Legends of Lifecycle: Mastering retention 

Delve into the core strategies that drive customer retention, from building strong relationships with internal teams to ensuring you're measuring success with the right metrics. In this webinar, you'll learn how to improve your own retention campaigns with expert insights from Jeff Kinsel, Head of Customer Experience at 12twenty, and Seth Longhurst, Lifecycle Product Growth Manager at Papa. They'll be covering everything from messaging personalization to segmentation, and more. So whether churn is something you're dealing with now or a potential future challenge you want to get ahead of, join us and discover how to build a solid foundation for customer retention through collaboration and data-driven decision-making.

Take a peek at what's discussed:

• Key retention strategies. Learn how to create a customer-centric culture within your organization and why this is critical to improving your business bottom line.
• Retention metrics. Understand the importance of tracking and measuring retention metrics, and discover which ones are most relevant for your specific business goals.
• Collaboration between marketing and product teams. Explore the benefits of collaboration between these two crucial departments and find out how they can improve customer retention.
• Segmentation and personalization. Gain insights into effective segmentation strategies and learn how personalized messaging can make a significant impact on customer retention.

Full transcript

Hello.

Welcome to Legends of Lifecycle.

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Exciting.

Okay.

So welcome again to Legends of Lifecycle.

About Legends of Lifecycle

It's our webinar series where we bring in lifecycle experts to share their expert tips and topics that are top of mind for marketers. So we're really excited that you're joining us today.

My name is Mariana Gonzalez, and I'm Head of Growth Marketing at Customer.io.

Customer.io is a leading customer engagement platform used by tech savvy organizations to build customer journeys that help you engage and convert customers and scale your business.

So we use first party data to send meaningful, timely, relevant messages to your customers across a variety of channels, including email, push, in app, and web SMS and webhooks.

So, the growth marketing team at Customer.io obviously uses our own tool.

Some examples of how we use this, we use email to reach, folks that are in the trial, in the free trial, to help them, understand the trial experience and convert.

We use a Slack integration to notify our internal team when someone converts as a customer.

We use in app messages to provide educational cues to folks that are in the product to help them understand how to use Customer.io, and you adopt adopt the different features. And then we use, campaign workflows and experimentation tools to further our retention and our monetization efforts. So just a couple examples of how we use Customer.io in internally.

One housekeeping item is that, if you have questions throughout the webinar, please add your questions to the questions tab in the bottom right. We'd love to hear from you, and we'll be answering the audience questions towards the end of the session.

So without further ado, I'm super excited to introduce today's Legends of Lifecycle, Jeff and Seth.

Jeff, why don't you kick us off with an intro of what you do at, 12twenty?

Yeah. Absolutely. So I am over the customer experience, which is everything post sale, for 12twenty, and also did that at another SaaS company that's probably more directly relevant, to lifecycle as far as, like, full scale, you know, email campaigns and marketing and some of these things, and have the same position at a at a previous one that was, for accounting practice management firms. So that's why I'm here, but, I have more of a perspective from the customer, you know, kind of genre overall of how it fits into the customer strategy specifically, as it fits into customer success is lifecycle marketing and, you know, outreach and and all the things we're gonna talk about are really very, very crucial to the overall customer kind of strategy.

But other than that, I live in Utah. I have, four kids. I like to mountain bike and ski, and, I also really, really like cheese. I don't know if that's relevant.

So Okay.

Thanks for that intro, Jeff. How about you, Seth?

My name is Seth Longhurst. I work for, Papa. Papa is a, multisided marketplace. We have pals who are kind of independent contractors who work on our platform, who provide nonmedical companionship and assistance. Most of our members on our platform are seniors, who get access to Papa through, their Medicare Advantage Plans as a benefit. We also have a lot of members who might get access through an employer sponsored plan.

So we have our pals, our members, our sponsoring organization. It's kind of a multi sided marketplace. And my role is really, you know, communicating with our pals, getting them through their sign up and onboarding journey, making sure they learning what they need to do and kinda getting them the them the information they need when they need it. So I've been at Papa for, three years.

I've been a Customer.io client. So, you know, launched them on customer. Io, have a lot of experience there, and recently have transitioned to working with Papa just as a, I'm just a consultant.

So not no longer full time.

Awesome. Thank you both for the intros.

We'll dive in. First question for both of you. What are some some of the key metrics you use to measure customer retention?

Key metrics for customer retention

And are there any nonstandard metrics that you also use to get to get insight into, customer engagement?

Yeah. I I think I'll start on this one. And Seth did a better job of paying attention to what we were supposed to do. 12twenty, the company is, we are basically a CRM for career centers as well as a job board for employers that are recruiting students, have a heavy presence in business and, law verticals as well as undergraduate institutions, and we are we are basically there.

