time and money to fill up the blank slate to get up and running. The opposite is true for B2C. Users expect value right away and don’t want to budget lots of time to turn a blank slate into an interesting feed or experience. They just want it to work. (The proof is in the pudding of abysmal retention rates of mobile apps.)

B2B sales reps overcome this problem with demos and demo accounts to show their prospects products in action. This gets their imagination going on what life with the product actually looks and feels like. The same need exists in B2C, but often data has to be pre-populated or a demo experience delivered in a low-touch way.

Any feed-based product—Facebook and Twitter are obvious examples—must overcome a blank slate to achieve user liftoff, and other apps like Strava are following suit. Since no user even has the opportunity to derive value until this happens, these products focus on this in the signup process, and then follow up with personalized emails.

Twitter starts right out of the gate by offering tailored suggestions of people to follow based on your web history:

They also ask: “What are you interested in?”

Based on this data and detected location, Twitter presents 20 interesting accounts to follow. (Looks like Twitter’s liftoff involves getting new users to follow at least 20 people!)

You’ll find similar paths in other apps that rely on feeds for user engagement. Pinterest asks you to follow five categories.

Swarm issues challenges to encourage users to “check in” to five similar places within 30 days.

These numbers aren’t arbitrary. Look at your own data to discover your own threshold for overcoming the blank slate.

Is there social activity?

Social and collaborative apps demand other people. Snapchat is no fun to use by yourself. Strava and Runkeeper are better with friends. The usefulness of products like Google Docs and Quip turns on ease of sharing and collaboration. If social activity is key to getting your users to liftoff, focus your onboarding energy at getting people to find friends (or coworkers) and import some contacts.

Once you’re over this barrier, your messaging strategy can leverage the power of the network. Instead of relying on sending emails and pushes to ask you to do something (like import contacts, add a profile photo, etc.), Strava’s facilitation of messages between contacts increases engagement.

The easiest way to build network effect connections into your product is to provide an import from Gmail, iOS, or another existing contact list.

Not all social activity is contact-based. BeerMenus, an app that helps craft beer lovers find great beers, focuses on location, effectively one’s neighborhood network. Once they know a user’s location, they can suggest new bars to try and send updates when new beers are released at those bars.

Does the user know where they stand?

It’s easy to assume that users know where they are in their lifecycle. Remember, they don’t have your map of activation events in their head—they just want to get stuff done.

Help users feel a sense of progress around getting stuff done with milestone emails. Fitbit’s messaging is all about keeping momentum. One of the very first emails they send new users is a congratulatory email. (They serve up an encouraging message if the goal isn’t met.)

Anytime a user makes progress, let them know. This seems trivial, but it’s important for users to understand that your product works. Even simple transactional messages, like the one below, give users valuable context and shows them some visible proof.

There are many ways to do this—finding the handful of milestones between user signup and liftoff will go a long way towards helping you funnel more people to success.

How do I create a single path to success?

Well, you can’t.

Remember, the single path to success is the one that avoids the many ways to fail—which of course, means that there are variations in the paths of avoidance.

What you can do is put bumpers in the gutters so the bowling ball stays in your lane, so to speak. Getting users to liftoff is about finding all the different ways users can fail, working backwards to see which behaviors correlate with a high customer lifetime value, and using that knowledge to help users get to liftoff and beyond to success, to the moon and back again and again.

What’s involved in achieving user liftoff in your product? Share with us in the comments below!

The free trial is your product’s audition, the point of transition for people to move from an acquisition channel—content, paid advertising, word-of-mouth, etc.—to actual usage. This is the key timeframe to set people up for success. Don’t expect users to get excited for a product experience they’ll enjoy only after they start paying.

So who handles the transition before and after signup for your SaaS users? Does the focus go from marketing to onboarding the moment that a customer enters a credit card? Many companies approach “activation” without actively managing this transition, assigning different teams to each period and breaking apart what should be a cohesive experience.

The problem with this discrete approach is twofold: the customer experience begins well before people even think about paying money, and marketing extends far beyond the day of signup. Customers don’t see this as separate phases though, as they’re rooted in their own context, goals, and whatever else is going on in their life along this continuum of time.

Often, SaaS companies can focus more energy on aligning their perceived experience with the customer’s actual experience. The most important place for this recalibration to take place is the free trial.

Designing Your Free Trial

Trials vary from one product to the next when it comes to time spans, sales processes, user communication, and product onboarding efforts. Whether you ask for a credit card upfront or offer seven days instead of thirty, and how you design the user experience within that time — it matters. The free trial is a leading indicator of the product experience.

If the buyer isn’t the user, then a high-touch approach could be a good strategy. If the buyer and the user are the same, it’s probably not a good long-term bet. And if the buyer needs to get wider buy-in from their team, you’ll need them to become evangelists for your product and your brand.

When you’re dealing with a variety of people along the way, they’ll need more time to try out your product. For example: developers, marketers, product people, and management may be involved at various points of deciding to set up, purchase, and use Customer.io. There’s no way to get buy-in and kick the tires enough for a fair evaluation in seven days. Thirty days provides a reasonable working period in which a lot needs to happen, while still injecting some sense of purchasing urgency.

There’s no magic answer for what will work for your SaaS product or your particular customers. Conversion rates and sales velocity will rely on a combination of how your customers behave and how you’ve designed the free trial experience.

Here’s a look at how different trial length periods affect that user experience.

The 7-Day Trial

Search on Google for “7 day free trial” and you’ll see a clear pattern: B2C apps prevail in this domain.

The strategy makes sense when you look at the price point of these apps and services. All of them are relatively low:

• Sling - $20/month
• Match - $21/month
• Spotify - $10/month
• Playstation - $15/month

In each case, the average user isn’t going to need that much time to decide if the service is right for them. The company can explain features and benefits, help make connections with friends, and show off recommendations. Most importantly, seven days is just enough time to get a trial user to accomplish one key action—sometimes, that’s all you need to hook someone for the long run.

Spotify, for example, aims to get its users to build a playlist. Playlists are extremely important in the music-streaming arena because switching between services like Apple Music, Tidal, and Soundcloud is otherwise frictionless. Your playlists, however, live on a specific platform. Getting users to see the value in Spotify’s playlists is key to building a sense of attachment.

For a social app, that one key task might be adding contacts. For a productivity app, it could mean checking off three to-do items. Whatever you choose, it should engage users with the core functionality of your product—and ideally, provide value that persuades them to stick around for longer.

The short amount of time in the 7-day trial, combined with B2C volume of signups, is actually a useful constraint. Marketing and product teams are forced to focus on engagement and introduce the user to a great product experience.

The 14-Day Trial

Both B2C and B2B applications offer 14-day trials, so there are lots of examples of how companies handle this. You’ll find a mix of trials that require credit cards and don’t, applications that are totally self-serve along with some sales-driven models. In terms of time frame, fourteen days could be a sweet spot. For consumer apps, it’s a luxurious time frame and for business apps, perhaps more of a crunch.

Here are a few of the models that companies use for 14-day trials and how it affects the experience. (This is true for 7- and 30-day trials as well, but the most variation is found in 14-day trials.)

• 14-day trial, expires without CC. This approach works for both consumer and business applications to illustrate use cases, use engagement to collect data, and impact conversion via messaging that leans on specific calls to action, as opposed to information and recommendations.
• 14-day trial, CC required upfront. Companies that require a credit card upfront assume their users are already highly motivated. It’s a bit unfair to call these trials “free”, but users still have an opportunity to cancel without getting charged. With more of a conversion happening on day zero to get the credit card in the first place, the entire trial experience focuses on onboarding as opposed to selling.
• 14-day trial, then freemium. While this is a comfortable approach for both parties, when a team knows that trial users will be relegated to freemium users without a conversion, there’s less incentive to get them successful during the trial. Campaigns often lean on retention messaging to try to get inactive users going again.
• Freemium, offer 14-day trial of premium, no CC required. There’s no built-in urgency in a freemium plan, and offers to upgrade are typically based on unlocking new features or accessing more of something (unlimited reports vs. five per month).
  
  This approach opens the door to interesting behavioral messaging opportunities. When a user hits the monthly quota or tries to advanced features, you can ask them to upgrade. Done well, this is a win-win. Done poorly, it creates a situation where users can’t stand your constant calls to upgrade.
• Freemium, offer 14-day trial of premium with CC required. The credit card makes all the difference. For consumer apps, this is typically a tough sell unless the premium version is big step up from the free version. For business apps, it’s likely a matter of ROI. If the user is getting value but maxes out their monthly quota, it won’t be hard to get the boss’s credit card.

The path you pave for a simple two-week timeframe makes a huge difference in the user experience. Choose an approach that provides your users with value rather than constant requests to upgrade. It’s okay to take a longer-term approach even with short trial periods when you have a good messaging strategy in place.

The 30-Day Trial

Many B2B applications use a 30-day trial since these tools tend to be more expensive and complex, require more organizational buy-in from customers, and involve testing and migration. Again, there are myriad combinations of asking for credit cards upfront or later on, letting people continue with a free account after a trial ends, etc. All of the same questions that you’d ask yourself about 14-day trial apply here too.

The biggest difference is that a 30-day time period provides a larger window of opportunity to sales and service models.

Self-Serve

The self-serve model is appealing since it forces SaaS companies to build tools that are truly self-explanatory and limit the amount of manual work needed to close a sale. In an efficient world, everything is automated. The problem is that most SaaS tools aren’t truly self-explanatory and require robust help documentation and lifecycle messaging to onboard trial users.

Sales

As Andreessen Horowitz partner Mark Cranney argues, sales teams are necessary to drive growth with large customers. “Even with early viral growth, SaaS products don’t sell themselves,” Cranney writes. “Selling an enterprise-wide deal is a lot like getting a bill passed in Congress.”

Thirty days is long enough to launch a multi-channel effort aimed at conversion. This can be good or bad for users, depending on the tone and volume of outreach. Cranney explains that a sales rep’s role is to understand before being understood. Getting a handle on why the user signed up for a free trial in the first place, then connecting the dots to the features that can help actually makes for a great user experience.

Sales shouldn’t be about selling and sales teams per se—it’s a blend of customer service, account management, and technical support. Done well, it can increase conversions, drive land-and-expand efforts, and build meaningful personal relationships with customers.

Service

If your product requires extensive setup or migration, providing help during the trial can make all the different. Service doesn’t have to be free either—SaaS companies may charge for “concierge” services upfront. Others bundle ongoing service packages with software, a model that can help users get value from the software.

Empathy for your customers is key here. Installing a “simple” Javascript snippet might be harder than you realize—requiring approvals, help from other teams members, or maybe just getting lost in the chaos of the modern workplace. Investing in support upfront can ease the stress of moving to a new platform.

A 30-day trial allows enough time for your team to establish a line of communication with customers and see how you can help them reach their goals. It could be the foundation of long and fruitful relationship.

Freemium

There is one other approach that sidesteps the question of trial length—the “free forever” plan.

Wistia has offered various free plans for years, but their strategy has evolved over time. For a time, the focus was on getting users to upload more videos, hit a quota, and then upgrade. Today, the trial focuses on getting new users to explore all of Wistia’s features.

Wistia CEO Chris Savage cautions that offering free plans just to increase the volume of signups may not be the best approach. He points out that 98 percent of Evernote users have never paid a dime for the tool. That represents a significant cost to the company and means they have to charge the two percent of paying users enough to support the entire userbase.

Chris suggests collecting plenty of data on how good customers become good customers, then working backwards to identify the trial model that helps you create more of them:

It took us six years to launch a free plan at Wistia. We had early customers who started off paying $50 a month, and were eventually paying more than $1,000 a month. That proved to us that once we got people to sign up, they’d be hooked. By the time we released the free plan, we felt really confident that it was the right choice.

Wistia found that experiencing the features that set their product apart from competitors like YouTube is the key to unlocking growth. That may not be true for every company, so it’s worth investing the time to understand what exactly makes customers tick.

Experience First

There are plenty of opinions, approaches, examples, and counterexamples for how to structure a free trial. Close.io CEO Steli Efti recommends a 14-day trial as optimal for most B2B SaaS products. The folks at Madkudu found that 50% of SaaS conversions happens after the trial ends, regardless of length, when they looked at a small sample of companies. Appcues found that putting up a paywall at the 30-day mark and offering trial extensions sped up their sales by 68% while ProdPad sees great success in their magically extending free trial.

It’s no surprise that growth expert Lincoln Murphy calls free trial length an “external-facing marketing gimmick.” The best free trial length, according to Murphy, “is what’s best for your current situation.” And there are two sides to every trial situation you build: what the customer encounters for a period of time and your job in making good stuff happen for them during that encounter.

Humans are not particularly rational decision-making beings. Left to our own devices, we’re susceptible to a wide variety of mistaken beliefs, flawed heuristics, and simple logical fallacies.

We acknowledge and address these natural susceptibilities when it comes to our customers' behavior. But let’s hold a mirror up to ourselves! Our work as growth marketers and product managers is also vulnerable to cognitive bias, no matter how “data-driven” we say we are.

With an awareness of how our brains tend to trick and trap us, we can find a path to clearer thinking and better decision-making. Here are three specific cognitive biases to keep a careful eye out for:

1. Automation Bias

Automation bias is when you tend to believe what your tools and systems tell you must be correct, even despite contrary evidence. This bias is tough to escape, as increasingly automation infuses everyday life, from getting the day’s weather to driving a car to automating rote tasks at work.

Automation lulls us into a sense of false security and lack of questioning. When it comes to problem-solving in areas like growth and product, we might find ourselves lulled into following “best practices” and advice on autopilot, just like how we follow every turn-by-turn direction given by GPS navigation.

We want to be successful, and in the pursuit of that success, we try to emulate what was done in the success stories we hear. In other words, we go on what Andrew Chen calls “advice autopilot”:

The problem is, the best advice rarely comes in this kind of format – instead, the advice will start out with “it depends…” and takes into account an infinite array of contextual and situational things that aren’t obvious. However, we are all lazy and so instead we go on autopilot, and do, read, say, and build, all the same things.

Advice autopilot is often well-intentioned and can still be helpful, revealing good insights to the uninitiated, but you risk taking a shortcut to building a well-intentioned but doomed business.

Everyone who’s had some measure of success did so by navigating deeply “contextual and situational” problems in a specific way. You’re not going to emulate their success by putting yourself on autopilot. Your set and sequence of growth navigation directions come from your own map.

2. Illusion of Validity

First described by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, the illusion of validity is a cognitive bias that causes you to overestimate the accuracy and soundness of your judgment.

