Idea to impact: Messaging for SMB growth 

In this informative webinar, you'll learn about integrating customer data into the Customer.io platform to create effective and personalized marketing campaigns. We'll cover the importance of tracking key data points and how to incorporate them into your campaigns. If you're new to marketing automation or just looking for some helpful tips, this webinar is perfect for you.

We believe that it's crucial for SMBs to stay connected with their customers through personalized communication. That's why we've created a platform that allows you to easily integrate your customer data and use it in your marketing efforts. Whether you have a large team of developers at your disposal or are a non-technical marketer, our platform makes it easy for anyone to create personalized campaigns.

Take a peek at what's discussed:

• Introduction to Customer.io and its platform capabilities. We'll provide an overview of our platform and how it helps SMBs connect with their customers.
• Tips for personalizing and optimizing campaigns. We'll share some best practices for integrating customer data and using it in your campaigns to create a personalized experience.
• Platform features that make Customer.io easy for non-technical marketers to use. We'll highlight some of our platform's user-friendly features that make it accessible for everyone, regardless of technical ability.
• Messaging strategies for engaging and retaining customers. We'll discuss different techniques you can use to keep your customers engaged and coming back.

Full transcript:

Intro

Hey, folks. Welcome to the idea to impact webinar. I am Cody. I'm on the marketing team here at Customer.io.

I'm really excited about this topic. I think the lens of this is gonna be all about start up and SMB and how do you use messaging to help impact that strategy that you're working on within your small business. So and I I think really the spirit of it. I was a SMB marketer, for a few years before I came to Customer.io in 2019. And I think everybody is probably in the same realm of how do you make a big impact with a small team. So welcome, everybody. We're super excited to have you.

We've got Jenna and Melanie on our team in the background here to answer some questions as we go. But we're gonna kick off before we get into the good stuff of the webinar with a quick poll. So I'm gonna publish this.

It should pop up on your screen.

And, really, we wanna make this event catered to what you're working on. So let us know what part of the customer life cycle is currently your highest priority. Is it that acquisition phase? How do we get as many new people in as we can? Is it more in the middle stages of activation, onboarding, and then expanding and upgrading?

Or are you trying to keep people in? You've got a user base, and now you're trying to retain or win them back. So we'd love to hear from you in the chat. I'm curious what everybody's working on.

We've got some activation onboarding coming in.

We're gonna give folks a quick minute here just to filter in. But, my quick story time is so before my time at Customer, as I mentioned, I was a marketer at a small business. We're only a small but mighty team of fifteen, and we had the difficult task of it was a membership model based company. We had fifty thousand members, but we are kind of slowly decreasing over time.

So kind of our big challenge was how do we how do we get these people the value that's gonna keep them there long term, and how do we catch them before they they leave us? And I think one of the biggest challenges we had was figuring out, what data points give us, you know, the most impact. What what data shows that somebody's adopting the product or somebody's not. And then the hardest part, especially when we're a small business with limited resources, is how do we get all that data integrated into the places where we can actually set up things that reach out to them in those moments and impact it.

So that's kind of the lens, that I'm coming with today and some of my background, but I've also had the the chance to work with you know, we have over six thousand companies that use customer out to send their messages. And so, some of the the meat of what we're gonna get in today is just from talking to a lot of those and and finding best practices on how do you onboard people successfully, and how do you catch them before they churn? So we're gonna go through a few of those use cases.

I'm gonna glance at the poll really quick. Okay. Lots of folks focused on activation onboarding.

Number two looks like acquisition. K. So a lot of that earlier earlier phase of the customer journey. And then retention churn as number three.

Okay. Perfect. We

Overview

should be able to speak to all of those. And like I said, please be active in the chat.

I'll I'll type a quick message, but, you can add questions here, or you can use that little questions tab in the bottom right, and we'll sure that we get to them. But no need to wait till the end for questions. I want this to be interactive. I'm just one person. We've got a lot of people in the crowd who probably have a lot of great opinions and great experiences with onboarding, activation, retention. So we wanna hear from you.