I always say, I'm like, we're like Salesforce for a career center at a university, so that's what we do. But as far as standard metrics and nonstandard, I think it always at the end of the day, I wanna make sure that every customer success org that I have, that everybody knows how they tie to revenue, which is the end all, be all. It's it's the number that's gonna get you fired if it fails, which is your, you know, net retention or annual revenue retention, your ARR, MRR, whatever those numbers are, I think are are probably the top line and always in the back of our minds, to do that. And then and then you get I I always kinda look at it.

That's the that's the first one. If you have that, then you can get cute with the other numbers, and the other numbers may influence that number. But that one is is truly the North Star for the entire profession of customer success, and, customers customer facing teams should should always be ever present because that's the measure of the company's health in SaaS.

Yeah. Seth, over to you.

Typically, you know, similar to a lot of other platforms we're looking at, you know, our cohorts, what our whatever our our monthly active users who are, you know, monetized or monthly monetized pals is kinda something we look at that's important. What our churn rate is, how many visits per pal are they're completing a month. We also have a lot of internal metrics we look at. We recently developed, like, an internal quality score that looks at a lot of the behaviors, data, where the pal is, and that kinda helps us internally evaluate pals against each other or decide who we might wanna try to retain or who we might not or for, you know, dealing with situations that just helps, our agents.

So that's, another tool we use. And then, you know, MPS, we have a lot of on our supply side things, there's a lot of, like, customer metrics we look at, like, in our markets and, you know, where we need to acquire Pals, what our gap is, what our fill rate is, and those, a lot of those metrics help us determine, you know, where we need to acquire or where where we might need to reengage Pals more, and what those what our tactics should be.

Okay. Sounds like a lot of different metrics that you're using, very nuanced.

Working in a marketplace, especially one where, like, supply is limited or it's geo kinda cons constrained to a geography is very it's been an interesting learning curve.

Yeah. I I think I even heard you say there's customers you do want to retain and others that you may like, not hear.

May not.

Yeah. Just based on behaviors or, you know, ratings.

Yeah. Totally. I think Customer.io falls, similar to both of you all. Like, we're our the growth marketing team is super focused on our self serve revenue target.

So at the end of the day, that's where, our our main goal, but we're looking at a lot of different metrics to help, gauge the health of retention. And and, really, retention is so broad. It's really about, like, getting, customers, acquired and onboarded properly and then using getting full value out of your out of your product or service, and then looking at at at churn indicators. And and so those are some of the things that we're also looking at, like weekly active accounts, feature usage, expansion and contraction, and as since that ties to to retention.

Great. Thanks for sharing. That's a great place to start grounding us in what all of our our different goals are.

Retention campaign strategies

With that, Seth, I I think you you're up with a a campaign show and tell. I'd love to have you share one of your most memorable retention campaigns and strategies, and what were some of the considerations when you built it, and and what did you learn?

Sure. So this one, I would say it's just memorable because it's recent, but I'm sharing it just because it's very simple.

In some ways, it's not, but I, I'll go through this. Let me Okay. So, can everyone see my screen?

Let me hold on one second. That's doing something weird.

K. We're gonna try this way.

So really this is just a walk through of a retention campaign. Typically when pals go inactive, it's we're waiting, like, for a full calendar month before they kinda fall in our inactive cohort. And this was, you know, just a hypothesis that we, me and my team worked, on last year where it's, like, looking at, churn prevention.

And, like, before we wait, you know, a full thirty days, maybe just intervening earlier makes sense. And so we kind of a hypothesis was just, hey. What about if we haven't seen Pals on our platform for seven days? Let's just do some messaging outreach and see if there's an impact.

So created a segment different a segment trigger campaign where if, you know, pal hasn't been engaging or working on visits for, you know, in the past seven days, they're gonna and they haven't received a message from us in seven days. They're gonna, be a part of this campaign. We had an experiment group using, you know, manual segment updates. Ninety percent received one of three messaging experiments. Ten percent were a holdout.

And the conversion criteria was if a pal accepts a visit within three days of receiving any messages from the campaign, that counts as a conversion.

So a lot of times, I'd say in, you know, you're working on margins in marketplace. It's, you know, sometimes the lift is very small.

And so but, you know, in our experiment, there was a three point six percent conversion rate, and in our control, that was three point zero percent. That's actually a really big lift. At twenty percent increase in conversion is a big difference.

And then looking at, you know, our experiment and control groups, we had a point four two percent increase in how in, like, people who were part of this experiment that were active versus inactive after the experiment period ended.

So this, like, the primary components, it looks really crazy, but there's kind of a time window that waits until a weekday during times where we know that POWS are more active.