When Kahneman was 21 years old serving in the Israeli army, he helped run tests designed to evaluate and predict the best candidates for officer training. Kahneman and his colleagues would watch exercises and take copious notes on the soldiers' behavior, their group dynamics, and their individual traits like aggression and patience. After each exercise, they evaluated each soldier and his readiness for officer training. “Under the stress of the event, we felt, each man’s true nature revealed itself in sharp relief,” Kahneman said. For a soldier who led the team during the exercise, for example, “the obvious best guess about how he would do in training, or in combat, was that he would be as effective.”

These best guesses turned out to be “largely useless.” Through each batch of new candidates, their predictions failed, found to be only slightly better than random guesses. The “statistical evidence of [their] failure” didn’t dissuade them or cause changes in how they made their predictions—in fact, Kahneman notes incredulously, they continued on with a deep conviction that their predictions were good.

Persistence is much lauded when it comes to building and growing a business, of course. But persisting in one’s approaches to problems and situations despite what the evidence tells us is not the way to win.

“Eventually, all playbooks will stop working,” Brian Balfour says, “The real problem is that over time we become habitualized and attached to these playbooks, and we resist throwing them away. ”No growth tactic, no acquisition channel, no retention technique will always work and be so good that you can cross that area of improvement off your to-do list. Things change, situations shift, what looks valid in one moment doesn’t apply to the next, and sometimes you’re just plain wrong.

As Kahneman concluded, “True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.” Continually ask smart questions, get and learn from feedback and metrics, modify approaches based on results, experiment, and start over, even when you feel confident.

3. Survivorship Bias

Survivorship bias is the over-privileging of evident successes — whatever “survived” and made it through a process. Survivorship bias narrows your field of vision, so that you’re making decisions based on incomplete information, discounting or ignoring key evidence from the failures and cases that don’t make it through.

A commonly cited example comes from World War II. Beset by an increasing number of planes being shot down, the Center for Naval Analyses set out to analyze where on the bodies of planes extra armor should be added. They diagrammed the bullet and shrapnel holes on every plane that came back from war, resulting in the following average distribution:

Source: Wikimedia, by McGeddon - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

Fortunately, thanks to statistician Abraham Wald, extra armor wasn’t added to the spots marked in red. Instead, Wald recommended that armor be added where they observed fewer bullet holes, because the planes hit there were the ones that never made it back to be analyzed. All the planes incurring damage to their wingtips and tails had been able to fly back to be diagrammed in the first place. The study failed to consider vital information and evidence.

Survivorship bias is a classic problem in business and investment. Looking only at prior successes in a particular vertical can make a certain bet seem good to a VC. Reading only about past successes can lead to incorrect conclusions about how first-time entrepreneurs should think about building their businesses. These are good high-level examples—in the trench of making product, though, survivorship bias is even more prevalent.

Your existing users are survivors too. When you go to learn about how your product is working from them, you always have to weigh the fact that they made it through. As John Egan, Growth Engineer at Pinterest, puts it:

Every active user you have today has figured out how to use the product and is getting enough value to continue to use it. Everyone else that didn’t get it has probably already churned out.

John shares one example from his time at Shopkick, when his growth team thought an experiment to encourage users to visit partner stores fell flat, achieving just a 2-3% lift, way below expectations. But when they segmented the analysis by existing and new users, they discovered that new users had more store visits by 30%. The experiment became a specific strategy for effectively activating new users.

Take people who tried your product briefly into account too — especially when it comes to activation and onboarding. They might know better than anyone why something is or isn’t working.

The art of thinking clearly

Cognitive biases exist because the brain needs to be able to take mental shortcuts and reroute focus and attention in other ways. The problem is when we blindly let our biases lead us, because it’s the path of least resistance. Clearer thinking takes effort, requiring deliberate and intentional thought processes that question paths taken, respond to feedback, and take specific context into account.

From Buster Benson’s helpful resource organizing 175 cognitive biases

Fight cognitive biases, first by becoming aware of them to try to keep them in check, and second by creating mental models and lessons of your own.

There’s valuable feedback about your product and your business hidden beneath the surface.

Above the water sits the easily visible feedback: metrics you’re collecting in analytics tools, NPS survey responses, customer complaints, angry Twitter rants—and hopefully a few vocal evangelists. Often, this vocal and visible group is the squeaky wheel that gets the grease and gratitude and drives change. The problem is that this type of feedback is simply the most accessible rather than representing the reality of how people feel about your product.

Two kinds of feedback tend to rise to the surface most prominently—feedback on your product’s most well-defined problems and its well-defined, helpful solutions:

Well-defined problems take shape with a critical mass of specific and clear feedback, shining their own light on next steps for the product. Well-defined solutions attract customers and feed word-of-mouth. They should be easily identifiable as the beating heart of your product. You’ve made something of particular value for which people pay you with time, money, and attention.

But what about everything below the surface—all the little problems that people forget to voice or don’t even bother to complain about that, over time, drive them silently insane?

Think about your own experiences: you come for one game-changing feature so you can deal with a few bugs. But you leave if the experience is fraught with annoyances—slow page load times, confusing navigation, a wonky feature, bad help documentation, or slow response times from support.

You’re probably hearing from just a sliver of your overall customers. One customer service expert has found that only 4% of dissatisfied customers voice complaints to businesses. If you get 40 support emails (which tend to focus on immediate troubleshooting) each day, but you have 1,000 daily active users, for example, then you have plenty of “under the surface” feedback to explore.

You might not be heading into the frigid waters to look at what’s underneath the obvious surfaces. Sometimes what you excavate won’t amount to much, but sometimes the feedback can crystallize, with some effort and dot-connecting, into some “Aha” moments for you.

Here are a few ways to dive in deep and collect all the feedback you need to keep your customers from walking away.

Silence Isn’t Always Good

Minor annoyances usually don’t spark angry emails, but that doesn’t mean they hurt your product any less. You may satisfy the loud complainers who’ve gotten your attention, but the quiet ones may be struggling with diminishing patience.

Upon encountering minor annoyances that don’t feel worthy of an email to support, the quiet ones get irritated and feel ignored. “How many times do I have to reformat this CSV before the damn uploader will work!?” If customers are quiet, don’t assume they’re loving every minute of your product. Maybe they are, but that’s a dangerous assumption. (Ever notice customers cancelling and churning without a peep? It happens a lot.)

Check in with your customers and open up opportunities to have a helpful conversation. Unless you’re just starting out with a product, you probably don’t have the resources to coordinate and schedule check-ins with every single customer. Instead, respond to behavior and signals of intent.

Tools like Fullstory can help you discover where actions might be speaking louder than words. For instance, people might be expressing frustration through rage clicking:

series of clicks in which your users are pummeling their mouse buttons in frustration. It’s like punching your site in the face, usually because it’s not doing what the user wants or expects it to.

Talk to your customers

Automate a simple automated email to reach out based on behavioral signals like inactivity trends, lack of communication, or an abnormal amount of exports. For instance, you can trigger an email to users who haven’t logged in a week or 2 or have viewed your support documentation X number of times within 2 days after already having been onboarded.

If you’re tracking support requests (as a user event), you can create an automated email campaign for whoever hasn’t contacted support in awhile. Here’s an example of a segment in our own Customer.io account, made up of people who haven’t made a support request through our app within the past month:

our “contact support” event is named “fly_feedback”

As people enter this segment, we could trigger a message like this one to spark a conversation (while providing a helpful resource).

Subject: How are things going?

Silence is either golden or deadly—I guess it just depends on whether you’re a librarian or a ninja. In any case, we wanted to say hi and ask, how are things going?

If you’re experiencing problems with [our product] or have questions—anything from trouble with your data integration to needing inspiration for a new campaign—just let us know. Seriously, we’d love to help.

Oh, and here’s a [blog post/guide] we created recently that you might find helpful!

This is a simple way to keep accountable to your quiet customers. You can, of course, get more sophisticated than this by tracking usage against support tickets to help you better understand how often to expect to hear from customers based on their level of usage—and then create segments to target people who fall outside those ranges.

Find Bad in the Good

It feels really good to get an email from a happy customer. In Customer.io’s case, there’s nothing that makes us happier than hearing about a customer whose behavioral emails cut churn, drove adoption of a new feature, and helped their customers.

But just because a customer has a success story doesn’t mean there isn’t constructive feedback to be had. These are the people that got results—and if you work in SaaS you know that getting people from a non-customer to customer to successful customer is really hard.

So, here’s what we recommend. Ask if you can write a case study about them, then schedule 30 minutes to interview them about their success. They get featured on your site, and you get a glowing review of your product. But you can also get something else way more powerful: a look behind the scenes. Just because someone ran a successful campaign doesn’t mean it was easy—it just means they persevered. It probably wasn’t as easy you’d hope it could be.

So assuming that Customer.io is doing the interview, here are the types of questions we’d ask to find out how this project got from A to Z:

• Did you do this alone or did you have help? Where did you need a hand from a developer/designer/copywriter, etc?
• What were the hardest parts about pulling this off? Was it wrangling people and deadlines? Or was it our software?
• What would you do differently next time?
• What could we have done to make this easier for you?

You know the problem areas in your software. Dig in. Find out all the ways this could have failed—it’s likely that other customers are getting snagged in the same areas.

Think Bigger—Way Bigger

It’s easy to understand how problems may lie below the surface in any situation, but that’s really just the beginning. Consider another type of iceberg model. Imagine that the bottom of an iceberg—the part you cannot see—is also its foundation. What you see at the top is directly influenced by the base.

As explained in the book It’s All Connected: A Comprehensive Guide to Global Issues and Sustainable Solutions, an event is connected to underlying behavioral patterns. Those patterns are the result of systems, which in turn are created and underpinned by mental models, beliefs, and values.

Take, for example, an oil spill, which is an event that is easily witnessed above the surface:

If you looked only at the event, you might think that we should just build stronger tankers and better pipelines. But if you look at the root cause of such spills, you can start to understand and address long-term, sustainable solutions such as developing energy sources that do not rely on oil transportation.

Changing the models, systems, and patterns that influence your employees and customers isn’t easy, but it is the only way to make structural changes that naturally result in a better company and product.

Incentives

How are your employees incentivized? Do you encourage them to make the best product possible, or are they constantly under the pressure of due dates? Do they feel comfortable taking extra time to do their best work, or are they required to sit through endless meetings? Perhaps more than anything else, this is why some products are truly great while others get lost in the day-to-day obligations of work.

Measurement

“What gets measured gets managed.” It’s the oldest business cliché in the book for good reason. Measurement and incentives go hand in hand. For example, do support people track the number of tickets closed or the percentage of happy customers? Every person and team at your company should have a North Star number that helps them understand if they are making meaningful progress or just ticking items off a to-do list.

Customer Interaction

Talk to customers early, often, and face-to-face. Chris Savage, founder and CEO of Wistia, recommends doing this in person when possible. In-person customer visits sound like the quintessential thing that doesn’t scale, but Chris has a great point that scale can actually help as customer numbers local to your team rise.

This in-person feedback was more honest and changed how Wistia did user research and product design:

In person, customers tell you things they would never tell you over the phone….[In-person visits are] the best way to understand if you’re building something of any value, and my only regret is that we accidentally convinced ourselves, at some point, that we didn’t have time for it.

The world’s best companies are self-aware and realize that it’s not great features alone that grow a company but a great experience. They understand that the iceberg is large and unforgiving. Look deep, look often, and never stop chipping away.

Have you ever been surprised to learn about under-the-surface feedback? Share your story with us in the comments!

Getting someone’s name wrong makes for a bad impression. That applies to email too, of course. You’ve seen emails that start like this:

Or this:

Imagine this scenario in real life, face-to-face with an acquaintance: “Hey first name, so great to see you!” or “Hi [awkward pause]”. You either look a bit loopy or like you just forgot the name of the human in front of you.

But why does this happen?

When contact information flows in from different sources — like website signups, lead generation forms, and event registrations — messaging tools end up collecting a grab bag of data. And don’t forget, humans aren’t consistent when it comes to data entry, guilty of irregular capitalization, errant spacing, typos, and other mistakes all by themselves.

That’s how you end up with a database of recipients that looks something like this:

Note that:

• Not every name is capitalized.
• There are some empty data fields.
• Bob entered a first and last name together in the same field.
• Felix has an email but no name data. (This one’s bound to happen when using registration forms with just an email address field.)

Name personalization is a basic part of messaging people—so basic that most email marketers drop in some type of first name content tag without thinking about it. But woe to those who have data issues in their system! This is a super common problem and luckily, there’s a simple solution.

Cover Your Personalization Bases with Fallbacks

The simple fix to avoid making embarrassing personalization mistakes? Have a backup plan!

These days, you can usually insert dynamic content into a message, based on the data you have about your recipients. Usually, suchtools will also give you the ability to set a fallback, in case a recipient is missing the data required.

In the case of Felix, here, we’re missing first and last name information. By setting a fallback like “friend” or “there”, Felix will get an email with a nice “Hi friend” or “Hi there” greeting instead of an offputting “Hi [first_name]”.

That’s the simple takeaway: set up a fallback!

Read on to learn how this all works in Customer.io.

How to create Liquid fallbacks in Customer.io

Customer.io uses Liquid, a powerful templating language that makes it easy to personalize content with data. To solve the “Hello [firstname]” issue, you create a fallback in Liquid, which checks to see if the name data exists and replaces the name with alternate text when it’s missing.

But first, let’s review how data is organized in Customer.io.

There are two types of data: customers and events. Customers and events can both have attributes. Customer attributes describe a person or their current state, like a first name, location, subscription plan name, or email address. Event attributes, on the other hand, describe details pertaining to a specific event. For example, a purchase event might have attributes like specific items, purchase price, time of transaction, etc.

When you want to include an attribute to personalize your message, you’ll use a Liquid variable, wrapping the attribute name in double curly brackets like so: {{ data_type.attribute_name }}

To insert the first name of a customer, you’d use something like {{ customer.first_name}}.

What’s special about Customer.io is that if a recipient is missing a certain variable, the send will fail. This way, we save you from embarrassing “Hello [first name]” situations and similar muckups altogether. However, you’d still want to use fallbacks so that you don’t have to spend time troubleshooting and fixing failed sends! Here’s how:

Step 1: Write your rule in plain language

This might seem like a silly step but it’s a good habit to get into, especially for more complex cases. Start by writing out what you want to happen in plain language:

Insert the recipient’s first name. But if we don’t have the recipient’s first name in our database, replace the first name with “there”.