Alright. So we're gonna get to right into the campaigns here in a minute. But just another thing to set the stage, I think we're all dealing with this as consumers, but the people that we're messaging also are dealing with this. And this is probably no surprise.

I'm I'm hammering home an old point, but everybody's inbox is pretty crowded right now. And some of the things that characterize it are repetitive messaging. You might have if you look at one page in your Gmail, you might have multiple emails from the same company. I know this is probably nothing new.

And, really, the the pain point here is that your customers frequently miss the important stuff. So even if there's really important messages that you're sending, it really has to be at the right place, the right time, and the right message for somebody to even see it. So we're dealing with this kind of complex, difficult messaging environment that our consumers are experiencing. And a question really today, one of our core themes, how do you cut through that noise during these different life cycle phases?

Agenda

Alright. So here is where we're gonna go. Number one, we're gonna quickly talk about data. I mentioned this a little bit in my my before customer story, but how do you track the high impact actions? We're gonna look at an onboarding campaign example, and then we're gonna look at a retention campaign example. And then we're gonna round things out with a fun one. If anybody's a fan of kind of the Spotify wraps type messaging, we're gonna kind of show one of those value reminder or kind of gamification email examples.

But, really, I think if you're looking at your your SMB, your start up messaging, you could in the system.

This is kind of a nice checklist. Some of the companies I've worked with use to say, if we have these things, we're off to a good start, and we can always complexify. But these are kind of the ones that we need to really drill home and and have down, before we really scale up.

Chapter 1: Data

Okay.

I'm gonna share my screen here. Actually, I'm already sharing, but we're gonna share a different part of the screen and jump to and the product. So I think I jumped right into this event. But, if you're joining us and you aren't currently a user of Customer.io, Customer.io is a customer engagement platform that lets you harness all the data you need the moment you need it, and most importantly, as in my past context, the ability to actually act on that data so that you can build out campaigns across email, SMS, push, in app messages. You can even trigger postcards to be sent from Customer. Io.

You can do that all in one place, to really say, how do we get that person from a new user to an activated user to a retained user and, you know, keep them long term? So we're a platform. I'm jumping right into, Customer.io here because I think it's a good visual for some of these campaign examples.

But when we're talking about data, what I wanna talk first about is getting the right data in.

So as you can see, your probably instance of customer out or whatever marketing platform you use, Maybe you have this live feed of a bunch of different data points. And, really, the key thing here is which of these are actually important and which of these are important at those different phases of the life cycle.

So we have things like people removing a teammate or people adding a teammate.

Maybe somebody, you know, adding a help ticket.

This is all custom to your business. And so the key thing is sitting down with maybe your product team, your engineering team, your marketing team, and saying, you know, what are the things that actually show that somebody is finding value? I'd pick three or four of those to start. You can also dig into the data. If you don't have too much data, you can start with some some gut opinions and then sort of test from there. But figure out what are mostly correlated with people finding success in our platform, and then gear some of your first campaigns around those.

What I do wanna mention is everything here is all fake data. I'm actually in a, dummy data account here, which mimics a SaaS kind of model company.

Just for context, this company we call Sketcher.io, imagine it's like a graphic design, product design type platform with a you can imagine, like, a PLG model free to pay conversions is a big use case in this fake company.

But, really, I think we've kinda set it up in a way to mirror what maybe you're actually dealing with in your product.

So this is kind of a SaaS model, but one thing I'd say, we work a lot with fintech companies. Maybe those first key actions of value are somebody, you know, setting up their or connecting their bank account to your your investing app, for example, or maybe making their first investment, making their first deposit, using the you know, swiping a card for the first time. We work with a lot of companies in the ed tech space too, and a lot of them are focused on how do we get learners to maybe favorite a first course in your course directory, or how do we get them to go from favoring that first course to actually signing up for our first course?

So we're gonna get into six examples, but whatever the context is, I'd love for you to kinda shout it out in the chat on on what makes most sense for your business as far as the data plan.