This uses a webhook to get external data. So there's some random core caught branching just to make sure that we I'm not hitting my back end with, you know, ten thousand people at once.

Some kind of some inter internal processes.

And then I use a webhook to get available visit data. That's something I work with my product team that from using a backhand webhook. And then we have some experiment or control group assignment using, manual segment updates and some true false logic, and then they go through the, experiment.

So this kinda just shows you, like, if you're not from you know, if you're working with your team, if you you could use a webhook maybe to get, you know, product recommendations or, top products or any feed data. Save that as an attribute and use that to display variable data in your message. So this is kinda what the test looks like.

I send this for a pal. It gives me information on kind of the visits that are available to them.

Save that as an attribute.

You know, we were also interested if, like, bonuses made a difference. So I used kinda a liquid update to calculate if bonuses were available or not.

So there if someone has already gone through this, you know, whether or not they're in the controller test group. If they already are, they're gonna go through. If they haven't been assigned, then I use some manual segment updates to add them to experiment or control group.

And then they either get one of our messaging splits, or if you haven't ever used CIO's holdout feature, it's awesome. It's very really important and powerful tool to when you can kinda easily see that conversion lift without without having to do a lot of data analysis. And that just really kinda doesn't send messages, but it's something to measure against. And so they were either getting, you know, one of three different messaging tests and also had branching determine if, like, bonuses made a difference or not.

And this is, like and one thing I'll say is, like, you know, just these aren't, like, the most overly designed emails, but a lot of time one thing I've learned is, like, you know, they don't emails don't necessarily always have to be. This has the right information.

This uses a lot of liquid.

So this is kind of like just shows you, for the subject line, this is example of one that cities like it pulls from that list of visits, like, the top three up to three unique cities. Hey, Seth. There are visits available near you in Bountiful, Salt Lake, and West Jordan. Are you available to take any of these?

So it looks really complicated.

When you preview it, I I I often will use snippets too if, like, I'm have a lot of liquid logic in headlines or pre headers or subjects. And so this is kind of example of just some liquid functions that, you know, sort through that city data or that member data and make it, intelligible.

So this is an example. Like, check out these visits in Clifton, Fort Lee, and Woodland Park. Our members would love your help.

You know, conditional formatting if there's a bonus to display that there's not it's not there, and then links to view all their visits.

As you can kinda see on this side, this is how kind of when I'm pulling that data from the back end, how it gets stored in Customer.io as, an array.

And then this is an example of just kind of a push notification that's one of the generic messages.

You know, six visits available near you.

Hi, pal. Papa here. There are six visits. Visit the app and check them out.

So this is something that's memorable just because it's I I I just thought some very easy. If you don't know where to start, just start somewhere and test, and you can expand upon it. You don't have to have, you know, your, you know, five hundred and forty days planned out. Like, start at seven, then go to thirty, then sixty, ninety, eighty or whatnot.

Just start somewhere. Don't let perfection get in the way. So this is kind of an example of you. If you don't know where to start, just start somewhere and start testing and see if it makes a difference.

So cool to see, in detail this email with so personalized with relevant information.

Tell did you have to build it out in stages? Did you do, like, a simple v one and then, fast follow with with additional personalization? Or how did you, phase this out?

So I would say there this was kind of divied on some from different tests. So we were actually using this in activation and, like, I'm not using, like, the message split test. So, this is kind of a carryover of something that we use to test and or activation to see if so initially, like, just knowing if, you know, the liquid is working, the messages are working, like, I would start with just, like, one, for example, before you, you know, go on to, like, a messaging experiment.

Nice. Awesome. Well, awesome results. Yeah. I'm totally with you. It might look small in terms of percentages, but it's really twenty percent lift is huge.

So, nice work there. Awesome to see that campaign workflow in those messages.

Jeff, the next one is for you.

Changing approach to nurturing and retaining customers

Was there an moment or a learning for you, that changed the way you approach nurturing and retaining customers?

Yeah. I think, the the moment for us, and and thinking back to, a previous, the the previous role where it was most illuminating, when we were serving the accounting space.

And and many of you will sit there and go, well, that's not a very good because it seems like that's basically the first thing you do. But it was an moment for us. But, was figuring out really, really key segmentation and getting close to where people were and what they did and what their workflows were and the type of job they did. I think it's especially important.

Some companies come with a strong culture of, you know, maybe a founder, CEO, other executive team, or department leads knowing the industry before, you know, and saying, I was one of these. I know what that person's gonna do, and we have a very narrow vertical focus. When it gets wider and wider, it gets more and more difficult to figure out who these people are, where they live, what they do, what they like, what they don't like, and and you can get really weird with it, which I think, I think, you know, as Seth was saying, like, it's a game of margins. You can get very, very, you know, tricky with it and and get down to the to the brass tacks.