Step 2: Build your Liquid one step at a time

The best way to translate this statement into Liquid is to start by imagining that the database is perfect. In that case, our message starts off like this:

Hi {{ customer.first_name }}

Since no database is perfect, we’re going to create an “if/else” rule that says: if there’s data for the customer’s first name, output that first name.*

Hi {% if customer.first_name %}{{ customer.first_name }}{% endif %}

Now, for the fallback. An “else” statement will determine what to output in case there’s a blank or missing first name:

Hi {% if customer.first_name %}{{ customer.first_name }}
{% else %}there{% endif %},

In plain English, this says that if there’s no first name value, replace the name with the word “there.” Recipients with missing data will see “Hi there” and the email send won’t fail.

Step 3: Refine it (optional!)

One simple way to refine your personalization is to address capitalization inconsistencies in Liquid as opposed to inside your database. To do so, add a capitalization filter:

Hi {% if customer.first_name %}{{ customer.first_name | capitalize }}
{% else %}there{% endif %},

If you know that you have some people with first and last names in the first_name field, you can split the two words and only use the actual first name. In the code below, the split filter is looking for a blank space in the field. When it finds one, it will only include the first word.

Hi {% if customer.first_name %}{{ customer.first_name | capitalize | split: " " | first }}
{% else %}there{% endif %},

Step 4: Preview!

It’s always a smart move to do some quality assurance review before sending any email or setting a campaign live.

Let’s look at the case of Felix again. Remember, we have his email address in the system, but no first name or last name. In Customer.io, you can check the preview specifically for how the email will render for Felix.

Here’s what you see in the Customer.io preview when you’ve inserted the first name Liquid variable with no fallback:

Plus, Customer.io will notify you when there’s an error. If you click on the “Review Error” button, we’ll tell you what data you’re missing for this particular person.

Now, let’s add a fallback, like we did in Step 2. Instead of “there”, I’ll use “burger fan” as my backup. Here’s what that looks like in the composer preview:

Hooray!

We’ve broken down and refined the details quite a bit here. But you can simply copy and paste the Liquid snippets above into any email!

Final Thoughts on Personalizing with Liquid

• Double-check where you’ve put spaces and punctuation. This is easy to miss when you’re creating markup in Liquid and dropping in an extra comma or hitting the spacebar outside of the brackets without realizing. If you’re seeing text like “Hi Linda,,” or “Hello ,” in the preview, do a quick check.
• If your customer database is missing a lot of information, consider running it through the Clearbit Enrichment API to find the missing data.
• Once you graduate from personalizing first names with Liquid, start exploring the endless ways you can use it to make your personalization awesome. This is where you can really take email and dynamic content to the next level.
• Don’t be afraid of the Liquid templating language! It can feel a bit intimidating, especially if you’ve never coded before. Customer.io has safeguards like the error detection and preview capability, documentation and tips, and of course, our support team to help!

Finally, remember that true personalization doesn’t come down to whether you’re using a name or not. You could send an email every day using first names perfectly in the greeting and subject line but fail to make any positive impact. The name trick can help a bit, slip-ups with data and dynamic content can hurt a bit—but at the end of the day, personalization has to be meaningful to actually work, coming down to whether your message is relevant or not.

*Note: For Customer.io folks who aren’t yet on our new Google Cloud infrastructure, it’s best to use a slightly different “if” rule than described above. Instead of{% if customer.first_name %}{{ customer.first_name }}, use{% if customer.first_name != blank %}{{ customer.first_name }}.

Have any questions about Liquid or want to share your cool message personalization tactics? Add your comment below!

Every run scored in baseball is worth one point, but not all runs are the same. An earned run occurs when the hitting team scores despite the fielding team’s best effort. An unearned run, on the other hand, is the result of an error by the defense—a dropped fly ball, a flubbed throw, etc.

The point is that unearned runs are preventable. They are errors of judgment, focus, and skill. You can apply this simple concept to just about anything, of course. But think about your lifecycle email program. Are you making preventable mistakes that are holding back better business growth and your brand?

Often, these errors are simply avoidable because they break the cardinal rules of effective lifecycle emails:

1. Aim for one goal per message.
2. Build trust for the long-term.
3. Serve your customers by understanding their context, expectations, and goals.

Let’s take a look at some of the missteps we’ve seen in the wild, so you can learn to avoid making the same flubs:

Cancellations Aren’t a Mistake

Take a look at this email sent after a trial cancellation:

Here are a few places the message goes awry, from the very start with the subject line:

• Second-guessing a cancellation is a presumptuous move. Even if the customer did make a mistake, that’s probably something they’d realize and self-correct. Framing every cancellation as a potential mistake on the customer’s part is more likely a homerun to feelings of annoyance and anger (especially if the customer has to put in effort to make the cancellation, as is often the case).
• This framing also makes the goal of this email unclear and sets itself up for failure. In most cases, the answer would not only be “No, the cancellation is NOT a mistake"— and it’s easier to hit "Delete” or “Spam” than reply to a silly question, especially after being accused of an error.
• The personalization is broken or a bit too basic. Using your email address as if it were a first name in both the subject and the body, especially in this day and age, is counterproductive. It’s an overt attempt at personalization that ends up accomplishing the opposite of its intended effect at fostering a sense of relevance and relationship.
• What does “Sent from Odenwald - Germany” mean? It might be an attempt at a personalized feeling, as if Camille was sending this message manually — but that charade is broken with the email-as-name personalization and failes to provide any helpful context otherwise…
• Plus they CC’d a sales tracking email! If you’re going to use a CRM to track customers, at least keep the tracking in the BCC field.

Watch Out for Sales-y, Spammy Language

The student loan space is fraught with scams. There are plenty of unsavory types out there trying to get borrowers to consolidate for a fee or buy into fake loan forgiveness plans. Anytime you’re playing in the financial space, you have to be careful to avoid language and branding that people will associate with spam.

That’s why I was a little disappointed to receive this email from Student Loan Hero (a perfectly legitimate service).

click here to see the full email

Take a look at the copy in the first few sentences:

• Asterisks
• Bombastic all-caps words
• Exclamation points
• And big red text that reads “100% FREE”

Further down in the email, there’s a winky face emoticon appearance:

This email does a decent job of relaying some important information to get started, and my guess is that this message reflects stylistic choices to connect with the youth. But this email ends up sending off signals. If people are already wary of the businesses in your space, you have to go out of your way to make them feel secure. (And that’s actually what the company does on their homepage, which touts security and trust-building social proof.)

Contrast that with this welcome email from LearnVest, a financial-planning platform. The message focuses on “bank-level security” and easy access to connect to human beings if you need help. It’s a completely different experience.

More Information Isn’t Better

Cratejoy is a subscription box marketplace, serving customers buying boxes and merchants selling them. Here’s an email they sent to a seller the first day they started a trial. It explains—in great detail—that you’ll be using a new, specialized version of the product.

The information might be relevant at some point later in the lifecycle, but it’s a ton of text to digest on day one. Also there’s a mismatch to the recipient’s context: presumably, the trialer hasn’t used the product before, so they don’t really care what the platform used to be like.

To make matters worse, there isn’t a clear call to action. There’s a lot of text and a lot of links to click on. That alone isn’t a huge problem, but the first few emails from a service sets the first impression. So if you start out with information overload and unclear guidance, it’s likely that the new user isn’t getting the help they need and that they’ll fall out of the habit of opening your emails.

Focus, not more information, is better for both you and your customers.

Product-Focused Emails Don’t Always Work

A 28% open rate is great for an unsolicited e-commerce campaign, but terrible for a SaaS welcome email. Groove founder Alex Turnbull was racking his brain to understand why his onboarding emails were so poorly received by trial signups.

After quite a bit of self-reflection, analysis, and conversations with a number of customers, he came to the conclusion that customers “simply don’t care about ‘getting more out of their Groove account.'” “Counterintuitively,” Turnbull writes, “a product-focused message was not the best performing post-signup email.”

So Turnbull and his team set to work testing new strategies for the all-important onboarding emails. The result is a message that sets the tone for the user’s experience with Groove. The 28% open rate was replaced by a 41% response rate—a massive improvement. They even use customer responses to tailor the rest of the onboarding process.

The improved email has unlocked other findings too—a better understanding of customers’ challenges and improved insights on building better relationships and messaging for customers.

It’s also just a better email: note that it’s pretty short, friendly, and readable. Instead of a link salad, there’s a focus on one request—to answer why you signed up for Groove. The message also sets up the expectation for a few more onboarding emails to come introducing the service, instead of stuffing the first message with all the information.

Practice makes perfect

Professional baseball teams are highly invested in metrics to improve performance. If you’ve seen Moneyball, you know exactly what I mean. Teams track data the same way a marketing or product department does. But pro baseball teams practice more than the average team working on lifecycle communication.

Errors are only avoided through better coaching and more reps. Better emails are the result of good process, quality control, and iteration. Get practicing!

Have you come across a lifecycle email gone right or wrong lately? Forward it along to marketing[at]customer.io!

Have you heard of Facebook’s “7 friends in 10 days” rule?

Early on in the life of the company, the Growth team discovered that a Facebook user who added 7 friends within their first 10 days in the app was far more likely to stick around for the long-term. Hitting 7 friends (in 10 days) became Facebook’s Aha! moment.

The Aha! moment is the point in the user experience where your product’s value becomes clear to your users. You judge whether and how this happens on a product-by-product basis, but the end-result you’re looking for is usually conversion or long-term retention.

Much of Facebook’s growth in the ensuing years came about because they were able to take that knowledge and leverage it. By devoting their efforts to bringing more new Facebook users to their Aha! moments, the Growth team grew Facebook to a billion users worldwide.

Sneak Up on Aha!

One problem with the Aha! moment framework is that it can come off as overly reductionist.

The Growth team at Facebook, for example, have been open about the arbitrary nature of getting users to precisely “7 friends in 10 days.” The number is an estimation, a signpost. “8 friends in 11 days” or “9 friends in 12 days” could have been just as successful. The point of codifying their Aha! moment as “7 friends in 10 days” was to give the team a unifying goal to shoot for.

When you walk into your office with an explicit, measurable goal written on a whiteboard, then you know exactly what you need to do to be successful. When you walk in with a vague mandate, you don’t.

“7 friends in 10 days” worked as a signpost despite being imprecise, and that comes back to the fact that Aha! moments themselves aren’t that precise. They’re quantitative goals in that they represent a succession of behaviors or events. Once users add [X] contacts, or invite [X] friends, or perform [X] actions in your app, they’re more likely to stick around for [Y] weeks.

When you understand what your users value, you can look closer into how they behave and begin testing out various theories as you search for your Aha! moment. As Chamath Palihapitiya explains, a keystone like “7 friends in 10 days” was something to frame a user experience around, a simple representation “of what it was to both capture core product value, to define what it meant to be able to onboard into a product … and then to basically iterate around that.”

Find Your Power Users

Start by finding your power users. Josh Elman, who helped grow user bases of products like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, explains the value of uncovering your power users' stories:

I frequently get asked what are benchmarks for retention after one day or one week….Ignore the benchmarks. Find the patterns in the stories of people who do get your product. Figure out what converted them and got them so excited to keep using your product every day or every week.

People who became successful using your app or service probably did something differently from those who churned out early—if you can figure out what and why, you can start to reverse-engineer that path for your other users.

The first step, of course, is figuring out what kind of behavior you want to identify as the basis of “power usage.” This sounds like a simple task (and it might be, depending on your product), but the Aha! moment isn’t always obvious, because it’s not necessarily the most-performed action or the one that seems most vital to you or even just one single moment. The action(s) that best correspond with retention might not even be around using what you consider a core product feature). You need to find the behaviors that, when performed, best correlate with continuing to use your product for an extended period of time.

For Facebook, that was adding 7 friends within a user’s first 10 days using the product. The most sociable people on the platform became its “power users,” and they tended to stick around the longest as a result of their usage.

If you use an analytics solution like Mixpanel, Heap, or Amplitude or use data analysis tools like Mode, you can get this kind of behavioral granularity straight away. For example, see Amplitude’s Compass feature below, which gives you a graph of all behavioral “events” in your app crossed by how well they correlate with 2nd-week retention in-app.

The darker squares indicate stronger correlation between behaviors and retention;
the lighter squares, weaker

Looking at the above chart, one behavior sticks out: connected social account. When performed within 2 days of signing up, it correlates with retention better than any other behavior that users can take within 2 days. That tells us that it’s worth looking at as a potential source of Aha! moments.

You can also always start with good, educated guesses about power user behavior using more basic in-app analytics and through interviews with your best customers.

Dig Into the User Experience

How does power usage fit within your current product experience? Take a look at current patterns so you can work out next steps towards increasing the chance of reaching Aha! moments.

One way to do this is with user research. The shoestring method involves asking your friends, family, and people you manage to cajole into trying your product at coffeeshops and cafes. Then there are sites like UserTesting, which will provide you with people to use your app plus video recordings, surveys, and reports.

Make sure you give your testers a distinct list of tasks or objectives to complete. Your goal here is to put your testers through the paces of using your app, noting what parts are working as intended and which aren’t.

There are also tools like FullStory that let you actually record user sessions on your site and view them later, like a customer experience DVR. It’s a painless way to understand just what your users are going through when they use your product.

Of course, you can reach out to your best customers and power users to learn why and how they’re getting so much value out of your product. Your goal is to understand how people who succeed with your product get where they do.

After looking at behavior data and doing user research, you should arrive at a hypothesis about an aspect of your product that would be better and help you grow faster, if it were changed.

Take Action by Testing a Theory

Once you have the path to an Aha! moment in your product mapped out and some ideas for how you might bring more users to it, test out some of those hypotheses.

The most common way to test your hypotheses is to run an A/B test—to present two groups of users with two different versions of the same page, design, or onboarding flow. You do this while measuring some metric, usually conversion rate, and at the end of the test, you see how your different variants changed that metric.

For example, if you found that people who connected their social accounts within the first few days of using your product tend to stick around longer, then you might craft an experiment around sending an onboarding email designed to get more users connecting social accounts.

Here’s an example of this type of message:

Lighthouse is a team management tool. New users need to actually add team members in Lighthouse in order to do a better job of managing them. So it makes sense to nudge anyone who hasn’t added a team member yet towards that Aha! experience.

Note that you wouldn’t want to send this type email to everybody. First, segment your campaign so that only people not on the path to an Aha! moment (like anyone who hasn’t connected a social account or added a team member in the first few days, for example) receive it. Also, you can create a holdout or control group in order to compare your experiment results. (We did this with an onboarding test at Customer.io by creating an A/B test where one of the variations sent us a notification instead of sending out an email offer to a user.)