If you are just starting out and you don't even know where to start, we'll send over some stuff via email after this, but we have some, good templates for different industries that'll help you kind of set up, okay, what are all those things I need to know about the customer?

And then what are all those actions that I need to know? So we'll send you these templates afterwards.

I won't spend too much time there so that we can get into campaigns. But the foundation of everything is choosing the right data and the data that's associated with your customers finding value.

Okay.

Let me check the quick chat. Okay. We got a couple hellos. Please let me know if you want me to stop at any of these points and kinda dig deeper.

Chapter 2: Onboarding

But if we come back to key number two so I I this is one of my favorite ones. I think having good onboarding is so important. I think everybody in the crowd knows it takes so much effort and so much, you know, money to get a new customer, to acquire a new customer. You've done paid ads.

You've gone to conferences. You've got these people in.

Onboarding is the thing that takes them from just that brand new first user to are they actually finding value in our product, which I would argue is probably the most important part to retaining them. But we'll talk retention later.

So onboarding campaigns, as I've worked with a bunch of different companies, bunch of different industries, there's kind of a few things that ring true. So I'm jumping right into here to an example in Customer.io.

This workflow is triggered when somebody signs up. So that's a pretty basic one. They they've started in a a new account on your platform.

I'm gonna actually start zoomed out.

So maybe your onboarding campaign also looks like this big kinda spider web when you zoom all the way out with a bunch of different decisions. Maybe your onboarding campaign kind of looks like a straight line. Everybody kinda goes through the same process.

What I would say is whatever you did in that data planning phase, whatever those those three or four key actions that show that the user is finding value in your product, Use those as kind of the guiding light here as you decide how your onboarding campaign is gonna work.

So the basics, maybe you send a welcome email to start.

Here's where things get a little bit more interesting. So we have a split here. This is something I've seen folks do a lot, especially if you have different products or you have multiple sub products.

In this fake company, let's say we have kinda two main personas.

We have graphic design user Hey, Cody.

Hey. Sorry to interrupt. You cut out. I think your AirPods cut out.

In my background?

Yes.

Okay. What was my last, topic there?

Before you switch screens.

Oh, we're still back in, the slide?

Yes.

If anyone in chat can remember the last words that Cody said, because I was just focused on getting him to not cut out anymore, that would be very good.

You, Jenna.

Thanks, Cody.

You're good. Chat. Mitesh says that it can read lips, so I think I was good, without the audio.

Alright, Mitesh. We're gonna need to play that play on that.

Okay. Awesome.

So I'm gonna jump back in, and hopefully, this is kind of where I left off. But, we're starting an onboarding campaign.

And example I was starting with was you don't wanna talk to people about things in your product right off the bat that maybe they didn't come to learn about. And I I sorry if I'm being redundant, but I think the example I jumped into was if you're a fintech app and you have kind of an investing product and a banking product, maybe if somebody goes and signs up for your banking product, don't start talking to them right away about the investing stuff. Maybe they will wanna be an investor later, use your investing app. But this is your first moment where they're deciding, do I actually even wanna hang out here longer, or do I wanna bounce? So this is one that I've seen a lot of companies do successfully is start by whatever their first interest was, focus on getting them to some sort of value on that first interest first, and then you can always get more complex later.

So what that looks like here is I'm kinda splitting based on are they a graphic design user or product design? Two different products.

The other kind of pro tip, and if we think back to the data that we were looking at at the start, Actually, before I go there, what is the goal of the of your onboarding campaign?

This is probably I should have started with this. This is probably the most important part of building it out is what are we actually trying to get them to do? And what I'll say is a lot of the most successful companies I've seen, the goal is not always get them to pay.

Payment will come later if you get them to the value here in these first couple steps. So let's let's imagine that in our fake graphic design platform, somebody exporting a project shows that they've actually found that value. So we put the goal around somebody doing a first export.

So now as we go, we're sending people messages that say, you know, hey. Start your first project.

And then we're asking these little decisions. Have they actually created their first project? Yes or no? If they have, great.