But for us, it was figuring out, identifying some of those nonstandard metrics of saying, hey. You know what? Successful customers kinda look like this. These churn at a lower rate than than other ones we see.

Identifying successful customers

These are less successful customers, and they look kinda like this. And then figuring out what does that look like? What does their day to day look like? There's a big difference, you know, as we found for a sole proprietor that's doing tax returns on the side than a shop that's doing it, you know, with with one manager.

And then there's an even bigger difference for, you know, five managers. And figuring out those, all all of those kind of differentiations and paths to go to is, is especially crucial for figuring out, like, hey. What is what does the customer need? How do we accommodate this?

And and I think it really helps, like, from a lifecycle perspective of saying, when can you hit them when they're at home? Right? And do they want to be hit at home? And if so, what's the best way to do it?

Do they do email? Do they do LinkedIn? Like, where's where do we where do we, you know, catch them, in order to in order to be on top? So that was a big moment for us was to figure out, you know, nurturing and retaining customers.

We gotta kinda match the pace they're running and then and then insert ourselves as it's applicable to drive value.

Yeah.

So I'm hearing, like, know your customer, you know, foundation for any marketer, and then also, like, personalization, segmentation, like Yep.

Make it relevant to them Yes. Right with the right timing and and right messaging.

Cool.

I'll throw in my my own, experience here as well.

One moment I had in in retention. I was previously at a marketplace company, and we were sending a lot of feedback emails. You can imagine, like, someone's rating someone else.

And they often skewed negative.

And my manager told my told me, like, like, in any relationship, people don't wanna just hear negative feedback. Like, what kind of relationship is that? That's not a good healthy relationship.

So we have to send positive feedback as well. And that's one of the strategies I love most in retention. That was a big moment for me, and it just it's it's fun to build those emails. It's fun to share the good news and and the celebratory moments, and it's also really fun to receive those emails as well and those messages. So that's my plug for, yeah, the positive side of the celebratory moments and retention.

Feedback and positive communication

Yeah. And I think I just on on that note, you talk about a relationship, which I think is crucial, viewing it as a relationship. There's some interesting, things if you follow, like, customer success studies that happy customers are not necessarily successful customers or the customers that you want or that stick around. There are many happy customers that will then churn and say, oh, I think you guys are great.

Your product is not what I need, but you guys are really great. And, actually, there's there's a a potential, if you look at some of the correlation, there's a potential of sharing some of the messes and some of, like, difficult things and making it human to this. It's it's like if you were to go and look at review and it only has five stars, we're jaded enough to where we go. That's not a real thing.

There's no way that you have a hundred percent confidence the entire time you're shopping for reviews. You're paying for reviews. They're AI. They're whatever.

So so that authenticity, I think, is a crucial part, that we can do with, you know, with lifecycle marketing, especially if it's personalized, especially if it's targeted when they need it and when it's good for them, is we can we can really, you know, sidle up alongside them rather than standing on a podium and shouting at them and saying, did you know that our product is really great? We did a lot of great stuff. Instead, you can say, hey. This could maybe help you, and especially if you can get them when they need it.

You think of, like, an abandoned shopping cart, you know, thing for ecommerce, which is one of the greatest innovations and has made twelve hundred bajillion dollars.

But but, you know, like, the abandoned shopping cart is is there to serve you to say, hey. Did you forget something? By the way, here's a coupon. Here's an extra incentive to do this.

It doesn't feel like, you know, when done correctly, it doesn't feel like the the brand telling you, hey. You you gotta do this. You gotta come back. Why don't you give us your money?

We need your money. And it's like, no. We are we are here with you. It feels like maybe you forgot something.

Can we help you kinda push along the way because we're running alongside you? Because marketing has changed a lot. The give to get, like, you know, we're not, we're not watching Marlboro ads during, you know, Saturday morning cartoons anymore. Like, it's it's gotten much bigger and much broader.

Yes.

Yeah. We're looking for those signals of intent, trying to build a segment around that, and target the audience and and reach them in those moments when they're it's on their mind and they're thinking about it.

Awesome.

Strategies for nurturing customer relationships

Okay. Question for the both of you.

What strategies do you use to nurture customer relationships and keep them engaged long term? What other strategies that maybe haven't come up so far?

Like, we I have pretty extensive, like, ongoing we have ongoing, you know, onboarding. I think, you know, one element that's important to great retention is having a great onboarding experience too. So we really have invested a lot in, getting a really, customized onboarding experience, something that's very behavior driven based on what pals are doing versus you know, when I first started, it was kind of a a thirty day time delay. Hey. Just here's some information. We have something that's a lot more behavioral and relevant to pals based on kind of what they're doing and what we're trying to get them to do.