The goal for your test shouldn’t be clicks or opens. Instead, you should be looking for how many users in that particular segment go on to connect their social accounts. Later, if those same people stick around with your product in larger numbers, you’ll have some strong evidence that you’re bringing more people to their Aha! moments.

Your power users are your role models. Here, you’re experimenting with different approaches to bring everyone else up to their level.

How Aha! works

From Archimedes in his bathtub to Newton feeling the apple thunk thanks to gravity — Aha! moments (in our imagination) are often sudden, almost mystical moments of revelation. But the Aha! moment isn’t so otherworldly, something you just happen upon, or discover. It’s something that you cultivate through user research, understanding your product’s value, and experimentation. And as Facebook and other organizations since have shown, the power of what you can accomplish when you know it is huge.

It’s your turn! Have you found your product’s Aha! moment? How did you find it?

The energy was high at CloudApp’s Monday morning all-hands meeting. The sales team had closed a few large deals for the media and video sharing platform that week, and the entire company gathered to review revenue numbers.

But they were surprised to see they hadn’t grown as much as they thought.

Churn was dragging down their newly expanded revenue. That’s when Scott Smith, VP of Sales, realized he needed to shift his focus. “It was a freak-out moment,” Scott remembers. “We had been prioritizing growth with new customers and hadn’t been making sure to keep existing ones. This was a huge mistake. We quickly turned the Eye of Sauron onto churn and retention.”

CloudApp, ready to shoot down churn

Over-focusing on new customer growth is a common oversight. Addressing retention means that you’re not wasting all your hard work of attracting and acquiring people in the first place. Plus, your business growth gains momentum when you invest in what happens after signup. This is especially true for companies building subscription, SaaS, and other recurring engagement products that rely on customers coming back and continuing to find value.

Your success is tied to the success of your customers. Keeping that alignment saves you from being swayed or distracted by vanity metrics or lopsided efforts. Digging deeper beyond logins, pageviews, and message opens is a customer-centric view of engagement, rooted in the very real-world question of whether your customers are making progress towards and accomplishing their goals.

This is where data-driven retention communication comes in as an integral part of the customer experience — to reach out at the right moment to help make progress happen. Scott and the CloudApp team started to hone in on customer communication, revamping their email, in-app notifications, and other messages to help hit their target of 2% negative revenue churn.

“What’s been the most interesting about this process,” Scott says, “is seeing how a few weeks or months of work focused on your current customers can help you grow faster than going out to find brand new ones.” These investments have paid off, and CloudApp now hits its revenue expansion targets consistently.

Here’s how CloudApp uses data to automatically solicit feedback, unearth clues about customers’ needs, and learn how to improve their retention systems.

Equip Yourself with Customer Feedback

It’s incredibly frustrating to hear that a customer churned because of a missing feature — that you offered all along.

Julie McCollough, Head of Customer Success, was perusing responses to a data-triggered survey for current customers. One answer surprised her, as Scott explains: “There’s a company in New York called SeatGeek, and one of their key members told us they were happy with the product but would love it if we could do security authentication.”

CloudApp already supported this authentication with OneLogin, which ensured the security of user content for organizations that wanted to keep private their shared photos, videos, and GIFs. Julie reached out to get SeatGeek set up with the feature, and all was well.

closing the loop

No news isn’t always good news. A customer who is quiet all year long may be happily plodding along, or they may be racking up small annoyances and dissatisfaction until they leave, and it’s too late to ask them what they need. Passive open-door approaches — the “You’re welcome to contact us at this support email address.” one-liner — are insufficient when it comes to surfacing issues. One customer service expert has found that only 4% of dissatisfied customers voice complaints to businesses, and support emails tend to focus on immediate troubleshooting. So when you consider your (many) quieter customers, then you have plenty of “under-the-surface” feedback to explore, with deep implications for your marketing and product experiences.

CloudApp proactively solicits feedback from customers to avoid that fatal silence. They don’t just send a blanket-style survey to their entire user base once a year. Instead, they set up data-powered surveys that are automatically triggered to a subset of users when they perform certain actions or hit retention-related milestones in their lifecycle. This makes the feedback more timely and meaningful.

Let’s look at two examples of automated retention campaigns CloudApp sends via Customer.io that have shown high customer engagement results.

The Sticker Campaign: What do new users need?

When a person signs up for CloudApp, five tool tips guide them through the product’s basic features. If they successfully complete all five steps, they get a congratulatory in-app notification and an email about a small gift of stickers.

notification shows up in-app

the email offer

The email links to a Typeform survey to collect the user’s mailing address. At the bottom, there are two optional response fields:

• What brought you to CloudApp? What problem were you looking to solve?
• Anything we could be doing better? Any feature/product we are missing?

And that’s how Scott’s team began collecting valuable feedback from their most engaged new users who had completed all key actions in the onboarding process. They receive around 500 survey responses per month, with the email boasting a 76% open rate and 37% click-through rate.

A Zapier workflow sends the responses that have text in the 4th and 5th fields into productboard. Then the engineering, product, and customer success teams review the sticker feedback every two weeks.

Julie consolidates the sticker responses and looks for prospective high-value users, so they can reach out to them directly and help them with what they need. The engineering team uses productboard to bucket and rank feature requests by priority of user cohorts and by how a feature fits into their broader vision for CloudApp.

“It’s basically a more useful version of NPS,” Scott comments. “We’ll often see a trend about a certain feature that has existed for a while, but we previously were unaware that it was not being used as expected. These additional data points, collected in aggregate, give us a better sense that something isn’t working for a larger group of our users.”

Based on what they learn from previously unspoken customer feedback, they can make adjustments to their marketing messaging, customer success documentation, and product to improve the experience for future users. For example, CloudApp’s onboarding emails for teams currently show off their security feature so new customers don’t miss it.

excerpt from onboarding email

CloudApp’s Sticker Campaign opens a line of communication at a key time in customer onboarding — and makes it fun. Customers love it. Sure, mailing stickers and handwritten notes is labor-intensive. But thanks to data, CloudApp can offer this to just the right slice of users at the right moment. “It’s probably less than a dollar per user. If we get a tweet, email, feature request, or someone excitedly sharing their experience with their team at work, it’s great for us,” says Scott.

Give / Get: What can we do to keep you from churning?

Customer behavior signals important messages all the time, like “I need help!” or “I love your app!” or “Meh” or “I don’t know how to do more advanced things!”

You can respond accordingly. Did they complete all those key activation tasks and invite four of their coworkers? That’s a good sign that they’re going to be a power user, and maybe they’re ready to upgrade to a paid subscription faster than the norm. Exporting all their data or haven’t been active in weeks? That’s a good sign that they’re on their way out, and you can preemptively reach out and work with that customer to get them happy again, all before they hit “cancel.”

It’s important to catch those warning signs and automatically act on them, because when a customer stops logging into your app, that means trouble. A study of one million SaaS users showed that nearly all churned accounts were preceded by a period of non-use.

CloudApp combats this with their “Give / Get” email campaign, which triggers when users haven’t used the product for 30 days. The email comes from Chris, their Head of Product, who asks for some feedback: “I was wondering if you could spare a second to let me know what you thought of the product and if you have ideas on what we could do to improve?”

And then comes the offer: “In return, I’ve gone ahead and added one month of the pro plan to your account for free.” A bright blue button entices the user to click back into the product and redeem their free month.

This campaign, delivered at the right time with a catchy incentive, is very effective in bringing people back to the product. “We’ve seen about a 45% open rate on this email, a 3.4% click-through, and a 37% conversion-to-activity rate — that is, a user started using the product again and created a piece of content with CloudApp,” Scott reports.

Retention and churn are often discussed in the same breath. But churn itself is a symptom, rather than the root problem you’re solving for. Churn prevention and the overall work of retention starts way at the beginning, by building healthy habits that benefit the customer rather than just treating the symptoms and throwing out a lifesaver at the very last minute.

When you invest in your customers’ success from the minute they sign up for your product, nurturing them even after they’ve handed over their credit card once or twice, you’re investing in the success of your own business. Happy customers stick around for longer - so that’s the key: create happy customers by actually helping them accomplish the goals that motivated them to come to your product in the first place. That’s always going to be welcome in a user’s inbox, and that’s what will get them to stick around.

A version of this post originally appeared in Chapter 1 of Clearbit’s Data-Driven Marketing Book. Check out the full piece for more insights and a breakdown of top-performing retention emails at CloudApp, AdRoll, and CoSchedule.

At Customer.io, we love helping companies grow through customer communication. We wanted to explore further how growth inside companies actually happens so we’re talking to some of the best growth-oriented product people, marketers, and founders out there.

From Hiten Shah, co-founder of Crazy Eggs and KISSMetrics, we learned about how to take what your customers are telling you and fold it into your product. And we talked to Andrew Capland, head of the Growth team at Wistia, about how small observations about user behavior can turn into high-ROI experiments.

A process for digesting your customer feedback

At Crazy Egg, we would just take all the customer support requests that came in and we focus on prioritizing what we heard over and over again. We’d build it into our product and make it product better as a result.
—Hiten Shah, Crazy Egg and KISSMetrics

Soon after its launch, Crazy Egg became the top heat mapping tool on the market. But that didn’t happen because Hiten Shah and his co-founder Neil Patel were that much better than everyone else at predicting people’s needs and building a product to met them. It didn’t happen because Hiten helped invent the very concept of growth hacking.

Their success was a result of building systems that helped the team better listen to what their customers were telling themand act to improve the product.

Crazy Egg offers heatmaps, scrollmaps, frequency maps, and session recordings

Every week, one person would summarize all the customer service requests that had come in during the week and send out a digest email to the whole team. “As the business matured,” Hiten says, “the same process wasn’t working. We had more people working on product, new things coming out, and we realized that taking a bunch of customer support requests and prioritizing them ended up being a bigger problem than one person’s job.”

They needed a system, and they found one in a simple spreadsheet.

Each month, they’d go back through all of the summary emails that had been sent out and look for patterns in:

• the types of problems people were having
• who was having problems more often
• what people were trying to accomplish with their software

By looking at how the “top problems” evolved over the course of weeks, they could get a quick sense of what their biggest priority issues were and how much progress they were making on fixing them.

Once the amount of data in that weekly spreadsheet grew too large, they built a system for coding and tagging that allowed feedback to be automatically sorted and routed to the right people. Rather than one weekly email sent to everyone on the team, they sent several different emails each week—some segmented for certain groups of users (like product managers), some segmented by theme, some segmented by DRI (directly responsible individual).

At each stage of their feedback system’s evolution, it got technologically more complex—but only in accordance with their needs. As the team grew, their needs grew, and their toolchain grew to meet it. That’s how Hiten and his team were able to stay abreast of their customer feedback, not get buried in it:

If you don’t address something within a few months, it doesn’t necessarily matter to the customer anymore, unless it just keeps coming up over and over again, which means you’re doing a poor job of improving your product or improving the experience.

Without that clear line of feedback with your customers, you can never be sure you’re building the right product.

Experiment based on your intuition

We set up tracking events for things that are really important to our business. And then what we’ll do is literally just pull up chairs around a big computer and watch people interact with those events and take notes. I don’t think we’re doing anything revolutionary. It’s just actually doing it that for us makes the biggest difference.
—Andrew Capland, Wistia

At Wistia, the growth team’s experiments often begin with a hunch or a question about how the product could be better. One question that piqued Andrew Capland and the Wistia growth team’s curiosity was simple: “Why are so many people sitting through this entire dummy, placeholder video?”

“When you first log in to our tool, you’re prompted to upload a video. We were finding that some people just don’t have a video today,“ Andrew explains. "So we made a video that you could basically borrow from Wistia, a placeholder.” The video featured Lenny, the Wistia office dog and mascot, wandering around Cambridge with a tape in its mouth — and there was a simple message: “Video is better with Wistia than with dogs.”

“We just thought it was a nice way to get people to see what they could do with the tool once they had a video in it.” But instead of exploring Wistia’s customization features, as expected, the team found that people were watching the entire placeholder video all the way through.

Tragically, this video didn’t do much to help people learn how to use Wistia.

Since so many people were watching this video, Andrew and his team decided to take advantage of this opportunity and turn the placeholder into a product tour. "We made it super contextual to the page, where it’s Chris Lavigne, our head videographer, pointing up and showing you, ‘Here’s where you can customize the colors,’ and ‘You capture leads over here.'”

The team split new users into two halves to A/B test showing this new video versus the old Lenny video. After one month, they saw a 30% increase in the percentage of new users that used the platform’s customization features.

It’s easy to glaze over something like a video with a great playthrough rate as a sign of successful engagement. The "if-it-ain’t-broke” mentality would suggest that there’s probably something else more urgent to work on. But the really big opportunities aren’t always in obvious places or the most quantitatively proven. Often, they involve a bit of intuition and an experiment.

Both Andrew and Hiten’s stories touch on a similar theme—how to use intuition, observations based on qualitative feedback, and the voice of the customer to drive growth processes and experiments.

Are there specific aspects of creating growth that you’re interested in hearing more about? Tactics, teams, technologies? Drop us a line in the comments below and let us know!

And if you’re interested in talking to us about how your team does growth, head here!

Here is one of the classic SaaS growth problems: customer care and communication isn’t evenly distributed.

A high volume of self-serve customers is what allows business to scale — this is baked into the growth strategy of most SaaS companies. But in the face of the constant challenges of growth, including the ever-present threat of churn, companies often end up building up account management to attract and better retain customers, especially larger accounts.

That’s where you find the communication and care imbalance. A certain subset of customers grabs all the attention. One big enterprise customer can cover the salary of one account manager, and with that kind of math, it’s hard to dedicate equal time to customers who pay $50 a month versus those who pay $5,000.

But that doesn’t mean you should throw up your hands when it comes to all your smaller, self-serve accounts.

Larger customers pay the most but also tend to be resource-hogs, with a penchant for custom demands. When it comes to smaller customers: there’s a lot more of them and their lifecycle journeys tend to be more predictable. Programming your customer communication to provide care at scale is the smart way to increase profitability while providing a great experience for every customer, regardless of their contribution to MRR.

Here are a few steps towards mixing automation magic into your customer care and account management with helpful lifecycle emails.

Follow the Patterns

When it comes to your self-serve customers, you’ll probably find some element of predictability. They have similar goals, sizes, and acquisition paths into your business. If you look closely at user behavior by pricing cohort, you might find that the deviation from the mean is small. This makes scaling a baseline of account management more straightforward than you might think.

sample user behavior patterns

When you identify the points at which self-serve customers run into trouble, create automated messages to trigger at those points to smooth out friction and help people make progress. Timely messages feel highly personal since they address problems that are top-of-mind. A truly great automated account management message would also be prescient — because you can anticipate problems before they happen, you can swoop in to save the day at just the right moment.

