#354: Customer Marketing Deep Dive

#354 | Sue (Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Monarch Money), Jonathan (VP of Marketing, Seamless.AI), and Naomi (Senior Product Marketing Manager, Customer.io) join Dan for a live Exit Five session on customer marketing. Sue breaks down how Monarch discovered that the best time to promote their referral program was during trial and the data behind a 64% lift in referral shares and half a million dollars in incremental ARR. Jonathan shares how Seamless.AI stopped treating customer engagement like a campaign and built a full 365-day behavioral program, including an AI chatbot that deflected 55% of support tickets and live trainings that flattened their churn curve. Then Naomi walks through how she uses plain-text emails asking for replies to close the feedback loop on new features and shape the product roadmap.

Timestamps

• (00:00 ) - - Intro
  
• (07:15 ) - - Sue: Why the best time to promote a referral program is during trial, not after
  
• (10:15 ) - - The results: 64% lift in referral shares and $500K in incremental ARR
  
• (17:15 ) - - Sue's background: 16 years in lifecycle marketing from online dating to Calm to Monarch
  
• (20:15 ) - - Jonathan: Stopping treating customer engagement like a campaign
  
• (26:15 ) - - Building a 365-day behavioral multi-channel customer engagement program
  
• (27:15 ) - - The AI chatbot that deflected 55% of support tickets
  
• (35:20 ) - - Live customer training 4x a week and how it flattened the churn curve
  
• (40:20 ) - - Growth plays for NRR: marketing to users inside existing accounts
  
• (42:20 ) - - Jonathan's results: 24% decrease in cancellations year over year
  
• (43:20 ) - - Naomi: Using lifecycle marketing to close the product feedback loop
  
• (49:20 ) - - The MCP server onboarding flow and why she asks for replies instead of clicks
  
• (56:20 ) - - Using beta email campaigns to shape the product roadmap
  
• (59:20 ) - - Live Q&A

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Dave [0:00:01]: You're listening to The Dave Gerhardt Show.

Dan [0:00:17]: Alright.

Dan [0:00:17]: Welcome everybody.

Dan [0:00:18]: Let's see.

Dan [0:00:19]: Let's look at the chat.

Dan [0:00:20]: Let's look at the the numbers.

Dan [0:00:22]: Okay.

Dan [0:00:23]: People are here.

Dan [0:00:23]: People are joining.

Dan [0:00:24]: Welcome everyone.

Dan [0:00:25]: If you could just chat in first of all, let me know, let's just do our first technical sound check here, make sure you can hear me.

Dan [0:00:31]: And then for people that are joining, we're gonna get started here, you still have technically thirty seconds something like that before top of the hour, but If you're here, you're getting ready?

Dan [0:00:41]: It's Friday, could you chat in and tell me your win of the week?

Dan [0:00:46]: I'd love to hear what you accomplished this week it's Friday.

Dan [0:00:50]: My win

Jonathan [0:00:52]: of the week, we've been doing a

Dan [0:00:54]: lot of interviewing for new roles I think we're closing in on some candidates.

Dan [0:00:56]: That feels really good.

Dan [0:00:58]: Hiring always feels great.

Dan [0:00:59]: I haven't any shots yet Can anyone hear me because Just confirm that you can hear me?

Dan [0:01:04]: I wanna make sure I'm not talking to myself here.

Dan [0:01:06]: Alright.

Dan [0:01:07]: Thanks Jada.

Dan [0:01:08]: Appreciate it.

Dan [0:01:09]: It's up Molly, Richard.

Dan [0:01:12]: Everyone's just, like, thinking about their win of the week here.

Dan [0:01:16]: I hope.

Dan [0:01:16]: Doesn't have to be very long.

Dan [0:01:18]: Could be an easy one.

Dan [0:01:18]: Think of a quick win of the week.

Dan [0:01:20]: Did you launch something this week?

Dan [0:01:22]: Did you launch some content and new product feature?

Dan [0:01:25]: Do you get a promotion or raise?

Dan [0:01:27]: Do you have a good performance interview?

Dan [0:01:28]: Someone tell me someone excited to happen in your life this week while I have a sip copy and get my brain online here?

Dan [0:01:33]: No.

Dan [0:01:34]: I make my own coffee, Jonathan.

Dan [0:01:35]: Molly, I have a bell pepper growing in my garden.

Dan [0:01:38]: That's exciting.

Dan [0:01:39]: What?

Dan [0:01:41]: I hope it's delicious.

Dan [0:01:41]: I hope you...

Dan [0:01:42]: I don't know if if it means you're ready to eat it yet or how you'll prepare it, but that's awesome.

Dan [0:01:46]: Gardening is so hard.

Dan [0:01:47]: I've tried it many times.

Dan [0:01:49]: It is actually harder than it looks.

Dan [0:01:50]: Do you think you just plant some seeds and it grows and it's not how it happens.

Dan [0:01:54]: Jada said, not a winner in the week, but shows great rapport it's a client of mine.

Dan [0:01:58]: Got to see a video of her being ta for a training certificate I had to read Ta five times.

Dan [0:02:04]: Ta like a Taser gun.

Dan [0:02:05]: Is that what you're saying?

Dan [0:02:06]: Wow.

Dan [0:02:08]: That's intense.

Dan [0:02:08]: Christy company turned two today.

Dan [0:02:11]: Congratulations, Christy.

Dan [0:02:12]: That's exciting.

Dan [0:02:13]: What kind of company tell us about your business a little bit.

Dan [0:02:17]: Gardening is very hard.

Dan [0:02:18]: Yeah.

Dan [0:02:18]: I'm struggling with it.

Dan [0:02:19]: Alright.

Dan [0:02:20]: It's been a minute.

Dan [0:02:20]: You didn't come here me revamp about gardening.

Dan [0:02:23]: Let's get rolling here.

Dan [0:02:24]: Allison, I'm gonna have you share that slide for us.

Dan [0:02:27]: Before we get into today's session about customer engagement.

Dan [0:02:30]: First of all I have three great panel here that they're gonna join and each present some very specific each is bringing, we spent thirty minutes together earlier this week, and each is bringing stats.

Dan [0:02:40]: Examples, visuals they're bringing all the stuff that you wanna see about what these companies are doing in terms of customer engagement in terms of turning their customers into a superpower for their business.

Dan [0:02:49]: But before we get into that, I wanna tell you a little bit about our friends at customer I.

Dan [0:02:53]: They are a sponsor for today's session.

Dan [0:02:56]: They help marketers turn first party data into engaging customer experiences across email, Sms, and push, based built for marketers who actually care about the craft, not just blasting the same message to everyone on the list on a Tuesday morning, guilty see of doing that in my past life.

Dan [0:03:11]: For sure.

Dan [0:03:11]: Because the best marketers, like, all of you who showed up today, are trying to figure out customer engagement for growth and you know that not lot people are talking about how to engage your customers for growth.

Dan [0:03:20]: They're not just handling customers off to Cs or moving on, they're treating it like a real channel.

Dan [0:03:26]: Customer helps you do just that by unifying your data, messaging and Ai into one platform.

Dan [0:03:32]: So every interaction with your customers is stronger and more relevant than last, They also surveyed seven hundred fifty marketers, product managers, growth leaders and engineers and put together this great resource for all of you, but how their teams are engaging with customers right now.

Dan [0:03:46]: It's the best way to engage with customers in twenty twenty sixty.

Dan [0:03:49]: Put all that together and report for you.

Dan [0:03:50]: It's linked here.

Dan [0:03:51]: I don't know where it is in here.

Dan [0:03:53]: It's like somewhere in here.

Dan [0:03:54]: You'll look for it.

Dan [0:03:54]: You'll find it.

Dan [0:03:55]: But if you don't find it, their team is gonna send it to after, it's a great report.

Dan [0:03:59]: You should check that out.

Dan [0:03:59]: And without any further ado, we will jump to our first presenter, Sue is gonna join.

Dan [0:04:06]: On the sage here stu from Monarch, and she's gonna tell you a little about a referral program, and some surprising data that she got from running a test fairly recently.

Dan [0:04:15]: So Sue, welcome to Az five Live Mcs Savvy.

Sue [0:04:18]: Hi dan.

Sue [0:04:18]: Thanks for having me.

Sue [0:04:19]: So the example today that I'm gonna share is for our referral program.

Sue [0:04:25]: We revamped their referral program from a credit based system where we give you Monarch money credits.

Sue [0:04:31]: To a gift card system.

Sue [0:04:33]: So we were trying to figure out the optimal time to promote our referral program.

Sue [0:04:38]: And initially, I think most people would think, like, hey, someone should be a paid subscriber and have been using the product a while to be committed enough to want to refer another friend.

Sue [0:04:52]: We were wrong.

Sue [0:04:53]: We had our data partners do an analysis of when people refer the most and shockingly, it happens during trial, especially the first day of them starting their trial.

Sue [0:05:06]: So I was skeptical, but I went ahead and tested an in that message which I'll share, We built this mobile in that message to display to people who have just started a trial and data also showed us that they need to have at least one financial account connected.