Depending on your audience, like, I mean, we do monthly newsletters, and our customers and pals, we get a lot of positive feedback from them. And so, like, don't under sometimes people think, oh, newsletters list.

But that's, you know, a poor important part of our, engagement strategy.

We have a a pal a customer kind of advisor council that we've developed and kind of thinking that's, another way that we kind of just get more about the voice of the customer. We also do a lot of regular interviews with pals that we can.

I would say you know? And then there's the other side of, you know, retention. Like, our acquisition team does a lot of, like, retargeting and reengagement and, things of that nature as well.

Cool. Follow-up question for you about your onboarding. You mentioned you went from a time based to behavior based. I'm curious to know a little bit more about that. Did it get did you make it nonlinear? Like, they can do any of these items in any order. Was it did it get a lot more complex, your your workflow, as you as you pivoted that?

It's a lot more complex because we're using a lot of, like, wait until conditions and wait until branching. And if someone does this, if they're the first time they cancel a visit, then using events to connect different journeys too is something that, you know, we're I've utilized in that onboarding floor. So based on, like, you know, if someone does this or this, we kind of have, like, four different things that they could do, then they're going in a different onboarding path. And depending on, you know, what type of market they're in, they might get, you know, some messaging that's somewhat different. Alright.

So it's all one big campaign with lots of branches?

Lots of branches, but, actually, like, journeys that are kinda might be connected. Someone might bypass one journey, if they've completed their first visit. Yeah, and they've never canceled a visit. They might not ever go through that cancellation journey.

Yeah. Cool. Awesome to hear. Jeff.

Building trust and company identity

Yeah. Oh, Oh, I was gonna say on nurturing customer relationships, I think, and, again, from a less tactical perspective, I think it's what what I found consistently as a company is growing as it starts, and, again, we go to, like, where the founder is really involved or what you know, as as you grow. The first thing universally that we've done, at scale and in small enterprise deals as well as, you know, kinda shotgun approach is the, you you you win them by personality, usually, kind of you you I mean, you that's the great part about, like, customer success people is you're like, let's throw people that they love that are going to do this, and and we'll we'll win them that way.

And then we will branch that authority that actually comes from, like, a person to person and branch it over to the company to where they trust the company. So early in my career, I I did, franchising, and I remember working with franchisees that would say, if you if you quit, I'm gonna flip out. And that is so, like, nice, but also terrifying if you're like, I'm am I gonna retire here? This is crazy.

But what it was is they didn't have confidence in the company. They didn't have confidence in what our brand and what we were.

It it was instead you. You're my person. This is the person. I see that a lot with CX teams as we start out is that, oh, this is this is you.

You're my person. You know, you are the person I'm attached to rather than the company. So having a unified message that goes across the board that says, I am an agent to the company, but I am not the person that you need, But you're going to get a consistent experience whether it's from support, whether it's onboarding, whether it's whatever else, which takes a culture shift of saying we all have to be on the same team. We all have to be serving the customer.

Defining organizational values

We all have to recognize the part we have to play. There's often divisions between onboarding and customer success or customer success and retention or sales and customer success or customer success and customer support. And you have all these, but but truly pulling in the same direction, which is why I think lifecycle marketing is such a interesting crossroads because, well, you're marketing, but you're also CX, but you're also working on you know, those referrals are gonna turn around into leads and then sales, and so it's the same thing. So you're sitting at the crossroads of a lot of these things.

So I think figuring out what are we going to be so that we're not personality branching. We're actually saying our comp our company is what we are is is what you should have, and we're gonna have a consistent message all the way across. Because then people actually do learn to like your company, not Bob that they talk to one time at a trade show.

What are the what are some of the tactical ways that you've seen this implemented? How do you make sure that that happens to build that brand, and that culture and not just that, like, attachment to one person?

Yeah. I think I think you have to be very clear about what your values are and what you're doing and listening to customers. And you again, there there are cultures and there are cultures. There's the culture where we say, we as a company are gonna be very transparent, and we love, you know, numbers, and we want to do good in the world.

Whatever. You you may believe it. You may not. But but companies with strong cultures match their values, but you also have to look at, like, what are your actual values that what do you really value?

And if it's just sales at all cost, that's a type of business. If it's we want good for the people we're working with, that's a type of business. And and identifying what that is in your organization as well as your, like, big organization, and then make sure that your messaging is measured against that. That's part of, like, a marketers, a marketers thing and why, you know, it's challenging when you bring in people that are marketers that are not inside your organization because they don't understand what your organization really is, especially if they're there to help you figure out the brand for your organization.