Don’t Let Users Abandon Any Task

You hear a lot in the e-commerce space about the power of cart abandonment emails. Something like 57% of all carts are abandoned. Imagine if we had a way to tie abandoned tasks in SaaS directly to lost revenue. Customers who try to create that project, upload contacts, or whatever your Aha! activation event is — and fail — are way more likely to churn.

As a rule, don’t let customers abandon key tasks without a follow-up. These are some of the easiest messages to automate, and they create a custom-feeling experience for the user. Again, the type of message personalization that matters has more to do with timing and relevant copy rather than merging in a first name into the text and subject line.

Identify a few vital onboarding tasks for your customer and if people fail to complete them, make sure they get an email with the help they need. Your path to revenue is made of completed tasks.

Fill in the Gaps with Recurring Emails

Email is a great channel for sharing interesting and helpful account information. For instance, recurring emails with reports, stats, and other notifications is a great way to update users on where they stand.

Helpful recurring emails often share summaries and insights around:

• Account activity
• Account usage
• Success milestones
• Error notifications

The ad retargeting platform AdRoll, for example, automatically sends a recurring email of monthly metrics to its customers. The email rolls up the customer’s ad campaign performance from the past month, including key metrics like conversions and ROI, providing customers insight into their progress in the platform.

This monthly email also uses Customer.io’s conditional Liquid templating logic to show different suggestions for how to improve campaign performance depending on the various metrics. For example, this customer’s digest reports a relatively low number of clicks. So the email includes a tip that older ads tend to not perform as well.

Max Blaha, who manages growth at AdRoll, was inspired by the recurring digests sent by Zapier— and sees this type of communication as a way to “make sure that our off-line experience matches our in-app experience.” That way, AdRoll can continue to engage and provide value to customers without having to make them remember to log in regularly and check their stats. Thoughtful approaches like this around the customer experience checks out in the business numbers — AdRoll has a 97% customer retentation rate.

So while you may find that sending emails like this leads to people logging into their accounts less, that’s okay. You’re creating a better experience for them.

Exceed (Very Low) Expectations

When someone pays a smaller amount for your app, their expectations are likely pretty low. They understand that they won’t get a lot of personal attention and aren’t going to qualify for the concierge-level service that bigger customers get. Any value they get from your app is a huge win, so it becomes really easy to exceed their expectations.

Here are a few ways to communicate with self-serve customers that will help and impress them:

1. Send a few great account-related emails throughout their entire lifecycle. Autoresponders leave people hanging once they end, but a few smart (and automated) updates will make your product more accessible.
2. Blend personal emails (”Hi, I’m Tony from customer success…”) and account emails (“You used 71% of your quota this week”) to land in the inbox and initiate engagement in the form of responses with feedback and questions. You can greatly increase customer touch points if you increase variety along with thoughtful volume.
3. Start with one thoughtful interaction. Yes, one will do the trick. Try using a tool like Bonjoro to welcome new users with a video or automate a campaign to send out swag. If you make the effort to communicate with all customers early on, customers will be more apt to read and act on the automated communication you send later.

The truth is that lifecycle account management is low-hanging fruit. Creating these messages will force you to understand your customers better and find all of the friction in their experience. Done well, it amplifies one of the chief growth mechanisms — volume — that exists in the SaaS model.

Over to you! What do you think about harnessing lifecycle emails to provide smart, automated customer care?

Welcome emails are crucial. The moment after you first sign up for a service is when first impressions are made.

But what happens after your initial welcome email?

We’re all used to getting those chipper “Welcome!” emails from the services we sign up for. One touchpoint is easy to forget. Plus, almost everyone does a welcome email and repetitive patterns are easy to tune out. Post-welcome emails, which continue and develop a kind of conversation with your customer, can make you stand out.

Your Post-Welcome Defines Your Strategy

After going through 50 post-welcome emails, we were able to classify each email into one of four categories:

• Casual checkup: These are usually short, plaintext-style emails from a product manager or founder, requesting feedback and offering any help you might need.
• Quick conversion: These emails attempt to get you to add a friend, follow a topic, or perform some other kind of quick conversion action.
• Value sell: These emails attempt to show you more product value and convince you to return.
• The close: Seen more often with products where you buy a single-use license, these emails try to get you to buy relatively quickly.

You could categorize all of these emails by:

• the position in the user journey during which they’re most often used
• how they relate to the user, or what your goal is for the user

More specifically, you can place each type in a distinct quadrant along two axes — funnel position and technique.

• Funnel: If a company expects that people are closer to buying around the time of the welcome email, a bottom of funnel email is more likely. If they’re prepared for the buying cycle to take a bit longer and want to raise awareness in the meantime, a top of funnel email is more likely.
• Technique: If a company is primarily concerned with getting its users to perform a specific, quick action, you’re more likely to see an email with a direct request for a conversion. If they’re seeding a future action, you’re more likely to see a relationship-building post-welcome email.

Of course, within each kind of email, you’ll have variation and types blending into other quadrants. Quick conversion emails can look like casual checkups, and vice versa. The key is to understand what you’re trying to accomplish with every post-welcome email you send and then tailor them to that purpose.

The Casual Checkup

Especially popular with small startups and lean operations, the “casual checkup” is almost always written in a plain text style. It comes “from” a company’s founder or CEO shortly after you sign up and receive your first welcome. It’s not about converting customers in that moment but about learning and building awareness.

Alongside the many GIF-laden, 10MB+ marketing emails in your inbox, the personal check-in is spare, designed to look like it was tapped out just for you. It wasn’t. However, and more importantly, you’ll often get a real person if you respond. Companies will hook up the casual checkup to send automatically and route all replies to a human. So feel free to reply, as Matt Bilotti from Drift asks you to do in this email:

You’ll notice the focus here is gathering information:

…why did you sign up?… Would love to learn more about what you’re working on.

The message isn’t trying to get you to sign up for a bigger plan or to share the product with all of your friends, and that’s very intentional.

The casual checkup is also used to get feedback on products that are in early stages of development. The plaintext format — approaching customers like a friend — can get you far better engagement rates than a standard company email that’s slickly designed and from no-reply@company.com. At worst, customers gain a little more context on the product they signed up for. At best, you wind up with a productive conversation or feedback that you would never have gotten otherwise.

Sometimes post-welcome emails will combine the informality of the casual checkup with some of the marketing content of a value-sell email. They might send you blog resources or documentation to get started using the product, as in this post-welcome email from Infogram:

Or you might get a casual checkup that features a personal introduction from the founder or CEO, delving deeper into the mission and values behind the company, like this one from Modsy:

Takeaways

• Asking your customers for feedback and context on why they’re using your product is a powerful way to learn. It works best when your product and team are small enough to manage all the replies.
• The personal introduction is a great way to start building relationships with your users. Whether it’s discussing your values or providing content that you know people will find valuable, you’re working on building something for the long-haul. So don’t worry too much about immediately converting people. Instead, dial down and measure using metrics that prove that your initial efforts are succeeding, like reply rates, clickthrough rates, and smaller behavioral conversion rates.

The Quick Conversion

If email isn’t your primary channel for customer feedback, or you’re simply more focused on conversion than on conversation, the immediate conversion-style post-welcome email may be what you need. This type of message is always designed to get you to accomplish one quick thing, whether that’s taking an action within a product, inviting or referring a friend, or opening up your contacts.

Let’s say you have a social consumer product. You might send an email designed to make it super-simple to see if you already have connections on the platform, like LinkedIn does:

This spare interface and prominent call-to-action button are hallmarks of conversion-centric design. LinkedIn knows you’ve been to their site, they know you understand the value of the product, and this is their rigorously-tested vehicle for you to start fully participating.

Dropbox uses a quick conversion email to get you to download the Dropbox apps onto your computer and phone. They know that the more Dropbox apps you have around you, the more likely you are to start using Dropbox regularly.

Takeaways

• The best quick conversion emails use some kind of operational leverage to get huge results. Done right, the quick conversion email can be an effective mechanism of growth.
• When selecting an action to drive users towards, make sure you’ve figured out (or are testing) whether that action benefits your product’s growth in a meaningful way.

The Value Sell

The value sell is the opposite of the quick conversion. Instead of getting people to take an immediate action, you’re trying to motivate and inspire to seed a conversion, upsell, or cross-sell that’s coming down the line.

Often, you’ll see this type of email with a product that involves greater investment on the part of the user. After you receive your first welcome email from Airbnb, for instance, you’re likely to get a newsletter like this:

view full email

After registering your account, Airbnb will periodically send a curated list of places you could go. Each featured listing in the email functions almost like a landing page or a new conversion opportunity to make a booking.

You can also use the value-sell message to help new users get acclimated to a product or remove onboarding friction. Here’s an example from Airtable, a collaborative database tool.

view full email

Airtable’s post-welcome email provides useful templates for you to get started in their tool. New users will stick with or move to another tool that’s more immediately easy to understand if they don’t understand Airtable’s relational database capabilities. So the content isn’t designed to push a sale and upgrade from a free account but to help you get more out of the product.

Takeaways

• The value sell is a bottom-of-funnel technique on a longer timeline, making it particularly well-suited for continuing product education and building relationships with customers who have larger lifetime values.

The Close

The “close” is about converting evaluators into customers, used by companies with shorter marketing funnels.

For example, you might use a closing post-welcome email when your product has an extremely short trial or demo period, as with screen recording software ScreenFlow. When you download and use it, any recording you make has a large, obtrusive watermark. A bit later, you get an email thanking you for downloading the trial, pointing out the watermark, and prompting you to purchase a license.

The product can’t be used in its demo state, as the watermark is simply too pronounced. This is an effective technique largely because of the velocity at which new users move through their funnel. People try the product, see how it works, and then are soon prompted to buy. If they got a glimpse of the product’s value, they’ll be ready.

The closing email can be more subtle than this if you have a longer-term value proposition. In this example from the Wall Street Journal, signing up for a subscription triggers a post-welcome email that offers you “exclusive access” to the WSJ+ community:

As part of the WSJ+ community, you get access to opportunities like talks, getaways, and other exclusive offers. The Journal is riding that post-purchase crest of a wave to upsell you. While subscription revenue is nice, it’s the margin on vacations and getaways that can really drive bottom-line expansion for a publication like the Wall Street Journal, and post-subscription is a favorable time to show these selections.

It’s easy to send a clunky close-like email at the end of a lifecycle campaign (“Buy Now — 10% off!”) when it feels like everything else has failed and you may as well take the shot. But if your business model supports it, it might be worth moving it up to be the second arrow in your quiver.

Takeaways

• The close is often misused as the begging, last “Hail Mary” email in a drip campaign. Instead, if your model relies on a quick customer funnel or converting higher-value customers, experiment with trying to close in your post-welcome email.

Making the Most of a Second Impression

When you’re looking at your own lifecycle campaigns in the context of the post-welcome email, consider the following questions:

• What stage of the funnel are my customers in when they get this email?
• Is my goal to get people to convert, or am I trying to build a relationship and convert down the road?

Sending out a casual, plaintext greeting because you feel like it’s the “startup” thing to do, or sending an aggressive coupon code campaign every day because that’s the prevailing approach to building revenue — these are just different iterations of a grab bag strategy.

Instead, tailor your post-welcome email to your business model and what you’re trying to accomplish. You only have one chance to make a second impression.

It’s up to you! What successes or failures have you seen with post-welcome emails? Share with us in the comments below!

In SaaS, you look for improvement opportunities where your effort-to-value ratio is high (where effort is lower and value is higher).

Here’s a simple example set in a vacuum to help make our point. Assume your product costs $100/month, and on average every month, you get 100 new trials and 10 new customers. That would mean your trial-to-customer conversion rate is 10%.

Now, imagine you increase that rate to 20%. That’s not an easy task by any means, but the effort-to-value ratio is incredibly high. Over a two-year period, the company would reach $48k MRR instead of $24k MRR. That 10% increase in conversions ends up doubling your revenue:

Sample result of high effort-to-value ratio

Finding these kinds of relatively low-effort and high-value improvements is how you grow faster and build a strong business. And almost nowhere is the effort-to-value ratio more favorable than in activating (and reactivating) users from their abandoned free trials.

Why Activation (and Reactivation) is Low-Effort and High-Value

It’s a mistake to categorize users who sign up for a trial of your product and fail to convert as a loss. They’ve already done something crucial — they discovered your product and raised their hand to try it. Now it’s up to whether you’re turning that interest into actual activation and product engagement.

You’ve already paid the acquisition costs — in content marketing, social, advertising, referrals, etc. So why do we still see so little effort to win back the many people who abandon their trials? There are a few reasons:

• It’s easy to assume that the user tried the product and decided it wasn’t right for them, end of story. But that’s rarely the case.
• There are usually more pressing marketing tasks to be done (yet another blog post, this week’s newsletter, etc.).
• You’re not taking advantage of inactivity data as a signal to get in touch.
• It may not be clear who’s responsible for communicating with users at this stage of the journey (post-registration and pre-conversion) or what to say to them.
• It’s more straightforward to work on attracting new prospects than nurturing existing signups.

As a general rule, setting up triggered messages is almost always the best use of marketing time and dollars. Thoughtful automated messages scale to make the seemingly impossible challenge of doubling your conversion rates a possibility.

Typically, when companies who do send some type of emails at this point, they rarely get to the core of why the person signed up in the first place and the many reasons they didn’t convert. Instead, they often tend to be overly simplistic, and thus ineffective — from the friendly but generic “Hey, did you forget about us?” to the insensitive “Your trial is running out. Upgrade to continue.” to the Hail Mary discount offer.

Instead, you can apply the elements of a perfect activation email. You don’t need to use all of them but they work well in combination.

How to Create the Perfect Activation Email

In this post, we’re talking about “activation” across a user’s trial period (when you notice they are inactive) and beyond the end of the trial, when you’d like to win them back (which you may also think of as reactivation). This is the prime window of opportunity to capitalize on whatever interest drove people to discover and register for your product in the first place. The later it gets past the signup date, the more you’ll think about different winback tactics because that interest and initial energy will have dissipated.

So your goal is to reach out to folks who signed up for a trial and never got to give your product a fair shot and rekindle them with a spark powerful enough to get them meaningfully re-engaged. Expect to invest time creating a full campaign, not a few disparate emails.

It’s also not a great time for your call-to-action to be about payment and upgrading, since you’re trying to motivate people back into intermediate stages of the buying journey, like consideration and evaluation. Instead, ask them to take one small step forward. Prompting an action, almost any action, means that you can start building momentum to work with.