Sue [0:05:24]: Again, just a reminder mono money as a financial ag app.

Sue [0:05:28]: So if someone has at least one account connected, and they've started the trial, it's a good signal that they're ready to refer someone.

Sue [0:05:35]: And how we built this flow.

Sue [0:05:37]: And here's Customer.io.

Sue [0:05:39]: Hopefully everyone can see this But this is how I built this in Customer.io, we have every event streaming into Customer.io segment.

Sue [0:05:48]: So with the trigger of this workflow that I built was a free trial started trigger.

Sue [0:05:53]: And the next step you see, there's a wait until condition.

Sue [0:05:58]: I think this is pretty cool.

Sue [0:05:59]: I've been doing an email for about sixteen years and I really haven't seen a filter like this, but it says wait until...

Sue [0:06:05]: And it basically listens, for a credential sync to happen.

Sue [0:06:10]: So users will stay in this state after a free trial starts until they do this if they don't, they don't move along.

Sue [0:06:17]: And we check to see make sure that they haven't shared a referral already, and then we go back.

Sue [0:06:23]: To showing this in that message.

Dan [0:06:26]: So someone signs up her trial Sue of Monarch.

Dan [0:06:28]: It used to be time based.

Dan [0:06:30]: Right?

Dan [0:06:31]: And now it's based on this condition it's going until they hit the condition.

Dan [0:06:33]: Is that how it...

Dan [0:06:34]: One of the changes?

Sue [0:06:36]: No.

Sue [0:06:36]: We actually had no referral program during your trial.

Sue [0:06:39]: We didn't wanna touch.

Dan [0:06:40]: It came from nothing.

Dan [0:06:40]: Yep.

Dan [0:06:41]: Yeah.

Dan [0:06:41]: And so the Mission was, like, can we get some of these people that are trying our product or or your first Obviously was, this isn't gonna work because you need an nah aha moment people like did customer in love to find a feature to actually refer someone, but what found was this offer, and knew was the right after they sign for a trial to, like, you know, use more.

Dan [0:06:59]: I offered to share it with a friend.

Dan [0:07:01]: They had...

Dan [0:07:01]: What was the increase in lift and referrals that you got?

Sue [0:07:05]: So we took a very scientific approach to all of our experiments.

Sue [0:07:08]: We had to write a hypothesis.

Sue [0:07:09]: We had to do a daisy analysis on how long this would take.

Sue [0:07:14]: So I estimated a twenty percent lift.

Sue [0:07:16]: The actual was a sixty four percent increase.

Sue [0:07:19]: In referrals shared during trial, and that's not all we look at.

Sue [0:07:23]: We look at the downstream effects, and the downstream effect was we had a fifty percent increase in paid subscribers via a referral.

Dan [0:07:31]: Wow.

Dan [0:07:31]: And so this is mobile, but but one thing who you were talking about was, like, I think you had this discovery after...

Dan [0:07:37]: Was it after this initial test mobile that this might work on desktop as well.

Sue [0:07:41]: Yeah.

Sue [0:07:41]: So this was a twofold.

Sue [0:07:42]: So phase one of this was just introducing referrals to our trial audience which Yeah.

Sue [0:07:47]: Shockingly it worked, so we continue.

Sue [0:07:50]: And then we always sure to optimize what we're running.

Sue [0:07:53]: So I think I was just thinking about this on a weekend as we do, and it just I had an Aha moment myself, like, wait.

Sue [0:08:02]: I'm showing this on mobile, except Yeah.

Sue [0:08:04]: Most of our free trial traffic is coming from web because now we'll point of push people to a strike payment instead of Apple and Google, so we don't have to pay the Apple and Google tax.

Sue [0:08:13]: When I looked at the actual mix, it was eighty percent of our your traffic is starting their free trial starts on a desktop app.

Sue [0:08:22]: So we decided to expand this in that message not just on mobile, but also on web.

Sue [0:08:32]: And this is the Customerio screen that I use.

Sue [0:08:34]: Choose your destination.

Sue [0:08:36]: They make it really simple.

Sue [0:08:38]: You just choose your platform web, ios Android, Obviously, our devs had to connect all of this.

Sue [0:08:42]: And specify the page that you wanted to show on.

Jonathan [0:08:46]: Mh.

Sue [0:08:47]: And so we did it.

Sue [0:08:49]: Boom.

Dan [0:08:50]: And That's the desktop version.

Dan [0:08:51]: Yeah.

Sue [0:08:52]: This is the desktop version of the in app message or a pop up, whatever you wanna call it.

Sue [0:08:56]: And with this, we had some pretty pretty incredible results from this?

Sue [0:09:02]: Ultimately, we wanted to look at how many referral...

Sue [0:09:06]: Like, was there a percentage lift in the referral shared?

Sue [0:09:08]: As well as downstream effects on Ar and incremental subscribers.

Sue [0:09:12]: So what we found here was there was a sixteen percent relative lift in referral shared, and that ultimately led to Yeah.

Sue [0:09:24]: It was a twenty percent increase in referrals redeemed and that equated.

Sue [0:09:30]: And another interesting thing that we found was that users who actually send a referral during trial have a higher likelihood to convert from trial to paid.

Sue [0:09:41]: That will, a secondary metric that we were not expecting.

Sue [0:09:45]: And once get all the calculations there on the incremental lift, it equated to about a half a million Arr lift.

Sue [0:09:52]: Not expecting that at all, So that was a big one for us.

Dan [0:09:57]: That's pretty incredible...

Dan [0:09:57]: You think about, like, this psychology though Like, okay.

Dan [0:10:00]: If I'm going to tell someone I know about this app, and I'm gonna get some incentive to do it.

Dan [0:10:05]: Obviously it's why I'm gonna start by doing it.

Dan [0:10:07]: But if I'm gonna, like, make that commit...

Dan [0:10:09]: Like I'm gonna show someone else was like, hey, You should use this too.

Dan [0:10:12]: Like, it makes sense.

Dan [0:10:13]: You might be a little bit more ten towards, like, I'm gonna use this for or I'm gonna be more committed to trying out this app and making it work, which is awesome.

Dan [0:10:19]: Okay.

Dan [0:10:20]: We got a question from Jacob, Jacob capo?

Dan [0:10:22]: I'm sorry from this mispronouncing your name.

Dan [0:10:24]: Was this slip due to the change from credits to gift cards, and what made your...

Dan [0:10:27]: The question credits in the first place?

Dan [0:10:29]: Mh.

Dan [0:10:30]: What made you question?

Dan [0:10:32]: Excuse me the credits in the first place?

Dan [0:10:33]: Was it a credits or was it more of a placement of when the referrals came up.

Sue [0:10:37]: It was literally credits.

Sue [0:10:38]: It was Monarch credit, so you can use it toward your next Monarch subscription.

Sue [0:10:42]: We did not feel that it was strong enough our referral channel wasn't pulling...

Sue [0:10:46]: I like to think of referral being the top free acquisition sources.

Sue [0:10:50]: It was landing there.

Sue [0:10:52]: So we had a huge change in the growth team.

Sue [0:10:56]: We had a new Cg come in and just shake up the program.

Sue [0:11:00]: The lift wasn't due to this change because we never tested it against the trial audience.

Sue [0:11:04]: We never pushed referrals to our trial on.

Sue [0:11:07]: Yeah.

Sue [0:11:07]: So the lift was purely just taking this moment in time that we knew from data was a good time to promote this and shooting it off.

Sue [0:11:17]: We actually honestly to be clear, we didn't see that huge of a lift when we went from a credit system to a gift card system.

Sue [0:11:26]: We thought we had a hypothesis that people would prefer a gift card where they can use it for whatever versus Monarch credit, but that actually didn't really lift referrals.

Sue [0:11:37]: What is helping our referral program right now is the way we're marketing it.

Dan [0:11:41]: Okay.

Dan [0:11:41]: Other questions if people have other questions.

Dan [0:11:43]: I I should've said this at the top, but feel free to jumping on the chat panel.

Dan [0:11:46]: I'll check the q and a panel.

Sue [0:11:49]: I see Jill ask what type of tools do you track for your metrics and measurements.

Sue [0:11:53]: Ka, definitely, but that feeds directly into amplitude.

Sue [0:11:57]: I'm a big amplitude fan girl.

Sue [0:11:59]: So for us, on the marketer side, I build funnels that say, hey, this in that message was delivered, how many people share a referral, which we have as an event within seven days.

Sue [0:12:10]: Seven day window is what we like to look at.

Sue [0:12:12]: And on the data side, they use Stat sig to do all the in...

Sue [0:12:18]: Statistical analysis.

Sue [0:12:19]: With and every...

Sue [0:12:20]: Like, we have to wait for statistical significance.

Sue [0:12:24]: So everything is squeaky clean on the data front.

Dan [0:12:29]: So tell us little about about your background?

Dan [0:12:30]: How how'd you get into this?

Dan [0:12:31]: How do you end up doing growth at Monarch?

Sue [0:12:33]: Oh my gosh.

Sue [0:12:33]: So I've been doing growth retention, engagement, email marketing work for the past sixteen, seventeen years.