And and you're like, well, we gotta figure out what we are and what we wanna be and what our spot in the market is. And then we want to be that thing, and then we want all of our stuff to be consistent with that. Are we helpful? Are we authoritative?

Are we, informed? Are we, you know, returning? Are we friendly? Like, it's it's all those, like, wooly marketing, you know, word cloud things of being like, we wanna but but I think I think there's actual truth to that of figuring out your values, figure out what you wanna be, and then be relentless in making sure that everybody knows that and adheres to that in all your interactions up and down the company.

Yeah. Definitely has to come down from the top. I think that really helps to align organizations, and it can be challenging as your organization is growing and hiring new people, And there are different voices writing messages and and reaching out to customers, so it is a challenge to to find alignment there.

Great.

Alright.

Hot takes on retention and strategies

So now I would love each of your hot takes on retention and retention strategies.

Yes.

Let's talk about that.

Go ahead, Seth. You can start. I talk a lot.

You know, really, I mean, I think one hot take is just I think the best retention we've talked about this at Jeff. Like, the best retention strategy is a great product.

There's a lot of times where, you know, especially in the lifecycle role, a lot of people will come to you, hey. Can you just do this because something doesn't work right or this and that.

If that's a root product problem, ultimately, you really gotta solve it in product. I mean, lifecycle's great at getting attention, getting people to your platform, but it's not product. And so, that's one thing. You know, I a hot take.

And then just another hot take I've had is just you know, in our world, everyone's kind of a designer. Everyone's a graphic designer, copywriter, and it's just you have to test. And sometimes, like, simple, ugly stuff works. And so, you know, it just especially in the email world, you know, it's and so if you think like, oh, I'd you know, I can't do something really slick or, even just, you know, not letting perfection get in the way.

Like, if I didn't have available visit data feed, I would do something prior where, you know, I was just saying, hey. You know, we have visits in your county or your city of stuff I have. You know, work with what you have. Don't let you know, there's a lot of we have a lot of data available in this world, and I think about myself, like, ten years ago, like, it just, you know, a, some of that just was wasn't possible to get.

And, you can't there are ways that you can start, you know, before you know, don't let engineering or product or, you know, I don't have this or I don't have this fancy AI or I don't have this, you know, predictive churn algorithm or something. It's very simple. There, you know, there are ways that you can look at, hey. You know, what what are indicators of churn, and how can I start there?

Yeah. To echoing that, I think customer success, the best retention, best lifecycle marketing, best fill in the blank.

You know, I remember talking to someone. They said that probably is, like, ten percent. Like, if you have, like like, ten percent of your churn could be human based. Maybe twenty.

Right? But, like, it does not matter. If you if you are if you are selling, you know, bicycles in Alaska, you're going to have a harder time if they do not want what you want. Right?

That is that is the thing. So getting product market fit, which I think goes back to, like, the culture and and the challenges.

Retention is primarily product because there are some janky products that you use, I guarantee, in your daily life, and you say, this is the worst interface I've ever seen. The buttons don't make any sense. I hate this. I hate every part of it, but darn it.

It is it is really handy, and it is really great. And there are whole industries and verticals out there that are using janky, bad, non UX, no no marketing, and and it's just kind of like, it's easy. Right? It's easy when the product is easy.

That's rare, so we have to influence it. So I think, it's it's almost like retention is first and foremost a product issue, and then second, like, fill in everything else. Like, it's all secondary to that because you could be the greatest greatest customer success team in the world and still fail if your if your product is bad.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah. I've so true. So true. And, my experience as well that, like, you can use lifecycle marketing and mass marketing to bring customers in, to educate them, to, offer promotions, but it really it goes hand in hand with the product.

Product experience and and really you need that product market fit.

Collaboration between marketing and product teams

So which which leads me to a a follow-up question is how do you all work with your product partners? What How are your teams structured? Do you share OKRs? What are some of the characteristics of the relationship between marketing and product at your orgs?

I'll I'll go over first on this one because, I I wanna steal Sass under. We I think I think it's one of the critical, points. Being being over customer success, I think you serve at the crossroads, the necessary crossroads of you are you are the highway between sales and the customer. Right?

Like, what the stories that come back to sales to sell, from marketing to come back. Where are our case studies? You're also, you know, you're kinda shuffling around, especially if you get into a leadership role. But you have to have that product focus, and there's a lot that customer success can and should and does do in every organization I've had.

We have worked, you know, we've always had some layer of, like, in app announcements or something else that we help marketing do that. There are other organizations where marketing own or sorry. Marketing product owns it top to bottom. All in app messages are all going to be us.