Let's get them to, you know, ready to export. Make sure you export your first project. We move them forward. But if they don't, here's where kind of you can really dig into reminding them.

Hey. Remember to give your ideas life. Create your first project. And then we're asking again, did they do that first thing?

And the key thing here is you don't wanna move them too far forward if there's a really key step. So you can imagine if you were in, like, Photoshop, for example, if you've never started a first project, you're probably not gonna export a first project. So make sure that whatever your your key events are that you're using in onboarding kind of makes sense as you go down.

I'm gonna check chat really quick. Does anybody have any, other key onboarding recommendations? Would love to see those two. I'm gonna kinda move us towards retention. But if anybody has any thoughts there, throw those in the chat.

Okay. So you've got onboarding up and running.

And the cool thing too, especially in customer out, is you can actually flip on the metrics view and see where people are actually starting to do their first exports. So this is really important, that your team do some form of this kind of data analysis afterwards because you might find that some messages are actually getting people to start that first project or do that first export faster than others.

Again, the EdTech example maybe is users actually signing up for a first course, or maybe if you're in a two sided marketplace, maybe it's getting people to connect with the person on the other side of the marketplace, whatever that key activation step is.

Okay.

So we've got through onboarding.

Let's talk retention.

Chapter 3: Retention

So, again, you've worked so hard to acquire the customer.

You've worked so hard to get them onboarded based on what, you know, behaviors they're showing you. You've gotten them to some sort of first value.

You've worked hard, and that person has been expensive to get to this point. And so the key here is can we catch people early? Can we catch them before they actually are canceling and help them get back into finding value?

So I'm gonna pop back here, and we're actually gonna start with, segmentation.

So this is something I've seen people mock up churn risk segments.

And I think the really interesting part is people might show you that they're not finding value in a few different ways. So, again, when you do that data planning, figure out what things or lack of things show you that somebody is at risk of churn. In this case, maybe we have somebody who has not signed in in the last week. It's kind of the core one.

And then we're saying, and they haven't done one of these these options. So maybe they, had viewed the pricing or the cancellation page. That's a pretty obvious one.

Maybe they had removed at least two teammates in the last fourteen days. Sometimes that shows that, you know, maybe that they're scaling down if you have kind of a business model, a product. You have multiple teammates in one account, that could be a telltale sign.

Maybe they've dismissed your product tours. They aren't, you know, finding that value in in what you're showing them. And maybe they haven't taken that core first step. So, again, this is all based on the this fake SaaS company, but you can kind of imagine what those might be for your business.

So if they meet any of that criteria, we're saying, hey. Let's count these people as at risk of churn, and let's engage them. So once we have this churn risk segment built out, we're triggering a campaign based off of it.

So what's the trigger?

Let's let's send this as soon as somebody meets that criteria of being at risk. And the key here is you wanna you wanna get in their inbox, you know, right away, that week, that day. You don't wanna wait because they might be kind of at that decision point where they're saying, are we gonna stick around with this product or not?

What another helpful thing is I've seen people say don't don't throw, like, an offer at them right away because that might not be the thing.

Special offers like a free, you know, free few months or maybe, you know, get a a fifty dollar gift card if you stick around for another month.

Sometimes those are good. Those can have a place in this journey, but a lot of times, folks are not necessarily worried about the price or the discount.

They might have just not found value in your product. We all can probably think of a product that we happily pay twenty dollars a month for, fifty dollars a month for, because it gives us the value that we're looking for. So folks have recommended to me that you start out with just a reminder to help show them where they need to get back in. And kind of the pro tip here is if you can send that reminder on their preferred channel, that goes a long way. So when you're onboarding someone, capture the information on what channel they like to be, reached out to on. That might be email. It might be SMS.

I always turn my push notifications on or off, but my wife likes to have them on. So, she might be more receptive to a push notification. I prefer email a little bit more.

SMS sometimes is a little bit aggressive, but sometimes there's a time and place for that. SMS is very intimate part of their inbox, but it can be a very effective part. So I think just asking somebody early what they prefer can then help you in this more of this churn risk space to make sure you get the message in front of them on the place that they're actually gonna take action.