Sue [0:12:40]: Yes.

Sue [0:12:41]: So I've been doing this.

Dan [0:12:43]: Yeah.

Dan [0:12:43]: Where else have you done up beyond Rack.

Sue [0:12:46]: So my expertise is in subscription e com.

Sue [0:12:48]: Right.

Sue [0:12:49]: My first job.

Sue [0:12:50]: Oh, my goodness.

Sue [0:12:51]: I'm gonna date myself here, but my first job in this department was in online dating, and this was pre pre app online dating.

Sue [0:12:59]: So a website like, e

Dan [0:13:02]: update yourself.

Dan [0:13:02]: I don't know.

Dan [0:13:03]: I know.

Sue [0:13:05]: Just yeah.

Sue [0:13:06]: Dating the era of V, but I don't know if anyone knows the website j dates?

Dan [0:13:12]: Yes.

Dan [0:13:12]: Yes.

Dan [0:13:13]: Date.

Dan [0:13:13]: I like so...

Dan [0:13:14]: Yeah.

Dan [0:13:15]: I even either on Jj date, but my wife was jewish.

Dan [0:13:17]: So...

Dan [0:13:17]: Yes.

Dan [0:13:17]: I give day date.

Dan [0:13:18]: Yeah.

Sue [0:13:19]: One know someone who met on Jade date was our catch phrase there.

Dan [0:13:22]: Like that.

Sue [0:13:23]: Yeah.

Sue [0:13:23]: But they

Dan [0:13:24]: asked.

Dan [0:13:24]: Just said a heart emojis.

Dan [0:13:25]: I don't know who is this showed up on our screen.

Dan [0:13:27]: Someone's sent in the heart emojis to us?

Dan [0:13:29]: Amazing that But...

Dan [0:13:30]: Okay.

Dan [0:13:31]: So you started in e commerce and then also online dating apps.

Dan [0:13:34]: What was your first role there?

Dan [0:13:35]: What what were you doing for them?

Sue [0:13:37]: I was an email operations coordinator.

Sue [0:13:40]: So Yeah that's where I learned all the technical.

Sue [0:13:43]: By the way, just so you guys know.

Sue [0:13:45]: I'm a team of one at Monarch money and life cycle.

Sue [0:13:48]: So I'm the one that builds all these workflows.

Sue [0:13:51]: I'm the one that directly works with the data partners.

Sue [0:13:53]: My first job is where I got most of that experience.

Sue [0:13:56]: I was a technical coordinator, so they had me build all the segments, worked with all the engineers, and This is why startups love me because I can build the things.

Sue [0:14:05]: I can do the strategy.

Sue [0:14:06]: I can do the data.

Sue [0:14:08]: Yeah.

Sue [0:14:08]: Never did, I think being a coordinator at Jade date with lend me on a sixteen seventeen year trajectory of this role.

Sue [0:14:16]: But I love it.

Sue [0:14:17]: Before Monarch money, I was doing the same thing at Calm, like calm down, the calm down, Like, calm app, meditation and stuff.

Dan [0:14:26]: Yeah.

Dan [0:14:26]: Yeah.

Dan [0:14:26]: I used to use that for admin minute.

Dan [0:14:28]: But, okay.

Dan [0:14:29]: You're right now.

Dan [0:14:29]: So you You have a ton of non B2b background and in marketing, which is really interesting because we bring a lot of people with B marketing background to us.

Dan [0:14:36]: And so this type of stuff, I think when a lot of Bd markers or some group obviously who here they want to know more about, especially, like, on the push and the Sms and email side.

Dan [0:14:46]: So it's really awesome to hear a little bit about your background and some of your experience there.

Sue [0:14:51]: Awesome.

Sue [0:14:51]: Thank you, Dan.

Dan [0:14:53]: Cool.

Dan [0:14:53]: Alright.

Dan [0:14:53]: There's no further questions for Sue.

Dan [0:14:54]: As of now.

Dan [0:14:55]: If you do have a question, Sue is gonna be backstage.

Dan [0:14:57]: He will answer your questions in chat.

Dan [0:14:58]: I believe Jonathan is gonna go next.

Dan [0:15:00]: And John is gonna talk about a couple cool things.

Dan [0:15:02]: Johnson, we talked Wednesday, you shared a very specific example and a very specific sort of like, couple of different sets of stats and things you wanted to show and it's very clear cut.

Dan [0:15:11]: And then this morning Jonathan sent us, like, five slides with, like, ten different charts all these different graphics.

Dan [0:15:16]: He looks like you spent all night working on an update because he wanted to show you everything he knows.

Dan [0:15:20]: And Seam is a very interesting business.

Dan [0:15:23]: He's gonna tell you a bit about it.

Dan [0:15:24]: Jonathan, thanks for joining excited to kinda go through some of this stuff with you today.

Dan [0:15:27]: No.

Dan [0:15:28]: I appreciate it.

Jonathan [0:15:30]: Recognize a lot of folks in the chat as well.

Jonathan [0:15:32]: So really my goal here, like, this webinar is all about not only how to acquire customers.

Jonathan [0:15:37]: Right?

Jonathan [0:15:38]: We do that every day, but how do you keep customers?

Jonathan [0:15:39]: And the marketing playbook that goes behind that.

Jonathan [0:15:43]: So at first, I was gonna share, like, one strategy that works for us.

Jonathan [0:15:46]: And then I thought, you know what?

Jonathan [0:15:48]: Why don't we take a couple plays that have the playbook.

Jonathan [0:15:50]: So my goal here is that maybe one of them resonates with you and you can take it back to your desk and It it'll work?

Jonathan [0:15:56]: Who knows?

Jonathan [0:15:57]: But I'm here to answer questions.

Jonathan [0:15:58]: So I'm gonna go through a few plays that we use at our own organization, some context.

Jonathan [0:16:02]: This will really help too.

Jonathan [0:16:04]: So when you're seeing this stuff you're like, what?

Jonathan [0:16:06]: Team twelve, not a team o one Sue, props, to you by the way, that is some awesome work that you're doing over there.

Jonathan [0:16:13]: We'd love segment, amplitude and our Customer.io stack as well for real, they're doing some really cool things.

Jonathan [0:16:20]: But my team focuses on end to end marketing.

Jonathan [0:16:23]: We focus on the higher customer journey and a little bit of more.

Jonathan [0:16:27]: So we have your classic demand gen.

Jonathan [0:16:30]: We've got content.

Jonathan [0:16:31]: We've got creative, I heavy a dev, but we also have customer education that lives on the marketing team.

Jonathan [0:16:37]: They'll explain a little bit in terms of why that's important product marketing is also absorbed by the marketing team.

Jonathan [0:16:43]: We also handle recruitment marketing.

Jonathan [0:16:45]: So we're not only recruiting for new users and trials and customers for the platform and the software.

Jonathan [0:16:52]: We're also recruiting for the people that are on work for us to help us get more of those things as well, including retaining customers.

Jonathan [0:16:58]: So we have our hands full, but that's what you do You take the opportunities as they are presented to you a little bit different from organizations they worked with in the past, and what's also different is the way that we're compensated.

Jonathan [0:17:09]: However you wanna put an Mb, bonus, commission, were compensated on three pillars.

Jonathan [0:17:14]: Net new revenue makes sense.

Jonathan [0:17:16]: Net revenue retention or Nr, which is like revenue retained over a period of time.

Jonathan [0:17:22]: You wanna try to get that as high as possible, ultimately more than what you're originally getting in the year prior.

Jonathan [0:17:27]: And profitability.

Jonathan [0:17:28]: Right?

Jonathan [0:17:29]: Profitability business.

Jonathan [0:17:30]: We've got one of the larger line items across the org.

Jonathan [0:17:33]: So the money and budgeting is part of my role, including the activation of campaigns like Back to share with you.

Jonathan [0:17:41]: And then our motion, this is kind of what's a little bit different from works that I've worked with at the past.

Jonathan [0:17:47]: We have a million users in the platform.

Jonathan [0:17:48]: We have eighteen thousand paying organization and about forty thousand paying users from those organizations.

Jonathan [0:17:55]: So things move very quickly at seamless.

Jonathan [0:17:59]: Our velocity very fast.

Jonathan [0:18:01]: It's a freemium motion.

Jonathan [0:18:02]: A lot of data comes in and out all the time and the really cool thing about that is that we're able to see things happen very quickly when we test for better or for worse.

Jonathan [0:18:11]: So I'm gonna

Dan [0:18:13]: share in users, you got statistical significance all day long.

Dan [0:18:15]: Right?

Jonathan [0:18:16]: It is.

Jonathan [0:18:16]: And...

Jonathan [0:18:17]: Like I mentioned it sometimes works in our favor, and sometimes, you know what?

Jonathan [0:18:21]: You learn very quickly.

Jonathan [0:18:22]: And both of those things are a gift.

Jonathan [0:18:24]: Right?

Jonathan [0:18:24]: Yeah.

Jonathan [0:18:25]: So I'm on few screens here.