But most of them, it's it's a it's a joint effort for us to do this because that's that's very, you know, practical. So I think it goes to all the same thing of, like, you gotta pick your battles with with product. You have to keep them involved. If you need to get tools to do something else, it is a constant game of bringing them back to the customer because the more sophisticated your organization gets, the farther the product decisions are going to get from you and from product to do that.

So we use Gong. We've used recordings. We've used transcripts. We've used all these things to say, hey.

I have a personal stake. I know that this is going to be a problem for our customers, and I need you to know how much of a problem that's going to be, and it goes back to segmentation. This is going to be a problem for this segment of customers. We also had our support team who product was a little afraid of our support team just because they would release things that support had not heard about, and they walked over there when we were all in office.

And they were like, you gotta roll it back. You can't do this. You can't do this to all of our customers. You just exploded our support tickets.

And product got a good idea being like, oh, yeah. There's actual, like, real world feedback that we have from this. And it it introduced this loop where they would release to the support team in a beta or a staging site. They would go through it, poke holes in it after it was already you know, again, this is already iterated.

And then and then come over and be like, great. Now you can launch it, and it created this nice symbiosis. And by by consequence, the support team would come back and say, hey. I wanna tell you all the great things that customers have said about that because we solicited the feedback and we have this.

So it was encouraging product to do better customer, research and details and get that feedback loop actually functioning. But I think from a from a you know, obviously, my chair is, like, CX perspective. You have to pick your battles, know when to hold and know when to fold and when to help product and when to push product to do that.

It's that's the hard part about running a company and especially a SaaS company is, like, you don't have infinite resources, but, like, you absolutely have to it has to be a focus of yours or you're going to, you will end up with a a a divorce from product market split and the reality of your customers, and it makes everybody mad.

Yes. Yeah. Great to have that feedback loop.

So And to to piggyback on that, I just say it's very important to have, you know, strong relationships with your product and engineering teams.

I mean, like, at at this and many organization I've had, we usually have, like, you know, shared OKRs or things that we're focusing on.

And it's really important you have lifecycle being in organizations where I've come in and, like, it hasn't been a priority. But before I was in a company I went to, there was, you know, this technical diagram and, you know, they had all the different things in our shared services and, like, you know, lifecycle marketing was just this, like, diagram off in the corner, and no one really knew what it does. So you kinda have to be an advocate for your tooling and what you're doing, your capabilities, and let people know, especially in tech, you know, turnover's pretty high, so you're always have to be, you know, letting people know, hey. Why data hygiene's important? Why we have to, you know, have, you know, our event instrumentation instrumentation done a certain way? And, you know, if you're changing something, why we need to know?

Yeah.

And whatnot. And so it's, you know, having those relationships and, you know, working on, you know, a lot of what I do is, like, you know, new features and new things and, you know, new policies that are being announced. And, I'd like the idea of, like, if you build it, they'll use it, but that doesn't always work. And so, you know, we're a very important stakeholder in educating our, you know, our end users about new features and how to use them.

Mhmm.

Yes. Yeah.

At Customer.io, we've tried to build, yeah, each squad each product squad has a marketer who's assigned to it. So marketing is is in there with product, providing the feedback, the user feedback, helping with the launch, helping build the appropriate lifecycle messaging to reflect the changes in the product, and just, like, very close partners, shared OKRs as well. Otherwise, we'll just be, like, misaligned on our objectives and our projects and our prioritization. So, but, yeah, the part about things breaking, that's especially important too. So just, like, so important to be looped in all the time and and be working as one team.

Yeah.

Okay.

So I'd like to shift gears now and, move over to questions.

I see a question that's been upvoted here from Noel.

Would Jeff and Seth be willing to share their decks? Okay. I think we'll check with you and share afterwards.

I'll go on to the next one.

Okay.

So, Seth, question for you. Can you shed more light on newsletters?

I run a weekly newsletter, and we only send these to churned leads and is a way for us to reengage.

Have you explored the topics of preference center in Customer.

Io? Topics and yes. That's something I I would I use.

I would say, yeah. So let's and I'll elaborate on that, but that's some we use the the topics in the perfect center, for, like, targeting different campaigns.

So that and that's something I do you could use, and you could segment based on. But I I I would say, like, with your active customers, it's like, if the information's important, and it really, a lot of it just talks to, like, speaking to your customer and seeing what they want. Right now, we found, you know, there's monthly is a good cadence for us because that's usually when there will have some updates or something to say. You know, weekly isn't something I probably would do a full newsletter. Ours are actually pretty long and have a lot of information.

And I'll piggyback here too. We also do a monthly newsletter. We share a variety of content. It's not just about product changes. It's also like, hey. Here's some marketing news that's relevant to you, events happening, job opportunities.

