How Guardio unlocked 20% of monthly upgrades 

Guardio is a cyber security company that provides protection to users through a browser extension. Driven by the ideal that security software should be easy enough for our everyone to use, they develop creative tools and products to combat modern web and browser threats. Guardio offers a freemium model along with a paid subscription-based browser extension that protects over 1M users from malvertising, phishing, scams, malicious extensions, and other web-based threats.

Guardio’s journey to Customer.io started when their marketing team decided to focus more on the end-user experience and their customer lifecycle journey. Previously, they had grown frustrated with the limitations of using react for their emails and how heavily they had to rely on developers to create, test, and send their emails. It became hard to manage their customer experience when it came to knowing who was getting what messages and when. Additionally, with their flagship product being a Chrome Extension, context-aware in-app messages were an important channel Guardio wanted to incorporate by implementing with Customer.io.

• The challenge: Needing to create a more harmonious customer experience journey where members of the Guardio team could easily see & control the lifecycle journey.
• The fix: Customer lifecycle-based segments.
• The result: Over 20% of all monthly upgrades came directly from a Customer.io campaign.

Guardio uses Customer.io to send 10 million messages a month to nearly 3.5 million devices across their 1 million users. Leveraging Customer.io webhooks and insights from our metrics dashboard, they’ve learned when their customers prefer to hear from them and have optimized their message timing for maximum impact. In this particular message, they informed the user about blocking a security threat and suggested exploring their premium product to unlock even more potential. As a result, 20% of all direct monthly upgrades stem from a Customer.io campaign, contributing to 20% of their total revenue.

Guardio also harnesses the power of Customer.io’s segmentation to target their premium users who experience a lot of cyberattacks (which Guardio blocks) to ask their customers to leave honest reviews to attract more customers.

One of the most important factors that pushed Guardio away from their previous provider and to Customer.io’s platform was the ability to create sprawling campaigns based on where the customer was in their lifecycle journey.

In the past, they had worked with siloed campaigns, and it was difficult to control message frequencies when a single user would be a part of two or more campaigns at once.

Their 10 major lifecycle campaigns, which cover every part of a customer’s journey include the following:

Each campaign has one ultimate action they’d like the user to perform. For example, the segment titled ‘Installed’ encompasses users who have installed the product. Their end goal for users in this campaign is for them to complete their first malware scan. Once a user has completed the scan, they graduate into the “Upgrade” campaign which, as its name suggests, aims to upgrade users.

By running users through different campaigns meant for each stage in the lifecycle journey in a controlled way, they have been able to tighten up their communication strategy. With some of these campaigns spanning 3 months, Guardio can guarantee the flow and timing in which their users hear from them. They even implement logic regarding iteration counters that make sure if a user re-enters the same campaign, they receive content variations.

Through these campaigns, Guardio now has a clear view-from-above of where people are in the customer journey, what messages they’re receiving and when, and where they stand in regards to conversion goals and outcomes.

To say that Guardio is a super-user when it comes to event triggers and attribute values would be a humble description. Guardio actively uses 400 event triggers across all their lifecycle journey campaigns with countless unique user attributes . By turning event actions into attributes, they’ve been able to supercharge their messaging personalization.

A prime example of this is when a user cancels. First, Guardio asks them why they’re canceling. Depending on the reason, they use Liquid tags to personalize which funnel of their reactivation campaign they will flow through. If someone says they canceled because the service was too expensive, their reactivation messaging focuses on discounts. If the user said they canceled because they couldn’t get the hang of how to use the product, their reactivation campaign content focuses on helping them understand how to use the product.

By creating campaigns that utilize event triggers, segmentation, attributes, and Liquid tags based on where customers are in their lifecycle journey, Guardio sends hyper-personalized messages to their audience to inspire them to take actions such as completing a security scan, upgrading, or leaving honest reviews. Even our own team was impressed by the extent of personalization they’ve managed to execute by leveraging events and attributes.