Jonathan [0:18:27]: I'm gonna pop mine up and gonna go over a few of the plays that work for us.

Jonathan [0:18:30]: We've got our charts.

Jonathan [0:18:33]: Right?

Jonathan [0:18:33]: We're gonna go back one.

Jonathan [0:18:34]: So because things are moving so quickly throughout the funnel.

Jonathan [0:18:37]: Right?

Jonathan [0:18:38]: We have tens of thousands of users that are leveraging the platform every week.

Jonathan [0:18:42]: We're not only focused on just the top of the funnel.

Jonathan [0:18:46]: We're also focused on retaining customers, growing customers, and, of course, in partnership with sales and Cs.

Jonathan [0:18:53]: This is just a little bit of a snapshot and really the point that I wanted to make here is that when I came to the organization, almost six years ago, we did things like most org I worked within in the past due when you acquire new customers, new users and such you throw them over the fence and let's see us deal with it.

Jonathan [0:19:10]: That was okay, you know, for a very, very short period of time, but the obvious, we find out the obvious.

Jonathan [0:19:18]: Right?

Jonathan [0:19:19]: Marketing winning, Cs isn't winning or Cs is winning marketing is that when always wanna win as an organization.

Jonathan [0:19:24]: Right?

Jonathan [0:19:24]: Because of that, you know, we're all sharing the same type of goals across the board.

Jonathan [0:19:28]: It's why we have Nr rn profitability as well as net new.

Jonathan [0:19:31]: So we stopped treating customer engagement like a campaign.

Jonathan [0:19:36]: This is one of the big takeaways that helped impact our organizations.

Jonathan [0:19:40]: We went away from, like, campaign.

Jonathan [0:19:42]: Let's do this for this period of time and then stop and try this new thing and try that for a period of time and stop and really went for a full three hundred sixty five day trigger or let's say behavioral driven multi channel campaign.

Jonathan [0:19:57]: So we start thinking of things like this month, we're gonna do G two reviews.

Jonathan [0:20:01]: Right?

Jonathan [0:20:02]: This month, we're gonna do testimonials or it's case study week, And it's just baked into the entire experience that you have with our platform today.

Jonathan [0:20:11]: And what does that mean?

Jonathan [0:20:12]: It means right message right time right place.

Jonathan [0:20:14]: Right?

Jonathan [0:20:15]: It's a combination of emails, combination of an app.

Jonathan [0:20:18]: It's a combination of Sms and even personalized outreach and training.

Jonathan [0:20:21]: It's a lot.

Jonathan [0:20:23]: Right?

Jonathan [0:20:23]: But really what we do and Customerio makes that super easy is that people are getting those messages when they're engaging with certain parts for platform.

Jonathan [0:20:32]: Right?

Jonathan [0:20:33]: And I'm gonna go into what some of those parts are in what some of the results are.

Jonathan [0:20:38]: One of the big things that we realized, you know, years back is users and customers would come on the platform, and that kinda drop off over a period of time.

Jonathan [0:20:47]: And there was a lot going on within that period.

Jonathan [0:20:50]: Right?

Jonathan [0:20:51]: We gotta drop them into the platform and said, hey, tool tips.

Jonathan [0:20:54]: Those are fun Just go on your our own way, and we had a lot of support tickets, a lot of them.

Jonathan [0:21:01]: And all these little squiggly lines are looking at here, managing those support tickets.

Jonathan [0:21:06]: Is not scalable at all.

Jonathan [0:21:08]: So like, why is marketing dealing with this because we are tasked with driving engagement in the platform as well.

Jonathan [0:21:15]: Right?

Jonathan [0:21:15]: We will want people these a product come off and we come back and come up and find value Aha moment?

Jonathan [0:21:19]: Whatever P acronym you wanna use, it we just couldn't handle human driven support and training anymore to a degree.

Jonathan [0:21:28]: So what we built was an agent.

Jonathan [0:21:31]: Right?

Jonathan [0:21:31]: I think you hear a lot about these days.

Jonathan [0:21:33]: But this has been up for about two years almost two years now.

Jonathan [0:21:36]: So in other words, we created an automation chatbot, agent, if you will, using voice flow and a combination of custom io for some of the app interactions as well as some of the email interactions.

Jonathan [0:21:47]: To literally answer any possible question the is.

Jonathan [0:21:50]: You know, in the past, you can see the numbers here.

Jonathan [0:21:53]: We have over seven thousand three hundred and eighty conversations that have been mitigated via chat.

Jonathan [0:22:01]: It's a lot of conversations in this period of time, and those conversations would have ended up becoming Jira tickets, which is lame.

Jonathan [0:22:10]: You might love Jira tickets.

Jonathan [0:22:12]: Right?

Jonathan [0:22:12]: But you sent eight thousand customers, seven thousand customers to open a ticket to get an answer to question that is very easy to answer and you're gonna end up losing customers.

Jonathan [0:22:22]: They're gotta turn off your platform.

Jonathan [0:22:23]: They're just not going gonna be as interested as they would be otherwise.

Jonathan [0:22:26]: So little picture of a little chatbot Sarah there.

Jonathan [0:22:29]: What makes this powerful?

Jonathan [0:22:31]: It's not like, hey, I built an agent in chatbot, let's see how it goes is that we invested into this strategy.

Jonathan [0:22:37]: We have a full time Ai engineer that works specifically on our chatbot as well as some of our other automations and workflows, but training this thing and keeping it trained and on task and not hall is almost a full ton job.

Jonathan [0:22:51]: And I think you're starting to hear that more and more as people are adopting it for a longer period of time, you know, agents in Ai.

Jonathan [0:22:57]: Right?

Jonathan [0:22:57]: You can't just let this run loose you have to train it.

Jonathan [0:23:01]: So it's trained with over, you know, three thousand hours of our training videos or articles, our entire knowledge base.

Jonathan [0:23:08]: It constantly has to be retrain, refreshed, the amount of conversations that we get, there's always a new question that it can answer every day, we don't let it run off the rails.

Jonathan [0:23:19]: We have to guard rails for it.

Jonathan [0:23:20]: So it doesn't try to make stuff up, and trust me, people try to do that all the time, especially when it comes to pricing.

Jonathan [0:23:26]: Not gonna let it happen.

Jonathan [0:23:28]: But the results so far, I mean, we've seen a deflect deflation rate on our tickets by about fifty five percent for us, it's meaningful, right, that's thousands and thousands and thousands of tickets, but tickets aside, it's thousands of customers that couldn't get the answers to the questions that they wanted, maybe they in the knowledge base, but they didn't wanna go through the knowledge base who does.

Jonathan [0:23:47]: Right?

Jonathan [0:23:47]: We're were able to provide an experience that keeps them on the platform to this day and helps them move on for higher level escalation, of course, we have people.

Jonathan [0:23:56]: Right?

Jonathan [0:23:57]: But this was a huge win for us.

Jonathan [0:23:59]: And it was a big bet for us too.

Jonathan [0:24:00]: We didn't really know if this was gonna be a great solution or not.

Jonathan [0:24:03]: This happened at a time where at least, I was a little bit skeptical about having Ai answer questions instead of people, but I've been

Dan [0:24:12]: a fantastic job so far.

Dan [0:24:13]: Jonathan, if I asked one quick follow question, and I am gonna take a bait because you mentioned talking about Ai and of course, we can't do anything without talking about Ai.

Dan [0:24:21]: You're Ai engineer.

Dan [0:24:22]: I mean, if you've got plenty obviously of data to look at.

Dan [0:24:25]: But I'm kinda just maybe give us a little bit of, like, a what is the day to day or a kind of a weekly schedule look like for them?

Dan [0:24:32]: Like, what are they actually doing with, like, you said it's coaching?

Dan [0:24:35]: It's obviously looking at a data, but I love for everyone to hear a little more about what that Ai engineer actually does on a day to day database.

Dan [0:24:40]: Next

Jonathan [0:24:41]: our guy, About shout out Southeast f seamless a lot.

Jonathan [0:24:46]: So part of it is the training of the bot.

Jonathan [0:24:49]: Right?

Jonathan [0:24:49]: That's relatively easy.

Jonathan [0:24:52]: A lot of it is analyzing Mc.

Jonathan [0:24:54]: Questions, the answers that are coming through on a daily basis?

Jonathan [0:24:56]: Yes, Some of that can be solved the Ai, but you can't quite trust Ai all the way.

Jonathan [0:25:01]: So it's a lot of manual intervention in terms of what's prompting the answers, How do we readjust the prompts?

Jonathan [0:25:08]: Questions or readjust the answers based on the uniqueness of prompts as well as he helped he's also working on some other projects for us related to automations and workflows within Innate ends, some of our Ai capabilities within our app, but this is a big part of his job because it's servicing so many of our customers every single day and it's the primary way in which you get support inside of our platform?

Dan [0:25:32]: Totally.

Dan [0:25:32]: And then, Jonathan, when we were talking this before, are you gonna talk about training next?

Dan [0:25:36]: Who's that...

Dan [0:25:36]: I wanna jump ahead if you wanna talk a bit about that.