We only send it to people that are really engaged that have clicked on an email in the past couple months. So it it we don't wanna spam. We want it to be relevant, and and so we're sending it to a highly engaged audience. And we've seen really good, results from that because then when we announce a feature there, we use the newsletter as a an additional channel to to reinforce a a feature announcement, and we see really good engagement through the newsletter. So that's, that's how we're using newsletters.

Yeah, weekly seems like a a free a high frequency cadence, but, great to try it with churned leads for for reengagement.

And, yes, we also use the the preference center in customer IO.

Okay.

Let me find another question. Okay.

Segmentation and personalization in onboarding

So here's another a voted question.

How do you approach personalization in onboarding?

So based on what sort of information do you segment the onboarding flow and branch it out?

For me, a lot of it, it's it's just, right now, it's just the location information and then, like, if visits are available.

That's, something that we're using a lot. I would say, if we were to expand upon like, you know, right now, we you also have to look at, like, whenever you're segmenting, like, what your size is and what your scale is and when it makes sense. Like, I would say maybe our our the next steps would be, you know, working with acquisition and may in personalizing based on type of who we're type we kinda have different cohorts, different profiles, and that would probably be, like, our next step if I was, cohorting for someone who we have, like, a lot of stay at home parents that are pals. We also have kinda youthful retirees or kind of a cohort, and we have a kind of a a larger cohort of people who are maybe a lot of people have, like, exited teaching or health care, but still wanna work part part time or pals. That would be kind of our next evolution of just kind of just, what kinda persona they fall into.

Since, we, at Customer.io, when, you're setting up your account, you have someone who helps you, the data integrator, the data partner who helps you set up your account, and then there's the marketer, the end user. So that's how we, segment our onboarding, and and that's our primary, like, split in in our onboarding flow.

Cool. We'll try and get through one more question.

Let's see.

Building strong relationships with engineering teams

Alright.

Okay. Here's a question, about, relationship with engineering. So about building a strong relationship with your engineering team, do you have any experience while working in this fully remote position?

Yeah. I can answer this one. Engineering is tough if if you have a differentiation between product and engineering, which usually I mean, they're like the same, but they're not the same by doing that. The the number one thing I found most effective for engineer across the board is for most of, like, the developers, whatever, they're with rare occasions, they're sitting in a box working on code with no actual context of what it does for anybody or how it changes the world.

Like, again, you could give them this and be like, congrats. You just cracked the nuclear code, and they'd be like, cool. Alright. Yeah.

I guess whatever. Like, that's fine. So you have to give them that that reason and that why because, again, it goes back to the give and take. There's gonna be a time when engineers have to work all weekend to fix something.

They need to have a face of the customer or those things. So we've been really intentional about, I mentioned Gong, doing the recordings, making sure that engineering hears that. You can hear the excitement in the customer's voice. You can get those stories.

Like, you think of case studies kind of you from, like, a marketing point of, like, I get more customers, but they're equally or if not more important internally. Like, look what we do. Look what your code did to do this. There's an old, you know, thing when they interviewed Ford workers on the on the factory floor, and they said, hey.

What do you do? And it was not, oh, I sweep the floors. It's I am making I am a crucial part of making the best selling vehicle in the history of the world, period. That is what I do every day.

Okay. You pick up bolts off the ground. Like, that's fine. No. The larger vision is you are making something that makes a difference.

So so we have to bring that perspective to the engineers, to product, to everybody at the company so that they all become customer centric of knowing that, like, what we do has impact. Here's the people that has impact because it's not feasible to send engineers to conferences. Wouldn't want to do that. That would be a terrible waste.

But so we have to we have to gather that and be really clear about about kind of selling what what they do back to them, and what the the end result impact was. So fully remote, joining on their calls, getting recordings, sharing with those regularly of, like, here's customer feedback that we heard in a shout out or something else with Slack, Whatever you're using, wherever the engineers are, it goes to the same thing. Where are they? Approach them there and and make it impactful for them at that point.

Seth, anything you would add?

Just adding just being participate.

Like, if you're on Slack or Teams relevant channels, being a a strong resource, helping them solve problems, showing you, like, what your platform can do or the impact of things that they've done. So, I think just, you know, being a participant too in addition to kinda sharing results and activity and feedback is important as well. Like, don't don't be a stranger in, you know, in those pod channels. Mhmm. Yeah.

I think that's a great note to end on. You know, customer retention is about that customer relationship, and it sounds like it starts from the inside. Like, we have to build those relationships with our teams, with our engineers, with our product partners, to have a good product, and then drive engagement. So, thank you both for your sharing your wisdom, and thank you all for joining.

We'll be following up, with, additional questions and slides. And so thank you all for joining today, and look forward to seeing you at the next one.

Thanks so much.