The elements mentioned below can be mixed and matched in a variety of ways. Let’s get to it!

Stock the Shelves

One of the biggest challenges for every SaaS business is that new customers start with a blank slate. It requires a lot of investment for a customer to start receiving value. To get abandoners engaged, try “stocking the shelves” with templates, example campaigns, data to test with, etc. Your features will make more sense when a new user can visualize their own data or content inside your product.

Here’s an email from Prezi doing just that:

Social Proof

There are a few ways to use social proof, one of the oldest and most relied-upon marketing tactics out there. In this example, Amplitude name-drops a few other customers. It suggests to a prospective user that they are in good company.

Another approach is displaying what’s popular. Take a look at a snippet from this Product Hunt email, which pulls in the most upvoted products added to their platform in the past week:

click to see full email

Context personalization

Meaningful personalization isn’t about customizing emails with the recipient’s name; it’s about sending messages at the right moment. It’s knowing when you’re at risk of losing the user and sending a helpful message just when they need it most.

Instapage nails it in this email. They’ve identified that the user has created a new landing page but stopped there before publishing it. This is a key moment in the trial, super close to unlocking product value, and one that deserves a message. Remember, the effort-to-value ratio—there is a lot of value from getting people over the hump.

We’ll take this kind of personalization over an out-of-context drip email saying “Hey [First_Name], did you know you could do X?” any day.

The Supportive Check-in

The truth is that you don’t really know why individual users don’t convert into paying customers. You can glean from data that people have trouble getting set up, or you might suspect that your competitor’s pricing is more attractive. But you don’t know until you start asking— and you’ll learn a lot by sending an email that asks for feedback.

You might file this under “things that don’t scale,” but the message itself is easy to automate, and the feedback is so valuable that it’s worth the time it takes to read and respond.

Use Data

There’s nothing like data to state your case. This email from Lyft is a great example of that. It’s simple and effective.

If you have data—“Customers who do [X] net a better ROI”—use it! And use it liberally.

Urgency as an Add-on

At this point in the customer journey, where you’re looking to first reanimate activity, we recommend using the very popular urgency angle only in combination with other tactics. The reason is simple: think about how motivating it is to get a “time’s running out” message for a goal you don’t care about anyway.

Here’s a nice reactivation email from Terminus that combines urgency (only 24 hours left, in a series that spanned approximately 4 days) with other persuasive activation elements:

There’s social proof with the mention of what big-name companies use the tool, an exclusive-sounding offer of a “lifetime 30% discount”, a risk-free trial so you’re not jumping back into the paid subscription right away — and most importantly, it starts out connecting back with what would have driven you to sign up in the first place. You want help with your UTM-tracking process. Urgency works as an add-on here, not the main persuasive nudge.

Prioritize the People Already in Your Corner

When you start to think about your marketing efforts in terms of the effort-to-value, it changes how you approach experimentation.

While it may seem inevitable that people will abandon their free trials, looking at activation and reactivation as an effort-to-value problem clarifies why it’s so important to try something to improve it.

This is a place where even a meager, couple-percentage-point increase could have a serious impact on your business, where what could simply be a failed experiment or a rounding error elsewhere could change your entire trajectory. The odds, in other words, are in your favor.

For more ideas on how to onboard and retain your users, check out these posts:

• Onboard Users to Success by Preparing Them for Liftoff
• The Cost of Keeping Your Customers
• User Retention Emails, from Day 0 to Day 90

Do you think reactivating recently unengaged or inactive users is overlooked by companies? What’s your experience? Share with us in the comments!

Maybe you’ve tested subject lines or obsessed over optimizing a landing page call-to-action. You greet your customer by first name in emails and track campaigns with UTM parameters. You rejoice when you see lifts in engagement like opens and clickthroughs. But how are these adjustments really affecting your business? Are your customers happier and sticking around?

Not all data is created equal — and these days, there’s certainly a lot of it available to use and call ourselves data-driven and data-informed. But how do know we’re using data to do marketing that really matters?

If we can do that, we can better tell our story, gain customer trust, and convey what makes our product truly valuable.

Data Helps You Tell Better Stories

Great content might seem like the product of creative talent, but of course, creative wins can become a powerful positive feedback loop. Even if you’re reviewing past content marketing performance, you may still be operating in the dark as you move forward. Without incorporating insights into a long-term content strategy, you can’t build a cohesive narrative for your business.

Airtable, for example, tracks the performance of every article they publish to find the perfect formula for making their blog as helpful as possible for their readers. That data connects content efforts to a higher-level strategy. As they explain:

Companies that are truly successful with content marketing execute consistently, but they also feed their learnings about what worked and what didn’t back into the machine.

To do this, they created a content marketing pipeline in Airtable that’s separated into three stages: preparation, production, and publication. While the first two stages are helpful for content managers to brainstorm and keep track of what’s in the works, the last stage informs all strategic improvements. This creates a pinwheel in which every new article written is another piece of data on what works and what doesn’t.

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The marketing team has a dashboard (in Airtable, of course) with every piece of content published. Each article is a separate entry in the database, and includes details like publication date, persona, and vertical. They also created a view that shows the performance of each piece, using a Google Analytics integration:

When it comes to coming up with new ideas, team members can start with the articles they’ve already written. They can see which types of ideas perform the best and reverse-engineer success. For instance, if they see that the article “SEO for Dummies” got over 2,000 hits, they create a series, breaking down the nitty-gritty of how SEO works while getting further data on what aspects of SEO are most interesting to their users. Or they might investigate deeper in other dimensions, looking at how the topic of SEO has performed for different verticals and audiences.

With a bird’s-eye view on both successes and failures, Airtable learns from their readership and improves the way they tell their story.

Data Helps Raise the Ceiling for Success

Marketers constantly use data for validation, whether it’s for new landing page copy or a tweak to the onboarding flow. But just looking at data isn’t enough, as Wistia’s CEO Chris Savage points out:

You can’t get a competitive advantage doing that stuff anymore. You could say that as the percentage of marketers with a certain tech stack or using a certain tool approaches 100%, the competitive advantage you reap from it approaches 0.

He wanted to find a way to use data in a way his competitors weren’t: to dig deeper into the customer experience.

A few months back, Wistians observed an issue with their onboarding process for their video hosting platform. Using FullStory, a tool that records user session, they discovered that users didn’t complete their walk-through if they didn’t have a video on hand to upload onto the platform. So they created a loaner video featuring Lenny, the adorable office dog and mascot.

via “Onboarding + Videos + A/B Testing = Happier New Users”

Based on the metrics alone, the video was a runaway success: 20% of users viewed the loaner video.

But as the team looked closer at what users were doing, they realized that people were watching the video all the way to the end. The marketing team worried that while people were entertained, they were also distracted from learning about the platform.

The team decided to go ahead and A/B test a different video that still had the same friendly and funny tone, but expressly taught users how to use the platform’s customization features. The new video resulted in a 30% lift on their main goal — which wasn’t, at the end of the day, for new users to watch the video itself but to check out the customization options.

Rather than use data to just give you a final thumbs up or a thumbs down on an idea, use it to double-check your work. You might find that a lift in engagement in the short-term, for instance, doesn’t equal better retention in the long term. Or that there’s a way to get a 40% lift rather than a 4% lift. This mindset will cause you to never be satisfied with a small improvement and help you raise the ceiling with what’s possible with your marketing efforts.

Data Helps You Find Leverage Points for Messaging

Onboarding is the most important part of the user experience, which is why most marketers look to data to pinpoint and reduce friction during the process. But they often furnish the new user journey with a kitchen-sink approach (here’s everything you need to know!) or what they assume is valuable.

Enter behavioral data to find those Aha! moments that fight preconceived notions of what’s valuable for the user.

Go deeper than MAU and DAU to see how users are interacting with your product — and longer-term, looking at the behaviors that separate the users who stuck around after month one from the users who churned. The Appcues team recommends focusing only on the behaviors with close correlation to retention:

• Behavior exhibited by most retained users AND by most churned users = no correlation.
• Behavior exhibited by few retained users AND by few churned users = no correlation.
• Behavior exhibited by most retained users AND by few churned users = correlation.

Only looking at popular behavior patterns is an incomplete story — no telling how it will end, whether your protagonists will stick around or not. Differentiated behavior that’s correlated with retention, on the other hand, indicates those users have found some sort of value. With that knowledge (or a strong hypothesis), you can design your onboarding to that path of discovery.

For Wistia, that path to discovering value requires a new user to upload (or borrow) their first video. After all, they put all that effort into optimizing the power of that loaner video. So it’s no surprise that there are nudges to upload your first video in their welcome email:

A smart (and subtle) trick of decision design that Wistia uses in this email is to only provide a link to the “upload your first video” step in their getting-started checklist. With an obvious and concrete next step, the reader is more likely to take action at all and on exactly the behavioral conversion you intended.

The Science of Storytelling

Relying too much on any ol' data can put you at risk of missing the forest through the trees.

We work through the thrum of loud declarations about being data-driven and modern movement towards a more analytical, agile approach to marketing. And it can be easy to get lost in numbers and information, even in the name of testing and iteration, obscuring the singular purpose of great marketing: to create a compelling narrative to get people interested and meaningfully engaged in the product.

Data matters for marketers not because it helps you decide between a blue or a red CTA. It’s not even because it helps increase clickthroughs or lift conversion numbers. It matters because it helps you craft a compelling story around their product that’s based in fact and a worthwhile user experience.

Over to you: how do you rely on data in marketing? Share with us in the comments!

Email bombardment is a fact of life. That’s why you can’t send random blast emails and expect a response. Your emails get lost and buried in your customers' inboxes.

That’s where triggered lifecycle emails come in. Lifecycle email campaigns work to nab attention and persuade, to talk to people in a way that makes sense to them, with the right message at the right time.

But it can be challenging to achieve all those “right” elements (right person, right message, right time) — and persuade people to follow through. How do you guide your users and customers to achieve the things they signed up to do?

I was surprised to find one of the best analogies for how to accomplish this from the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) — specifically game designer Chris Perkin’s concept of designing an invisible railroad.

Our quest: find out what invisible railroads have to do with building effective lifecycle campaigns. Let’s get to it.

A D&D Crash Course

D&D takes place in a fantasy world where characters embark on adventures and quests. The Dungeon Master (DM) is the game’s organizer, referee, and narrator, all rolled into one — creating the world, the story, and challenges.

Here’s how a character from the TV show Community, Abed, serving as the Dungeon Master, explains the game to his friends and gets it started:

[The game] takes place entirely in our collective imagination. I tell a story and you make choices in the story. Let’s begin: you are all standing on a country road. Legend has it the evil dragon Draconus dwells nearby, guarding a massive pile of treasure. Working as a team, your goal is track down the dragon, kill him, and then claim the treasure as your own…

Even though the DM creates and narrates the story, she doesn’t predetermine every step of the plot. The game is meant to unfold and develop based on how the characters act. “Even in its simplest form, D&D is all about making choices and dealing with the consequences,” explains Chris Perkins, who’s known as a Dungeon Master living legend.

Sometimes the DM forces players into scenarios, with no way for them to respond with agency. This is called railroading. For example, let’s say players stumble into a riot during their journey. A natural reaction is to turn around and get out of there. The DM could railroad players by blocking all escape routes, forcing them to stay and fight. Perkins explains that railroading was a mistake he used to make as a rookie DM: “I created adventures that were very linear and railroad-y and didn’t really offer players even the illusion of choice.”

Railroading can easily happen in lifecycle email campaigns. Instead of designing around and for customer actions, businesses often send email to try to force their recipients down stringent, business-serving paths. But railroading isn’t all bad if you can get beyond the one-sidedness to take into account customer choices and a collective world you and your customers inhabit.

The Invisible Railroad

Perkins shares how to craft an adventure without railroading the players while keeping the overarching story going in his blog post, “The Invisible Railroad”:

[W]hen I plan out the events of a game session, I’m basically laying down an invisible track that I hope my players never see. This track is what guides my campaign toward its intended destination. If all goes perfectly, my players will make decisions and take actions that push the story farther along this track until, finally, I’ve gotten them from Point A to Point B.

The expectation isn’t to have players adhere strictly to the invisible track but to move in the general direction you’ve designed into the story. “The track is for my benefit, not theirs,” as Perkins puts it. Here’s how he illustrates this:

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Figure 1: The good news is that the players have done exactly what you expected them to do. The bad news is that they probably feel railroaded and have no way to affect the outcome of the campaign.

Figure 2: The good news is that the players are making decisions that affect the campaign. The bad news is that you don’t know how to steer them back on track.

Figure 3: The good news is that you’re allowing players to chart their own path while cleverly steering them toward your intended destination. The bad news is that you’re exhausted from all the fun everyone is having.

How does this apply to email campaigns?

In D&D, the players' characters exist in the DM’s world. When there’s obvious railroading, the game simply bends to the DM’s will, which makes for a disappointing game, or encourages players to sabotage the storyline.

In email marketing, it’s impossible to effectively railroad users into actions you want them to take. Otherwise, you’d be seeing 100% conversion rates. As much as we’d like to think this is the way the email world operates, this sequence of orderly events, in which users proceed straight from Point A to Point B to Point C, just doesn’t happen:

In the email marketing context, people can, and do, simply stop playing altogether. They may have signed up and agreed to step into your product’s world but they can end that collective journey, the story you’re trying to tell (and sell), at any time. They don’t come back to your app or service, they don’t read your emails, they don’t open or click. You may be the “Dungeon Master” of your product, but your players are protagonists of many other worlds and their own stories.

That’s why Scenario 2 is what most of us are dealing with. Users go off your rails altogether.

For example: a common point where this derailment happens is right after signup. You’ve designed your first run experience and included onboarding tours and sent helpful tips in onboarding emails — and yet, there they go, never to return. They got distracted by a text message, or another browser tab, or went out to lunch, or embarked on whatever millions of possibilities in their life story that doesn’t involve your product.

Your best case scenario? People go off and decide to do whatever else — whether that’s abandoning your app and forgetting about it or checking out an advanced feature rather than downloading your desktop app like you’d planned. But with responsive lifecycle emails, you can gently shepherd them back on track in their overall product journey.

Signposts to Keep Your Quest on Track

By considering user context and behavior, you can create triggered lifecycle campaigns that work as invisible railroad tracks. This way, you take into account customer choice while also trying to architect those choices to serve your particular story. You’re allowing your users to chart their own path (which they’ll do anyway) while cleverly steering them toward intended destinations and specific experiences in your product.