Jonathan [0:25:40]: I sure am.

Dan [0:25:42]: Yep.

Dan [0:25:42]: Okay.

Dan [0:25:42]: Alright.

Dan [0:25:42]: I'll just show up and let you talk us to this one.

Jonathan [0:25:45]: All of this is, like, at other organizations, right I wouldn't really be diving into things like support and in app.

Jonathan [0:25:51]: Experience and training.

Jonathan [0:25:52]: Right?

Jonathan [0:25:53]: My job used to be, this is a while back.

Jonathan [0:25:55]: Now.

Jonathan [0:25:55]: You get M q and you throw the sales.

Jonathan [0:25:58]: Right?

Jonathan [0:25:58]: And then you're done, and then they throw it over to Cs.

Jonathan [0:26:00]: Good luck.

Jonathan [0:26:00]: The good old days.

Jonathan [0:26:02]: We get old days.

Jonathan [0:26:03]: I do miss.

Jonathan [0:26:04]: I'm just kidding.

Jonathan [0:26:05]: So We took that campaign, type of strategy or campaign sort of point of view on treating customers, turn that into a strategy, the same happened with customer education.

Jonathan [0:26:17]: So we turned that from, hey.

Jonathan [0:26:20]: There's is our knowledge base or hear some videos you can watch.

Jonathan [0:26:23]: Which by the way we have.

Jonathan [0:26:24]: Anybody can watch any video on demand.

Jonathan [0:26:26]: We have tons of training in the app.

Jonathan [0:26:28]: It's all good.

Jonathan [0:26:29]: With have courses, cool stuff.

Jonathan [0:26:31]: But at the end of the day, we found out two things.

Jonathan [0:26:34]: There's a subset of customers that just wanna be heard.

Jonathan [0:26:37]: I just wanna get feedback from a real person, and I can empathize with that quite a bit.

Jonathan [0:26:43]: You've ever gone through a drive thru lately and you got the robot.

Jonathan [0:26:46]: Like, sure the robot can take the order, but I'd rather tell a real person that.

Jonathan [0:26:51]: There's just something there that I don't quite trust.

Jonathan [0:26:54]: So that aside.

Jonathan [0:26:55]: We also started treating customer education as a marketing strategy.

Jonathan [0:26:58]: See what really what it comes down to.

Jonathan [0:27:00]: Found two things.

Jonathan [0:27:01]: One, they weren't talk the real people two, they wanna be taught how to do the things that they need to do in order to do their job better.

Jonathan [0:27:08]: That means more than how to use Seamless.

Jonathan [0:27:10]: That means what are sales strategies that are working today.

Jonathan [0:27:14]: We're marketing strategies that are working today.

Jonathan [0:27:16]: Having guest speakers on sometimes to talk a little bit about their experience.

Jonathan [0:27:20]: So they're not just hearing it from us.

Jonathan [0:27:22]: They're hearing real life use cases from customers and sometimes not even customers.

Jonathan [0:27:25]: We wanna bring in somebody that is a trainer in cold calling, we do that too.

Jonathan [0:27:29]: But we have live trainings.

Jonathan [0:27:31]: And we started that around the same time about two years ago.

Jonathan [0:27:34]: To date, we've done four thousand nine hundred eighty two customers trained, and we do our live trainings about four times per week.

Jonathan [0:27:41]: Sometimes less, sometimes a little more depending on a calendar, right?

Jonathan [0:27:44]: But we have trained a lot of customers.

Jonathan [0:27:47]: And anybody can take this.

Jonathan [0:27:50]: It's not just for new customers.

Jonathan [0:27:52]: It's not just for enterprise.

Jonathan [0:27:54]: Right?

Jonathan [0:27:54]: It's for anybody.

Jonathan [0:27:56]: If you've been on the platform for eight months, you can take a training anytime you want.

Jonathan [0:28:00]: You're a user and you haven't paid, you can take a live training with us anytime you want.

Jonathan [0:28:05]: It's all self serve up to you real people, real interactions, lots of q and a, different themes per day sometimes, and can kinda see that in our little notion tracker back.

Jonathan [0:28:16]: We've got some on intro.

Jonathan [0:28:18]: Got some on features, it's a big mix, but it's been another huge win for us.

Dan [0:28:25]: And I think Jonathan you had said once you got this program live, there was a drop off before after three months.

Dan [0:28:30]: A couple of questions I wanna get you in the chat.

Dan [0:28:32]: I we'll get this in just a second.

Dan [0:28:33]: But there was a drop off before.

Dan [0:28:35]: And then once the point of this program, you saw that drop off start to flatten out.

Dan [0:28:39]: Is that correct?

Jonathan [0:28:41]: Yes.

Jonathan [0:28:41]: So we had customers that came in, Come out of our engagement, I I e out of her app.

Jonathan [0:28:46]: The average for customers was about three months, and then it would decline, and then it would kinda stay steadily throughout the period meaning They used to be weekly users, now they're monthly, seriously.

Jonathan [0:28:57]: It's not a good sign if you're looking at your customer engagement.

Jonathan [0:29:01]: Right?

Jonathan [0:29:02]: It's a potential for churn.

Jonathan [0:29:03]: Yeah.

Jonathan [0:29:04]: Especially, you know, platform in the space that we're in.

Jonathan [0:29:06]: So, yes, as we started to do more live trainings, hearing our customers out, providing them with optional to meet with real humans, as well as easy ways to get questions answered quickly.

Jonathan [0:29:19]: That has definitely helped our business out pretty each tremendously, and I'll I have a grand reveal of how it's hitting online well.

Dan [0:29:27]: Perfect.

Dan [0:29:27]: I we won't ruin that.

Dan [0:29:28]: A couple questions that came up.

Dan [0:29:30]: One for Richard.

Dan [0:29:30]: You kinda spoke to this because it was...

Dan [0:29:32]: I think it was mostly about the first three months of their journey with you.

Dan [0:29:35]: But to bring a purchase question, curious about your approach to customer engagement plus education at the start of a customer's life cycle versus existing, find getting people to join is easier said than done.

Dan [0:29:47]: So maybe that's a little bit of a secondary question there, but John, maybe you talked about a little bit for us.

Jonathan [0:29:52]: Yeah.

Jonathan [0:29:52]: None of this is easy.

Jonathan [0:29:53]: So I hope it's not coming off that way.

Jonathan [0:29:55]: Right?

Jonathan [0:29:55]: Like, we don't have full capacity in our webinars, but it's marketing within itself.

Jonathan [0:30:01]: Right?

Jonathan [0:30:01]: It's the marketing inside marketing.

Jonathan [0:30:02]: So we have to market our training.

Jonathan [0:30:04]: People aren't just gonna naturally come.

Jonathan [0:30:06]: We love when they do.

Jonathan [0:30:07]: Right?

Jonathan [0:30:07]: That's a picture of a button in the app that they can always get access to.

Jonathan [0:30:11]: If they want to.

Jonathan [0:30:12]: But ultimately, we have to market ourselves and market our training inside the platform.

Jonathan [0:30:17]: As well as throughout their journey, whether it be on phone calls with Cs if they have one through our marketing automation workflows, you know, Customer.io and nav, we also use some behavioral triggers too.

Jonathan [0:30:32]: For funding, and we use example attitude, by the way.

Jonathan [0:30:34]: Awesome.

Jonathan [0:30:34]: We're finding that people are, you know, rage clicking for lack of a better term on a certain area they app.

Jonathan [0:30:40]: Maybe they're hitting these filters over and over again.

Jonathan [0:30:42]: We can cohort those customers and offer them a live training on the spot in the platform.

Jonathan [0:30:48]: So we're able to identify where we think users and customers are finding friction, but yeah.

Jonathan [0:30:53]: We've got a market.

Jonathan [0:30:54]: It's not easy.

Jonathan [0:30:55]: Let's see the other part of that too.

Jonathan [0:30:57]: Versus existing start is easier than existing, start...

Jonathan [0:31:03]: You have all their attention.

Jonathan [0:31:03]: Right?

Jonathan [0:31:04]: First month of usage is an engagements like ninety eight percent.

Jonathan [0:31:09]: Right it's so high.

Jonathan [0:31:11]: And it's just that over time, if you're not constantly getting in front of your customers.

Jonathan [0:31:16]: They're not constantly providing value, they're gonna drop off.

Jonathan [0:31:19]: And you know what?

Jonathan [0:31:20]: They're gonna drop off anyway.

Jonathan [0:31:21]: They're not gonna be ninety seven percent engagement for the next twelve months, but you wanna mitigate that as much as possible.

Dan [0:31:27]: I'll have Jonathan can respond to a couple more of these questions.

Dan [0:31:29]: I mean Chad after we go through a jump.

Dan [0:31:31]: Oh, your grand review.

Dan [0:31:32]: We wanna see some of the...

Jonathan [0:31:33]: We'll going the grand deal.

Jonathan [0:31:34]: Okay.

Jonathan [0:31:34]: Real quick here.

Jonathan [0:31:35]: We also drive growth plays so for higher net revenue retention.

Jonathan [0:31:38]: If you're not doing this already, identify some of your higher value growth accounts, enterprise accounts, whatever you may wanna call them.

Jonathan [0:31:45]: This sounds pretty elementary and it kind of is, but it's really low hanging fruit.

Jonathan [0:31:49]: We market to the users of organizations that currently haven't signed up to the platform.

Jonathan [0:31:53]: That's all this is.

Jonathan [0:31:55]: And this works really well for larger organizations segmented organizations buying committees that you wanna market to.

Jonathan [0:32:02]: You run the list of users that, you know, we happen to be a data platform, so we benefit from that.

Jonathan [0:32:07]: But you find the folks that you want to be part of the organization that currently is on your platform, and you mark up to them wherever they're at.

Jonathan [0:32:15]: Right?

Jonathan [0:32:16]: Get them on board, show them why Speak to them differently than you would net new customer.

Jonathan [0:32:20]: It's gonna win for our growth accounts, it's helped increase thirty two percent in Nr in two thousand and twenty five doing it.

Jonathan [0:32:27]: These our big accounts, but oil preface that.

Jonathan [0:32:29]: Results over time.

Jonathan [0:32:30]: Right?

Jonathan [0:32:31]: We're looking at the very end of the funnel here.

Jonathan [0:32:33]: Are we saving more customers and we're losing.

Jonathan [0:32:36]: And, yeah, we go through a lot of customers.

Jonathan [0:32:39]: Right?

Jonathan [0:32:39]: Just in general, we bring in tens of thousands of users per month?

Jonathan [0:32:44]: We bring in, you know, thousands of demos held per month.

Jonathan [0:32:48]: So we see a lot come through.

Jonathan [0:32:49]: Twenty twenty four to twenty twenty five year over year change in cancellation cases decreased by about twenty four percent.

Jonathan [0:32:57]: That's big for us if people that say you know what?

Jonathan [0:33:00]: I don't wanna cancel, which is awesome.

Jonathan [0:33:01]: I wanna renew.

Jonathan [0:33:02]: We want that.

Jonathan [0:33:03]: And then auto renewal removed about a nineteen point nine percent decrease.

Jonathan [0:33:09]: And then overall, it's just money in the bank to the organization.

Jonathan [0:33:13]: I know that's a lot of charts to look at.

Jonathan [0:33:15]: But at the end of the day, this is the net revenue retention number.

Jonathan [0:33:19]: This is the retention number, the Eb number.

Jonathan [0:33:21]: Right?

Jonathan [0:33:21]: We maintain more customers.

Jonathan [0:33:23]: We're gonna have a better chance of profitability without having the market to net new prospects.

Jonathan [0:33:28]: So bought been a waiting for us.

Jonathan [0:33:29]: Couple plays.

Jonathan [0:33:30]: Hope some of it was helpful.

Jonathan [0:33:31]: Understand it could be a little unique, but happy to share anything else in the chat.

Dan [0:33:37]: Yeah.

Dan [0:33:37]: Based on number of questions, Jonathan, there's definitely interested in what you just showed.

Dan [0:33:41]: So hopefully, you can answer a couple of those.

Dan [0:33:42]: It's Hopefully, at the end, we'd also bring everybody back up on stage and we'll try to answer some of the questions.

Dan [0:33:47]: I know there was a question for Sue that came in earlier.

Dan [0:33:49]: We could try to answer that live at the end.

Dan [0:33:50]: But, Jonathan, thank you very much.

Dan [0:33:52]: We're gonna have you jump backstage for a minute.

Dan [0:33:54]: And then we have an Naomi me, Jump on stage.

Dan [0:33:56]: Naomi has a really cool role.

Dan [0:33:58]: Works with Customer.io, but she's kind of like the power user of Customer.io, the product at customer, and and there way, you were pretty interesting background to too.

Dan [0:34:06]: Maybe we can start there a it'll up your background, what you've done the after your employment at Customer.io.

Naomi [0:34:12]: Yeah.

Naomi [0:34:12]: I'm a career life cycle marketer myself, which is actually...

Naomi [0:34:16]: I've got a slide that kind of covers it in big words.

Naomi [0:34:18]: So I'll throw that up, and then I'll just talk through to some of my career.

Naomi [0:34:22]: So, yeah, I've been in email very similar to everyone in the industry Fell into it, and I have not been able to leave it.

Naomi [0:34:30]: I don't know why I like, it so much, I just really enjoy it.

Naomi [0:34:33]: But I've been in email since twenty fifteen, about a year before I even joined customer I as an employee, I had a call with one of the senior product leaders just talking about myeloma of email and how I'm vocal in the industry, and he was like, well, if you ever want a job, like, come chat to me.

Naomi [0:34:49]: I was like, I

Sue [0:34:51]: don't know what I would do at Customer.

Naomi [0:34:52]: I them.

Naomi [0:34:52]: I'm a marketer that likes to do email.

Naomi [0:34:55]: And then about a year later, I joined the team.

Naomi [0:34:58]: And it's really cool for me because I really enjoy the community that we sit in as email, life cycle growth marketers, end user of the tool and then that combination I can kind of help shaped road map based on what people like us need.

Naomi [0:35:12]: So yeah.

Naomi [0:35:13]: I love my job.

Naomi [0:35:14]: And love what I do here, and I'm technically, my title is a product marketer.

Naomi [0:35:19]: Although I'm still like hanging on to the title of life lifecycle marketer for dear life.

Naomi [0:35:23]: Not.

Naomi [0:35:24]: Claw away from me because I still believe that a lot of what I do is life cycle.

Naomi [0:35:28]: But instead of looking at, how do I generate more top funnel or how do I, you know, create sticky retention?

Naomi [0:35:36]: I'm, like, How do I get people to use the product?

Naomi [0:35:39]: And Yeah.

Naomi [0:35:40]: What can I do it to get feedback on the product?

Naomi [0:35:42]: I'm a horrible salesperson.

Naomi [0:35:43]: I'm like, if you wanna use the tool, you can use the tool?

Naomi [0:35:45]: But I wanna know if you like using the tool.

Naomi [0:35:47]: And if you don't like using it, what we can do better and so Yeah.

Naomi [0:35:51]: Fine in my position.

Dan [0:35:52]: When I joined Drift Naomi, they gave me a product marketing title because I was a customer of drift before.

Dan [0:35:56]: Yeah.

Dan [0:35:57]: Okay.

Dan [0:35:57]: And they did the same thing where I had never had a product marketing title.

Jonathan [0:36:01]: Yeah.

Dan [0:36:01]: And they're were like, well, we don't really know what to do with you, but you can do a lot of stuff.

Dan [0:36:04]: You know the product.

Dan [0:36:04]: Yeah.

Dan [0:36:05]: We think you're gonna do, like, marketing the product, So we'll call your product marketing manager.

Dan [0:36:08]: Yes.

Dan [0:36:09]: I know that experience.

Dan [0:36:10]: Yeah.

Naomi [0:36:10]: It's pretty much exactly what happened to me So I was like, I don't know what product marketing.

Naomi [0:36:15]: Yeah.

Naomi [0:36:15]: Think does.

Naomi [0:36:16]: I know life cycle, and I know email.

Naomi [0:36:18]: And I know this community and they're, like, here's a problem marketing side.

Naomi [0:36:22]: I'm like, okay.

Naomi [0:36:22]: Alright.

Naomi [0:36:23]: Here we go.

Dan [0:36:24]: So And I...

Dan [0:36:25]: Do.

Dan [0:36:25]: So so you're actually doing some of these campaigns you were showing us earlier the week, Some of the types of engagements in the campaigns.

Dan [0:36:31]: You're running for customer oh.

Dan [0:36:32]: This is, like, How the sounds is made I'm the scenes here.

Dan [0:36:35]: Like, it sounds like you have a couple examples you wanted to show and say?

Naomi [0:36:38]: Yeah.

Naomi [0:36:38]: Yeah.

Naomi [0:36:39]: I've got a couple examples that I wanna walk through, and again, just hitting home that even though white title isn't life cycle or email.

Naomi [0:36:46]: I'm still very much so a life cycle marketer of sorts.

Naomi [0:36:50]: So I'm encouraging an of the platform.

Naomi [0:36:52]: I sit within the marketing team.

Naomi [0:36:54]: I have very specific things that I want from the people that I email or send in that messages to and just to give a quick look of, like, what the team kinda of seems like at custom.

Naomi [0:37:06]: So we have a very large marketing team.

Naomi [0:37:08]: I think in total there's, like, thirty or forty of us now.

Naomi [0:37:11]: When I joined, there was only nine or eleven.

Naomi [0:37:15]: It was so much smaller number when I joined.

Naomi [0:37:16]: Four years ago and now we're much larger team, but on the team, there still is that traditional, like, growth marketing, life cycle function.

Naomi [0:37:25]: And this team of five marketers, five growth life lifecycle marketers They own onboarding.

Naomi [0:37:31]: They own awareness.

Naomi [0:37:32]: They only upsell.

Naomi [0:37:33]: They own, like, referral techniques.