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Here’s a D&D scenario:

Players are traveling along a path but decide to take a detour to explore a village. As the players get further away from the intended story line, the DM introduces the village shopkeeper, who tells them about a mystical object he heard about in an abandoned castle. The players decide to head back to the path in search of the castle.

The players could have spent more time in the village and gotten embroiled in a random battle, derailing them from a particular campaign. By introducing some intriguing gossip from a villager, the DM offered a gentle nudge to get players back on track. This is what Perkins calls a signpost, a decision point he creates to try to steer the campaign back on track.

You might call them nudges, hints, or clues. No matter how far off track the heroes stray, they will at some point see an arrow-shaped signpost that says, in not so many words, “This way.”

The point is to offer information in a way that authentically piques player interest — and to do so in more than one way.

Your email campaigns are digital signposts. They nudge customers with interesting, persuasive, and helpful information at opportune times to get them back on track in your product.

Email is a powerful engagement and conversion tool when it’s used the right way. It all comes back to your customers and whether you’re providing value to them.

Listening is the most important skill to be a great DM, according to Perkins. “Try to listen more than you talk,” he advises, “because a DM who listens can better understand what the players are trying to get out of the game. You can look for opportunities to take the game in interesting directions.”

The same goes for being a great customer lifecycle master. Your emails aren’t a way to order your users around to do exactly what you want — and the more you approach email marketing that way, the more you’ll fail. You have to understand what your players are trying to get out of your game to lay down an invisible track that helps them make progress towards their goals. Your success is tied to theirs.

What do you think about the Invisible Railroad approach? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Most users go off the rails from our best-laid plans. And if your lifecycle communication falls off a cliff into silence after signup or fails to strike a chord, the result is indefinite derailment, abandonment and churn.

So we try to get users to do what we want them to do, telling them to “do this” and “click that” and “let us know if you need help with the thing you don’t know or care about yet” — and that’s the problem. Our message is wholly based on what we want and assume. This is the crude railroading approach, as we explain in our post on lifecycle campaign lessons from Dungeons & Dragons. “Railroading”, in D&D, refers to the frowned-upon practice of trying to force players into a pre-written plot, when the fun of the game is in collectively creating the story. Many ineffective lifecycle emails take this approach, coming off as annoying and tonedeaf, because they’re not taking real account of the recipient’s needs.

The best case is when you can guide users after they stray because you’ve built an “invisible railroad” — shrewdly subtle tracks created by your lifecycle messages — designed with the explicit expectation that people will and do wander.

By understanding where customers are in their journey and their needs, you’ll know what carrots to employ to get them to follow through. From a cart or page browse abandonment follow-up or prompting new users to set up a reminder for a new habit - the art and craft is in getting all the elements of message, timing, and person right to guide user actions, but without futile dictation or tiresome prescription.

This requires deliberately planning for contingencies and preparing for cases of derailment. The reality is that customers are going to do their own thing. For example, they might neglect to download that desktop app, their visits might taper off before experiencing an “aha moment”, or worse, never come back after a cursory look around. And while many of us think in terms of positive actions we’d like our users to complete, we don’t think quite as hard about how to proactively head off inertia, inactivity, and lack of progression.

Let’s look at an example of a company and the invisible railroad tracks they’ve designed to account for potential inactivity and impedement.

How Blue Apron Plans for Derailment

Meal delivery services are all the rage right now, so you’ve probably heard about Blue Apron. Their goal is to deliver delicious selections every week. Here’s a look at how they shepherd people towards key destination points in the customer journey.

Abandoned cart to finish a task

What’s one of the first things that fail to go according to plan? People start signing up and then leave before checking out:

Here’s an email that Blue Apron sends to bring you back:

At this point, Blue Apron knows that your interest was high enough to start actually signing up. So in this abandoned cart email, they address doubts and concerns that might’ve stopped you in your tracks. The “one more step” reminder helps in case you got sidetracked. There’s a $30 discount off your first box to lower the risk of spending money on an unknown experience as well as reassurances that the recipes are easy to follow and the shipping, free. Plus there’s a quick overview of how the service works to show you how easy it all is.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again

If you abandon your cart and don’t finish checking out or subscribe to Blue Apron’s newsletter, you’ll start receiving offers to convince you to give them a try. What’s interesting is that the calls to action in these emails all lead you to a signup page for the service itself (rather than blog posts or recipes), so their conversion goal is crystal clear: they want you to buy that first box.

The assertive conversion goal here is more straightforward railroading than invisible railroading - but what the emails do well here is mix and match persuasive tactics to go deeper than a repetitive discount offer. These newsletters show off appetizing food photography, evoke seasonal cravings and entice with popular dishes, and pique interest with actual weekly menus for Blue Apron customers. They also address real-life situations and painpoints that lead people to consider Blue Apron — like wanting to eat healthier, spend less on prepared food, or consume sustainably-sourced ingredients.

For instance, the newsletter below highlights how quick and easy their recipes are, framing Blue Apron as a solution for someone short on time to shop and prepare quick, delicious meals. These all-time customer favorites only take 30 minutes to make.

This newsletter speaks to anyone interested in mixing up their meal routine to try cooking new dishes and learn about new ingredients.

Here, they take a popular delivery/take-out favorite that you can make at home while using a lesser-known, seasonal ingredient: the persimmon.

Let the customer choose — while building anticipation

Unlike many digital products and services, engagement for a subscription commerce business like Blue Apron’s doesn’t look like much online. Happy, active customers are continuing to receive and cook their weekly orders offline. With this type of “opt-out subscription business”, it can be tempting to not communicate with your customers for fear of reminding them that you exist (and bring on cancellations) or make it a hassle to hold or skip deliveries.

But Blue Apron also understands that a sense of control and peace of mind also makes customers happy. Sometimes perfectly happy customers just want to skip deliveries because they’re on vacation or have a full refrigerator. So in their email confirmation of delivery, Blue Apron always provides a clear, easy way to manage delivery:

Then if you do skip a week, they send you a notification confirming the skip while still showing you the meals you would have gotten.

Just like a non-skipped delivery week, the notification email still shows you the recipes on deck for the following week to perk up your interest or let you change the menu as needed:

Instead of sending a simple note confirming a customer’s choice to skip a delivery, Blue Apron is laying down some nice tracks here to keep top-of-mind while still providing some value and buttons for you to push to customize your experience. The customer gets what they want while staying in the loop of what comes next.

Don’t fall victim to involuntary churn

In any recurring revenue business, there’s a chance that your customers' payments will fail because their card expired, was cancelled, or was declined for some reason. A chunk of your churn may be “involuntary", with people leaving, not because they stopped valuing you but because of inertia - not getting notified in enough time to care.

When there’s a payment-processing issue, Blue Apron sends a notification one time before cancelling an order and then after an order has been skipped. This is a deliberate attempt to prevent permanent derailment - that the customer didn’t even voluntarily initiate.

Make it right for the customer - early on

After the first delivery, Blue Apron sends a “Thanks for cooking with us” email that solicits feedback and urges you to upload pictures of your meals to social media. Right after your first Blue Apron meals, you haven’t derailed …. just yet. This particular message lays down tracks to prevent future derailment.

All the communication efforts before this point aimed to get people to try out the service. Now, right after this first experience is an opportune time to field feedback to cement a positive relationship with new customers — ensuring that any dissatisfaction doesn’t stem from confusion or misunderstanding — and foster a positive emotional connection (and customer-generated promotional marketing) by encouraging them to show off their culinary handiwork.

Yes, most people will head off the rails of your lifecycle journey plans. But you can deliberatelydesign for key parts of their adventures to make sure any natural derailment isn’t permanent. It helps to understand behavioral psychology to maximize customer engagement and be deliberate with contingency plans.

It’s a lot of work to think through multiple scenarios that people can choose, but it pays off. Instead of feeling like they’re being pushed to buy something, they feel like you’re guiding them to something that will make their experience better. Your invisible track helps users make progress towards their goals in your product, guiding them with more nuance, responsiveness, and an acknowledgement for how humans really make decisions.

Learn more about how the [invisible railroad concept can serve as a useful framework for your lifecycle campaigns]!

Today isn’t just any ordinary Tuesday.

With Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday kicking off the holiday shopping season, nonprofits around the world unite to mark the beginning of the charitable season. This global movement dubbed #GivingTuesday encourages individuals to donate their time, money, and talent to their favorite causes.

While charitable giving did uptick to $390 billion in 2016 (a 2.7% increase from the previous year), nonprofits still struggle to maintain fundraising engagement and drive volunteer participation to their organizations.

Similar to their for-profit counterparts, nonprofit teams thrive when they tell compelling stories to their audiences.Network for Good reports that 55% of nonprofits experienced a positive impact in fundraising because of great storytelling.

Nonprofits like Watsi and DoSomething are taking storytelling to the next level. Through personalized messaging, these organizations boost audience involvement — and we’re proud to help make that happen in Customer.io. Let’s take a look at their journeys…

Watsi Makes Every Single Donor Feel Special

Watsi is on a mission to make universal health coverage available to everyone, especially individuals residing in developing countries. Fueled by technology, the nonprofit bridges the gap between donors and patients. Its crowdfunding platform enables people across the globe to directly fund medical care needs, ranging from prescription eyeglasses to life-changing surgeries, with 100% of their donation.

Watsi has the patients and the right technology. But how do you get someone in a Miami studio apartment to donate to a stranger who lives in a Tanzanian village?

Simply put: it’s the stories.

Watsi shares stories of patients that not only highlight the treatment needed, but also their personalities and lives. For example, while learning about a seven-year-old girl named Dorcas who needs surgery to correct her clubfoot, you’ll also discover that she dreams of being a politician or doctor someday.

The Watsi team began exploring how to connect their audience with these patients into their email marketing campaigns early on. As Grace Garey, cofounder of Watsi, told us, “Through lots of manual experiments, we realized that the key to successful email for Watsi was personalization, segmentation, and relevant storytelling.”

The result is a breath of fresh air to the donor experience, delivered by tailoring messages and relying on smart segmentation to ensure the right stories get the right donors.

One of Watsi’s most effective emails from the early days, back in 2015, was a personalized message from the doctor of a donor’s most recently-funded patient. These customized updates drew donors closer to those they’ve supported, creating a sense of meaningful interaction, and thereby encouraging them to fund more patients.

It’s important to note that Watsi didn’t achieve email marketing success overnight. Their team made a deliberate effort to monitor donors’ actions and A/B test their campaigns. Through experimentation, they found what content resonated with particular donor groups. “Instead of debating internally about our content and approach (e.g. a weekly digest vs. a monthly newsletter), we’re going to assume nothing, fearlessly test everything, and see what works,” writes Grace on the Watsi blog.

Now Watsi’s revelations and learnings around how they communicate with their donors have become part of the organization’s fabric and an expression of their mission. As Director of Marketing Brigitte Bradford says, “making people feel like everyone deserves healthcare and feel connected to every person’s story is part of what we do.”

Interested in helping Watsi for #GivingTuesday?
Click here to fund a patient!

DoSomething Inspires Change, One Text Message at a Time

DoSomething is activating youth in 132 countries to take action in their communities, online and off. The New York-based nonprofit has already supported the participation of more than 5.5 million young adults in causes and campaigns, from helping hurricane victims in Puerto Rico to rallying against bullies on the playground. DoSomething ignites young people’s passions by making it easy for them not just to learn how to volunteer their time and gifts — but to do something to take real steps to improving our society.

DoSomething isn’t mailing pamphlets or relying on email to keep engaging their young audience. As LivePerson reports, more than 70% of Gen Z and Millennials prefer to talk via text message as opposed to a voice call. Instead, the nonprofit uses this generation’s preferred storytelling tool — SMS (or text messaging) — meeting teens on their playing field to nudge them towards action. It’s paying off, as the organization’s CEO Aria Finger told Entrepreneur: “Our most effective communication tool is SMS and we are super real on it.”

DoSomething’s communication style is interactive and conversational, while giving teens the option to personalize which issues matter most to them. When they choose a campaign, DoSomething provides steps on how to take action on the issue on their site and via SMS. Members are encouraged to upload pictures showing how they took action and get chances to win scholarships and swag for creating change.

For instance, the organization teamed up with Chevrolet and model Amanda Steele to launch the Ride & Seek campaign. This initiative empowers young people to wear seat belts and practice safe driving. To sign up, they just text SEEK to 38383. And then the following message pops up on their mobile screens:

Freddie Bologno, DoSomething’s Director of Mobile Messaging explains why the friendly, participatory approach works:

When you think of who you typically text with it’s going to be your friend and family, that’s why DoSomething strives to be authentic as possible when talking with our members. We don’t want to be just another brand in their phone, but a friend they can trust and look to for ways to make an impact.

To manage these SMS social impact campaigns, DoSomething uses Twilio-powered Actions and webhooks in Customer.io. Their team uses behavioral logic combined with segmentation to send texts based on their volunteers’ actions.

“Everything we do is a mixture of product and content. If our campaigns aren’t excellent, with excellent names and titles, and amazing impact, they’re not going to go anywhere. But if we don’t have a good product, if we don’t have a frictionless website, if we don’t have excellent SMS capabilities, then we’re also going to go nowhere,” Aria told the radio show The Business of Giving.

Want to help DoSomething on #GivingTuesday?
Click here to pay it forward!

*A quick note: DoSomething never asks its young members for money. As Freddie explains, "Instead we want to tap into their passion and energy to create change. For [this] Pay It Forward campaign, we’re looking to older people who care about the work we do to donate so that we can get more young people creating the biggest impact.”

From Stories to Donor Action

#GivingTuesday is a time to celebrate and champion community service. Like Black Friday, it’s also a time for emails from organizations to flood your inbox. But there’s a way to stand out in the way you communicate your stories. With personalized messaging, nonprofits hold the key to increasing connections, volunteer participation, and donations.

What’s your experience with sending personalized messages? Share your comments below!

This is a guest post from the team at Airtable. Read more on the Airtable blog

Talking to your customers helps you build better products. It’s the most direct way of figuring out what problems your customers have and how to solve them before inking it in code.

When you’re launching a new product or feature, this feels obvious. By doing user research and talking to your customers, you can test and validate new ideas before actually building them. But in the long run, you don’t create something great by badgering your customers every time you want something from them. You have to anticipate their problems and needs and adapt from there, which means creating a flexible system where you’re always doing user research.

Make Sense of User Research Across Teams

Getting the feedback you need at the right time can be difficult. Companies often make the mistake of reviewing immediate feedback after blasting their users each time they launch a new product or marketing initiative rather than creating systems for the feedback that drips in over time.