Naomi [0:37:35]: They're they're really the core foundation of the traditional role of a lifecycle marketer.

Naomi [0:37:41]: They're executing on that.

Naomi [0:37:42]: And then I am one of five product marketers.

Naomi [0:37:47]: And we each kind of have our own area of specialty, I come from a background of loving email marketing specifically.

Naomi [0:37:55]: And so with that, I own our design studio, which is kind of our email editor and marketing that.

Naomi [0:38:03]: And then with kind of this new adoption of Ai in our industry, I have also decided to own kind of, like our Ai features and how we deliver them to our audience base.

Naomi [0:38:14]: So those are kind of, like, my areas of focus within the organization, but, of course, there's a million other features of custom and as product marketers, we own launches an education and awareness for those product areas since so I sit kind of in that second I can column them there.

Naomi [0:38:29]: Now I wanna walk through two examples specifically, but what I believe to be customer engagement is, yeah, It's awareness activation is top of funnel retention, but it's also how you find out if what you built is working.

Naomi [0:38:44]: And I love, like, a small startup environment, I thrive in a really fast paced motion where the Ceo is like, on calls with customers, and you're learning about what works.

Naomi [0:38:56]: But at is at some stage, I don't know, like, what stage of user base, it occurs that, like, feedback loop between the Ceo that shapes the product direction or the product team, shaping that product direction at some level of scale that feedback loop almost breaks at companies, and that's where Jira tickets start to pop up, and zen us tickets start to pop up and there's not really this connection point between the end user experience and the marketing team that's talking about these features or, like, the product team that's, you know, reading these support tickets.

Naomi [0:39:31]: You have to play telephone in order to get that.

Naomi [0:39:34]: And I as an individual like, refused to do that.

Naomi [0:39:37]: I'm, like, as a marketer, I want people to reply to me.

Naomi [0:39:39]: Please reply.

Naomi [0:39:41]: Makes my day even if someone's like, I'm frustrated.

Naomi [0:39:43]: I'm like, but why?

Naomi [0:39:45]: Tell me more.

Naomi [0:39:46]: And so the two examples that I wanna walk through are gonna kind of talk through how I implement touch points to drive that.

Naomi [0:39:53]: Feedback loop.

Naomi [0:39:54]: The first is our Mc server.

Naomi [0:39:57]: So about a year ago at customer, we launched our Mc server, if you're not familiar with what an Mc server is.

Naomi [0:40:03]: I view it as just like a new term we'll use for integrating.

Naomi [0:40:08]: Ai tools with products.

Naomi [0:40:10]: So you can integrate an L such as claude or a Cursor or Chat Gp with tools like custom or notion, and now ninety percent of my workday data as a marketer, I just spend in claude, And I use an Mc server to create new pages and notion.

Naomi [0:40:25]: And, like, create this page on why customer is a good product, and I will use this page to communicate out with users and share it widely internally.

Naomi [0:40:35]: So that Mc server is essentially that connection point.

Naomi [0:40:38]: But the one thing with launching an Mc server is I can't necessarily see what our end users are doing in cloud or Cursor or Chad I can't see what they're commanding that L to do inside of customer.

Naomi [0:40:52]: And so I really need kind of a a life cycle marketing touch points to be, like, how is your experience?

Naomi [0:40:59]: Since I have no visibility into it, like, through back end events.

Naomi [0:41:03]: Or conversion events, let's say, I need them to reply back to me.

Naomi [0:41:07]: So what I did is I'm just gonna jump over.

Naomi [0:41:10]: As soon as an admin turns on the Mc server in a user's account I have individuals enter into this onboarding flow.

Naomi [0:41:20]: So after twenty five minutes, usually, I would kind of expect action to be taking quite quickly between enabling it as a feature and an end user are going to connect to something like claude cursor, I reach out to users after twenty five minutes, and I have this simple, like, let's get you connected to some L to kind of guide that process.

Naomi [0:41:38]: And this first email looks like such.

Naomi [0:41:41]: So I sent this email out, and I'm like, welcome to our Mc server.

Naomi [0:41:46]: You are basically part of this group now that's using Mc to connect to claude and Chat And Cursor, and here's like the setup guide.

Naomi [0:41:56]: So instead of having to comb through a bunch of our docs.

Naomi [0:41:59]: In order for you to quickly access this or connect it.

Naomi [0:42:04]: Here's the information right in front of you.

Naomi [0:42:07]: And it's interesting because I actually get quite a lot of responses back, either being like, oh, I was able to connect this super quickly.

Naomi [0:42:14]: Thanks so lunch or, like, hey, what other prompts do you have that I could use with the product.

Naomi [0:42:20]: And that type of information is either a signal that things are working really well for me, which I'm like, perfect.

Naomi [0:42:26]: We don't need to change anything here or or Hey, these questions that I'm getting back from end users.

Naomi [0:42:31]: I should use to shape the next touch point or just rein into this first one because people are having these questions right off the back.

Naomi [0:42:39]: So this is my first touch point, jumping back to kind of what this workflow looks like up until yesterday, I had a second email go out after a day, but I'm working on redoing this one.

Naomi [0:42:50]: So it's been paused since then.

Naomi [0:42:51]: But then I have this third email that basically connects to the user asking them how their experience was kind of after a a three forty day period.

Naomi [0:42:59]: So I jump into their inbox again, and all replies go to me.

Naomi [0:43:03]: They do not go to a Zen us ticket, they go to me.

Naomi [0:43:06]: Because I am, like, a mega internally sharing any questions and concerns with the product team.

Naomi [0:43:11]: Of course, if, like, the bug pops up Share it with our support team that can help debug.

Naomi [0:43:16]: But for the most part, I just wanna know, like, real marketing feedback of what they want and what they're using.

Naomi [0:43:21]: And I find actually the way that we've template out this feedback, resulting in quite a lot of responses people will literally take this and then write in, like, a tab format underneath answering my questions, which is super helpful for me to take that feedback back to the team.

Naomi [0:43:37]: The ways in which I've been able to take this, kind of response to whether it's the first email or the third one or even the second one we had it launched is we initially launched our Mc server with only reed capabilities about a year ago.

Naomi [0:43:53]: So you could ask it for data around your campaigns, your broadcasts, you could ask it for information on a user profile, you could say based on this specific.

Naomi [0:44:05]: User, create, like, a lookalike audience for me, who should I be targeting based on what this really successful user does.

Naomi [0:44:12]: But we create capabilities weren't there yet.

Naomi [0:44:16]: So we have been behind the scenes, chipping away and create capabilities so that individuals will be able to, create broadcasts and campaigns.

Naomi [0:44:24]: Hopefully, we're watching it around next week, but this is really what we've heard in response.

Naomi [0:44:29]: People are, like, the read capabilities are great what we wanna create.

Naomi [0:44:32]: And so if it wasn't for feedback like that, we would just be, like, silent.

Naomi [0:44:36]: Everyone loves said.

Naomi [0:44:37]: And so we don't need to do anything more here, We can just let the feature b and carry on our merry way.

Naomi [0:44:42]: So feedback.

Naomi [0:44:43]: Hope shape her product.

Dan [0:44:46]: I love that a company of your scale, Naomi me is one email is still the crown jewel communication tool.

Dan [0:44:52]: Like, yeah.

Dan [0:44:53]: Thank you for validating that for the eleven thousand time that we've done with these sessions or a session.

Dan [0:44:58]: Any session we've done.

Dan [0:44:59]: Like, email is still our number one go to channel even with, you know, else that that's out there.

Dan [0:45:04]: And then two, you're looking for just replies, like, to an You know.

Dan [0:45:09]: If you look beautifully Html, like, it's not like, click here, go here, fill up this form or take this survey or let's get this data point.

Dan [0:45:15]: Like, you're looking for the fastest feedback loop possible, which is, like, and also, it goes all to you directly.

Dan [0:45:21]: Right?

Dan [0:45:21]: And you're taking in in ingesting it in your engine or helping take that data and analyze it and push it within the team.

Dan [0:45:27]: Like, hopefully, the rest of the audience here is picking up on that too, but customer was a very successful company and a pretty big...

Dan [0:45:33]: Thirty five people in the marketing team

Sue [0:45:34]: alone.

Sue [0:45:34]: Yeah.

Dan [0:45:35]: To look at the email replies for data.

Dan [0:45:37]: We're letting humans kinda analyze it and get that fast feedback loop but I think that's really good important call out there.

Naomi [0:45:43]: In other roles too, this would be the most unsuccessful email ever because there is no quick through rate.

Jonathan [0:45:48]: Yeah.

Naomi [0:45:49]: We'll still like un subscribing or, like, going through a social link in the footer.

Naomi [0:45:52]: My click through rate is so low because there's nowhere to click.

Naomi [0:45:55]: But I have to shift my, like, success metrics.

Naomi [0:45:59]: When I'm looking at the results of this email and be like, I got this money replies and ten percent of them were feature requests, ten percent of them were praise, like, categorizing it that way.

Naomi [0:46:10]: And like, look at how this feedback then shaped the rest of our product, and I, like, I love it.

Naomi [0:46:15]: I want one through one more example.

Naomi [0:46:17]: I small set time here, but I'll be quick.

Naomi [0:46:20]: The second kind of email outreach that I have instrument as part of my role as a Pm, is helping shape our beta programs.

Naomi [0:46:28]: And I really enjoy features that are in beta because you get more feedback than you have ever before.

Naomi [0:46:38]: It's almost this like contract where you're saying, this thing is in beta and we wanna hear you yell about its imperfections, and the changes that you want because we're still in this phase where things could drastically change.

Naomi [0:46:51]: After you launch something and you make a big splash about it.

Naomi [0:46:55]: I find frustrated users, they get grumpy or they churn quietly and they don't communicate why.

Naomi [0:47:02]: But if something's in beta, people are gonna be like, hey, I know this was recently released in beta, and here's what I need.

Naomi [0:47:09]: Like, this is a bug.

Naomi [0:47:11]: I understand sin beta or, like, hey, are you still working on this thing?

Naomi [0:47:15]: Like, I really want this.

Naomi [0:47:16]: As was, like, a feature a request.

Naomi [0:47:18]: And so what we have is, oh, year a bit ago.

Naomi [0:47:25]: We launched design studio, which is essentially in the left hand nav here in customer.

Naomi [0:47:30]: You'll see design studio.

Naomi [0:47:31]: It's a new email editor, and we launched it quite early before, I would say we had the amount of features that I would even want as a marketer myself.

Naomi [0:47:42]: But since then, since over the past year and a half, we've been adding so much stuff into it, and it's email outreach that essentially drives that feedback.

Naomi [0:47:51]: Loop.

Naomi [0:47:52]: We had definitely a roadmap of items that we knew we were going to add through throughout the beta experience, but when we hear from customers requests of what they want.

Naomi [0:48:02]: We are constantly adding them into the next sprint.

Naomi [0:48:05]: And that feedback kind of is a result of touch points like this.

Naomi [0:48:09]: It's just a simple email for myself that again, is, like, okay, here's like, a quick overview of what you can do in design studio, but, like, reply back with questions or comments.

Naomi [0:48:19]: So although we do have an in product kind of, like, capture of people leaving feedback, I get a ton of replies from this, like, at least twenty to thirty a week, and some of them again are like, hey, well I wanna learn how to do this.

Naomi [0:48:34]: And then I'm like, okay, that's not clear in the product.

Naomi [0:48:36]: How can we make that experience better.

Naomi [0:48:38]: So even just general questions.

Naomi [0:48:40]: There's no such thing as a stupid question in my books because email is tricky.

Naomi [0:48:45]: It's a straightforward channel, but it's tricky to execute sometimes and I want the product that I represent to be as easy as possible to use.

Naomi [0:48:53]: So touch points like this, text base, they don't need, like, a fluffy lifestyle image are really easy to just get out the door and get sent to users.

Naomi [0:49:01]: So that's my spiel of the second email that we've sent.

Naomi [0:49:05]: And that email been running for a year and a half now, and it still gathers great feedback every single day.

Naomi [0:49:12]: So just to wrap up kind of, like my long winded chat here of how I implement life lifecycle and customer engagement points at Cast is, I really don't think you need a full Cs team or like a research program to close the feedback loop.

Naomi [0:49:26]: You just need the right message and the willingness to listen.

Naomi [0:49:30]: Sometimes it can be hard at scale, but if you break it up into kind of like, bite sized pieces like I have.

Naomi [0:49:35]: It's digestible, and it's usually really valuable to the business.

Naomi [0:49:38]: That's awesome.

Naomi [0:49:39]: Mh.

Dan [0:49:40]: Thanks, Naomi me.

Dan [0:49:41]: Alright.

Dan [0:49:41]: Don't go anywhere.

Dan [0:49:42]: You can stop sharing your screen.

Dan [0:49:43]: Now That's okay.

Dan [0:49:44]: We're gonna invite Jonathan, and we're gonna invite Sue back up to the stage.

Dan [0:49:47]: If anyone has a question for Naomi of what she just presented, please put it in the chat.

Dan [0:49:51]: I looks like I can use my window now.

Dan [0:49:53]: So now I can see, okay.

Dan [0:49:54]: Nothing in the Q A panel, that's fine.

Dan [0:49:55]: There was a question earlier.

Dan [0:49:57]: I'm gonna go back first to a question that I came up for Sue.

Dan [0:50:00]: This question is from Pat to how far into your trial member, refresher, the referral program in the trial and earlier on the trials what Sue was presenting.

Dan [0:50:10]: How far back in your trial did you find a sweet spot for communicating or referral program Our system is pretty complex and we have sixty day onboarding period, curious if we should wait until that's completely over or if we potentially should start during the onboarding period and extend a bit beyond.

Dan [0:50:25]: Sue what do you think?

Sue [0:50:27]: This is exactly the question that we had before we started the referral program, which is why we tap the data team.

Sue [0:50:32]: I know this is the standard answer, but I think you should do the analysis with your data team on when referrals happen organically the most.

Sue [0:50:40]: And kinda double down on that.

Sue [0:50:43]: Even if you have a sixty day window, I think you'll be surprised, it seems like the consumer mindset, they're more price sensitive that we're just...

Sue [0:50:51]: The price is just top of their mind when they're starting their trial.

Sue [0:50:54]: So I would guess that earlier would be better.

Jonathan [0:50:59]: Yeah.

Jonathan [0:50:59]: And test it try

Dan [0:51:00]: it out.

Dan [0:51:00]: Right?

Dan [0:51:00]: And see what it is you could always try to find unlimited way of testing it.

Dan [0:51:03]: I'm sure.

Dan [0:51:04]: Jumping forward to the questions that came in for Jonathan, and I believe Jonathan answered most of those John, was there anything you wanted to expand upon that you didn't get to fully answer in chat that you would wanna answer with a mic in your hand so to speak?

Jonathan [0:51:19]: I don't think anything has not been said already.

Jonathan [0:51:24]: I think the net of it is is that any anytime you're doing something new for the first time or you're expanding on a strategy.

Jonathan [0:51:32]: You're giving things differently.

Jonathan [0:51:33]: All of it's hard.

Jonathan [0:51:34]: Right?

Jonathan [0:51:35]: So really, the intention was not to say this is easy.

Jonathan [0:51:37]: It really was about, like, sometimes the hard stuff is what you should be doing.

Jonathan [0:51:42]: Yeah.

Jonathan [0:51:42]: Somebody asked about scaling customer education.

Jonathan [0:51:45]: It's incredibly difficult scale.

Jonathan [0:51:47]: It's actually un scalable.

Jonathan [0:51:48]: Right?

Jonathan [0:51:49]: You'd would have to hire more people to do those trainings because our customer education team.

Jonathan [0:51:54]: We have two of them.

Jonathan [0:51:55]: They're building the decks.

Jonathan [0:51:56]: They're doing the live presentations.

Jonathan [0:51:58]: They're answering the questions.

Jonathan [0:51:59]: They are, you know, sending those videos to vimeo and they're doing all the behind the scenes stuff.

Jonathan [0:52:05]: And it's pretty taxing.

Jonathan [0:52:07]: So not easy, not necessarily scalable but worthwhile.

Dan [0:52:12]: Alright.

Dan [0:52:12]: I'm jumping over to Slack until Allison to run the poll.

Dan [0:52:15]: In the spirit of feedback and growth marketing inspired, by we always do this, but inspired by Naomi me, like, for feedback Sue see, like, jonathan looking feedback.

Dan [0:52:22]: We're gonna ask for feedback on this session today.

Dan [0:52:24]: And if you could jump in and rate today session, five being the best sixty minutes of week, one being you're putting our lawsuit for sixty minutes that you just lost.

Dan [0:52:34]: I don't know.

Dan [0:52:35]: I'm whatever it is.

Dan [0:52:35]: One is not good.

Dan [0:52:36]: Five is really good.

Dan [0:52:37]: Give us a quick rating.

Dan [0:52:37]: That's very helpful.

Dan [0:52:38]: We appreciate everybody spending the time with us today.

Dan [0:52:41]: Hopefully, this was helpful.

Dan [0:52:42]: There's some great questions that came through.

Dan [0:52:44]: And it was awesome to hear from Sue Naomi me and Jonathan on the different programs and campaigns and the lots of data lot, like, we're doing more of these sessions we're sharing, you know, examples and visuals and it's getting more and more interesting, like, just pull your sides and just show me what you would show your board.

Dan [0:53:00]: Right?

Dan [0:53:00]: We talked about earlier in the week.

Dan [0:53:01]: So it's really fun to see, like, inside each of these companies and see what you're doing.

Dan [0:53:04]: So thank you to the three of you for spending time with us this week in our audience sharing all of that.

Naomi [0:53:09]: Thanks for having us.

Naomi [0:53:10]: Cool.

Dan [0:53:11]: Alright, everybody.

Dan [0:53:12]: Talk to you soon.

Dan [0:53:13]: Thanks for the time.

Dan [0:53:13]: Bye buddy.

Dave [0:53:18]: Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast.

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