The result is a flood of information that’s impossible to navigate. For a single product, the marketing team is busy sending surveys and campaigns. The product team sets up NPS surveys, schnedules user interviews, and pores over analytics tools. Meanwhile, customer support is responding to the constant influx of tickets, tweets, and in-app messages.

Everybody is collecting information, while very little of the research and insights are actually studied company-wide.

The trick is to set up a collaborative workflow for UX research, so you can pull in feedback at any time and spread that information across teams. If you can do that, you don’t need a big research team or an outside agency to tell you what your users are thinking. You build a constant conversation with them.

Let’s talk about how you can create a self-replenishing system for gathering user insights by automating event-triggered NPS emails, finding a time to talk to your customers, and getting the right information to the right people on your team.

1. Create a “Pull” System for Feedback with NPS

The first step is to create an ongoing “pull” system that helps source users for you to talk to automatically. The best way to do that is by tapping into a method you’re already using for collecting customer feedback, like NPS surveys.

An NPS survey asks a user to provide a rating on a scale of 1-10, followed up with a short explanation for the score. The simplicity of the survey means that you can send them out to your customers at a steady cadence. That’s your starting point for building an automated UX workflow.

Suppose that you want to interview users who are on a paid plan and who either love or hate your product. You can create an event-triggered campaign that automatically sends customers who upgraded to a paid account an NPS survey seven (or however many) days later. Here’s how you’d set up that segment in Customer.io:

This is where the quantitative aspect of NPS becomes really helpful. Say you want to focus user research on customers who feel very strongly about your product. You can create an event-triggered email that fires off every time a customer enters one of two segments:

• Promoters (NPS > 8):
• Detractors (NPS <4):
  

trigger for user research invite campaign

Each time a customer fills out your NPS survey with a score lower than four or higher than eight, they get an email that looks like this:

This helps you build an ongoing base of users that you can reach out to do user research at any time.

2. Automatically Schedule User Interviews

Once you have a steady stream of users you can talk to at the top of the funnel, the next step (and often most difficult one) is actually getting them on a video or phone call. By automatically creating and scheduling call sessions, you can carve out more time that you can use to talk to more people and learn faster.

At Segment, an analytics API and data platform, the team uses Customer.io to put scheduling research interviews automatically. For every user who has opted into UX research, they create a custom segment in Customer.io:

The whole point of growing a pool of users for your research initiatives is not only to give you the flexibility to find people to talk but also to find people different dimensions, from plan-type to company role. For instance, if you’re building out a new feature limited to your enterprise product, you’ll want to talk to customers on the enterprise plan. By segmenting this pool further — by plan, for example — you can trigger more personalized messages.

The Segment team also sends Calendly links in their invitations, allowing them to schedule user sessions via video call or in-person. (Calendly is a meeting scheduling tool that allows you to set aside blocks of time in your calendar showing your availability. Users can click on the invite, pick an open slot on your calendar, and choose a time that fits their schedules.)

You could also use Zapier to send data about the pool of people who have opted into user research from Customer.io into Airtable to create helpful views of everyone who has opted in to your user research program:

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In just a couple steps, automation can bring you closer to your users. It eliminates the grunt work of gathering information for review, scheduling, and logistics, freeing up your time to actually talk to people.

3. Slice and Dice the Results

When you finish your user research sessions, the final step is to make sure that each interview is categorized, processed for insights, and filed away somewhere that’s easily accessible to everyone on your team. By baking this process into your feedback loop, you can ensure that it constantly happens on a real-time basis.

The more you can automate your firehose of UX research, the faster you’re able to process data and metadata. Not only will you be able to conduct UX research faster, but also accelerate the pace that you learn from it.

First, automatically email interviewers a form before each study begins. Provide a field where they can quickly take down notes as well as provide quantitative answers.

Each interview is categorized as it enters your base, which makes it very easy to slice and dice the results in a way that makes sense for your entire team.

That was precisely how Tomer Sharon, VP of Research at WeWork, put together his Polaris base for User Research. Polaris is an internal database that aggregates user research from 110 locations around the world. Using Airtable to collect user insights from across the company helps everyone from the marketing to product to customer support become more user-focused.

WeWork’s Polaris UX Research Base in Airtable.
Click image for larger view. Get the template here.

In the view above, you can see that each “nugget,” or observation links to a particular point in a WeWork customer’s journey — from “pre-membership” to “graduation.” That makes it really easy for the WeWork team to find specific nuggets of user insight based on what they’re working on.

In the early stages, you don’t need to create an elaborate system to help democratize your research insights. A bi-weekly or monthly email to the team is perfectly fine. The important thing is to make sure that the research you’ve done spreads across the team, where it can be deployed to maximum effect. Since you’ve already done the work of indexing your user feedback, it’s easy to whip up an automated email to your team with relevant research findings.

Click image for larger view

In the image above, we’ve created a view with a filter showing all user research conducted within the last month. User research is grouped according to their User Experience rating, from low to high.

Armed with the information in this view, you can pull out the core research themes each month, and send them to the team in an email. Team members can get the information they need quickly, and dive into the research database to learn more.

Spread Research Across Your Team

If you’re building a software product, you have a limited amount of manpower and limited capacity to run user research. That’s why it’s so important that you make the research you do easily accessible across your team.

Today, software tools help product managers and researchers organize research data while automating tedious tasks like sending emails and calendar invites. Setting up a system to categorize the results of your research allows you to build knowledge around your users that can be passed across your team. You create workflows that help you learn more about your users, better understand your collected user insights, and ultimately build better products for your users.

How does your team gather and organize UX research? Share your experiences in the comments below!

Too often, companies blanket their lists with emails that treat everyone like a prospect who needs education, or someone unaware of the problems their product solves.

They send email after email, packed with great content and stories, and don’t get deals to close.

They forget that someone who’s aware of your product, its features, and how much it costs requires a different kind of messaging—they don’t need education, they need to be sold to.

OK — Who’s Ready to Buy?

It’s almost ironic that so many email marketers struggle with the penultimate phase of the lifecycle—just as people are actually ready to buy.

Eugene Schwartz’s “Five Levels of Awareness” model helps explain why and also demonstrates the way out. Schwartz’s model places each new prospect on a spectrum of awareness. People exist on different parts of the spectrum depending on how aware they are of your brand and product:

You might have one email flow that works really well at moving people from being problem aware to being product aware. This means they start out not knowing much about the problem and move towards knowing that your product exists.

Or your email flow might move them from being solution aware to being product aware. You show them how you’re different from the competition and move towards explaining how your product features solve their problems better.

But here’s the thing: the fact that people know they have a problem and that you have a product isn’t enough to get them to buy. To do that, Schwartz’s model suggests moving people one more step to become “most aware.” Meaning, they understand how your product specifically works for them.

Creating your Segment

You’re going to want to focus most on closing the deal with your most aware, product aware, and solution aware prospects.

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These people have exhibited greater buying intent than others. While they have different levels of familiarity with your product, they’ve all shown some kind of interest in buying a solution to their problem — now that they know a solution is available.

Here are the characteristics of users you’ll want to target as you close the deal:

• Most Aware Users
  • Open all your emails
  • Click through a high % of your links
  • Ask your sales teams lots of good questions
  • Leave comments on your blog and social media
  • Possibly bought from you before
• Product Aware Users
  • Found you when they clicked a Facebook ad
  • Visit the pricing page on your website
  • Sign up for your email list, a free trial, or a product demo
• Solution Aware Users
  • Visit multiple blog posts
  • Visit product features page
  • Watch product videos
  • Read customer testimonials and product FAQs

Emails that Close the Deal

Once you’ve identified and segmented your users, you need to start sending them relevant emails to move them along and close the deal. Don’t think this will be just one or two emails though. Your campaign should have at least six to eight emails queued up.

Here are some of the email styles that you can use. They’re all powerful and act as the push users need to get over the last hump and buy.

Annual Billing Offer

Sometimes, what stops people from buying is the price. They know it’s a solid product but feel it’s out of their price range. Patrick McKenzie at Stripe came up with the email below while consulting for WP Engine.

A year of WP Engine typically cost $2,400. The solution was a discount that gave people the option to pre-pay for the year and save $200 or two months free. The email campaign explained the benefits and included a link for people to make the switch.

This is what Rand at Moz called “a work of marketing art.” Every part of the email from the subject line to the email itself makes for a positive user experience.

Time-bound Offer

A lot of times users are ready to buy but take their time doing so. One way to get them to act quicker is to send time sensitive offers. In the Creative Market example below, they offered people deep discounts if they bought before the deadline. The combination of the discount and the fear of missing out on a limited-time offer are enough to get people to buy.

On top of the direct copy, the call-to-action acts like a lead in to get people to act. Instead of saying something like, “Buy Now,” it caters to their curiosity. Saving 97% on a bundle of products is intriguing, but finding out what’s included is even more tempting.

Multiple Options

Users want to feel as though they’re getting the best possible offer for your product. Shea Moisture took a creative approach with the campaign email below and gave users the chance to choose how much they save when they buy. Even though this email was sent to a large group of users, it offers a level of personalization.

The sense of urgency also adds to the need to act immediately. The short three-day window ensures that product aware users feel comfortable taking that next step.

Discounts

People who fit into the product aware category are interested in price. So what better way to win them over than to draw their attention to your savings. Use a large, centered image of your discount, so that it’s the first thing they’re drawn to when they open your email. Next, add a clear call-to-action that stands out, making it obvious on what they have to do next.

Another approach is to incorporate gifs into your design to get users to stay in the email longer. This example from Your Karma leads with the brand’s main selling point, its premium features. Then they call out the savings users get when they sign up. It’s like saying, “Hey, we have the best features. You can enjoy them too and save big if you act now.”

Storytelling

People resist writing long emails a lot, but they can be highly effective. Joanna Wiebe at Copyhackers found that simply writing longer emails helped boost Wistia’s onboarding conversion rate by 3.5x. While the Wistia team wasn’t sure about changing up their style so dramatically, the results spoke for themselves.

Longer emails work because they give you a chance to get more than just a glancing impression from your reader. If you tell the story in the right way, you can transfer a lot of information in a very short amount of time and bring someone from barely being solution-aware to being ready to buy in minutes.

Now It’s Your Turn

Building an email campaign that converts shoppers to customers starts with knowing how aware they are of what you do. Even though they’re ready to buy, the added segmentation means your campaigns are even more targeted and move people towards buying something.

Then experiment with different types of emails. Remember, one email isn’t going to do it. Set up two or three emails per awareness segment, so you have a cohesive campaign. This way, you show people you understand what they desire and have the right solution tailored to their needs.

How do you segment your users? What types of emails close deals for your team? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Customers desire better promotions. Your generic offer—that only satisfies half their needs—isn’t compelling enough.

That’s a daunting hurdle to overcome as a SaaS business. You have a diverse group of users with varying needs, from the solopreneur to the Fortune 500 enterprise.

You need a robust solution that can send customized promotional emails. Then, your tailored 15% product discounts won’t get skipped over in users’ inboxes.

Dynamic segmentation is the tool you’re so anxiously seeking. It helps you deliver promotional emails that adjust to your users’ behaviors. You can send unique offers to relevant audiences to earn higher conversions.

By investing in dynamic segmentation, customers receive a suitable deal, and your SaaS team moves another valued user down the sales funnel.

Target Relevant Customers

Nowadays, customers place high expectations on brand promotions. They understand that companies are competing for their hard-earned cash. Nearly 80% of consumers switch brands because of an attractive promotion.

For your team, this realization can be quite surprising (or maybe even intimidating). How can you fairly spar with your competitor when the customer holds all the power?

Well, you possess a competitive advantage—dynamic segmentation.

Currently, some marketers use static segments that group subscribers by a single trait, like Facebook leads or webinar registrants. So everyone tied to the list receives the same promotional email, despite their unique needs and interests.

But with dynamic segmentation, you can send relevant messages that match your SaaS users’ specific attributes and behaviors. This personalization ensures that your target audience receives promotional emails tailored to them, not everyone on your mailing list. Bryan Johnston, a contributing writer at Spokal, agrees:

Lists created with dynamic segmentation can be used for marketing purposes, lead nurturing, and retention. And it requires no extra input from your prospects or customers, adapting with them over time as their behaviour and interests change.

Segments will vary based on your promotion. Some of your deals may benefit trial users who signed up within the last month. Or your team could focus on loyal fans who’ve enrolled in your yearly subscription plan twice.

With Customer.io, your team can replicate this technique right now. Create segments from a combination of attributes, actions, events, frequency, and times. Here’s a segment targeting trial users in Germany who haven’t accessed their accounts in the past 15 days.

Agorapulse implements a similar strategy. Customers sticking with the platform for 3 months receive a 25% off coupon on their next month’s subscription (if they leave a review).

Dynamic segmentation opens the door to personalizing the customer experience. Subscribers will be more inclined to pay attention to your offer and click the link.

Select the Right Timing

Bombarded with email from friends, family, and co-workers, the last thing you think a customer would want is a message from your business. In fact, they do. The Data & Marketing Association reports that “almost 50% of consumers prefer to hear weekly from companies sending promotional emails.”

It’s still important to not overwhelm your subscribers. Sending too many promotional emails can result in habituation. That happens when customers get so used to your actions that they will eventually ignore them.

To prevent subscribers from tuning out your promotions, you want to develop the right timing in your email delivery. Consider sending messages on the days where you get the best open rates and timing your promotion to the natural end of something, like the end of the week.

However, the timing of these promotions focuses on your SaaS’s readiness, not the customer.

Instead, you want to take advantage of dynamic segmentation. That way you can send triggered campaigns that correlate to the timing of your users’ behaviors.

Once subscribers meet the parameters of your predefined segment, only then will they receive your desired message. This strategy gives you the flexibility to automate your promotional email campaigns—saving your team time to do other important tasks.

In the example below, subscribers who fit the ‘Reluctant Trial Users in Germany’ segment will enter this workflow and instantly receive the ‘Promotion #1’ email. After a four-day delay, the same subscribers will receive the ‘Promotion #2’ email (only if they satisfy a specific condition I’ve added).

Aligning your customers’ characteristics and habits with your promotions is key to ensuring you don’t send a promotional email too soon or too late. The perfect timing will drive users to action.

Give Context to Your Promotion

Customers are bypassing your one-size-fits-all promotions. And they don’t mind weighing your offer against a few of your competitors.

Dynamic segmentation is powerful for breaking through these barriers to send relevant promotional emails to your SaaS audience. And with the right timing, your promotion becomes a magnet for users to jump on now, rather than later.

We want your thoughts! What’s your experience with promotional emails? Share your comments below.