So we've got this churn risk campaign reaching out to them.

What we're we're doing is similar to our onboarding campaign. We're just saying, can we get them to perform the event project export? Can we get them back in the platform and finding value again? And that's kind of what we're meeting as the success criteria.

What I will say, again, back to the the special offers, there may be a time and place for it. So maybe here in your next step, if they haven't done this, it's time to kinda roll out the next phase. And that might be offering them a free month, a discount, some sort of maybe a free session with your customer success team to help get them started. Try a few different offers here.

One of the most impactful versions of this that I've seen is, actually, they did a webinar with us last year. But the team over at Musora Media, they have a bunch of education apps for music learning. So you you sign into the app. You can learn piano. You can learn guitar. You can learn drums.

And they were noticing in their win back, that people were churning for a lot of different reasons. They simply put a, survey in their cancellation process, which a lot of you probably have this as well. And then all they did was they they built campaigns around the the key blockers that people outlined in the survey. And so if you're looking at this and you're like, oh my gosh.

This is getting a little complex. Do I have to have separate paths for every single reason somebody might churn? You don't have to start that way, but you sort of found that when they did that, it had an an outsized impact on keeping people around. So I think pay attention to why people are turning.

Try to make sure you have an offer or something that helps them with that blocker that they're experiencing.

And then if it makes sense, personalize a path in your, customer journey for that.

The goal is not to have unlimited paths. Unlimited paths in a campaign is a lot to maintain.

But if it is something that makes an impact, it's totally worth it.

Alright.

I'm gonna keep us moving here just for the sake of time and make sure we have time for Q+A.

Chapter 4: Value reminders

Again, please bring any questions, to the chat as well. But what I'm gonna call out here on our last one is the value reminders.

So you you're onboarding people. You're retaining people. You got those things flowing. Something that's gonna make everything easier is if you can keep your brand top of mind in a way that's not annoying, but does show your customers constantly that they're getting value out of your product.

So you might wanna there's different cadences you can, go with this. It might be a weekly reminder. It might be a monthly reminder. It might be quarterly.

Some companies just do an annual reminder, really effectively, kind of like Spotify does their Spotify rap where they show you all your usage. They show you what your, top, you know, songs you listen to were. It doesn't have to be that complex, though. And, really, the goal here is can we show somebody that they are getting value, so that if they start to forget or if they start to question, they realize, oh, yeah.

This this product's great. I'm getting value out of it, and let me hop back in.

So what we have here is we're triggering a personalized weekly progress report to people.

And in this case, we're setting this out once a week. We could change this up to every fourteen days, etcetera.

And it's a pretty similar message. This is something that should be low maintenance to get set up to start with and, hopefully, low maintenance to maintain.

But the core things here, and this looks a little bit wild, but I'll put it on the preview mode, is whatever those kind of key data points that we identified as part of our onboarding, part of our retention, you can actually repurpose those data points in a way that the customer can see. So maybe we are tracking their how many active projects they have, how many products they published or exported, I think was our our data point, and then how many teammates they have.

And then when we flip on the preview, again, these are all fake users, but you can see we're doing this little scorecard for our users. It's populating with how many projects they published, how many teammates they have.

And if we switch to a different person, we can see that those numbers will change.

And the key here this is the fun part. So I love these type of emails. I I love when companies send them. I love to look at how many unique words I'm using in Grammarly or if you use Strava, how many, you know, runs or bike rides you've been on.

So these are really fun for your customer. The nice part for you as the marketer is these are high value emails, but you can also throw in little subtle calls to action on each part. So maybe if somebody hasn't done a ton of projects, throw them a button that helps them get started again. Or maybe if, you know, maybe you've determined that having more teammates in an account helps keep them around longer.

Have your little call to action here be for them to add a teammate.

As a consumer, this doesn't feel overly sales y, like we're in your face trying to get you to do something because it's all about their stats. It's all about what they've accomplished. But as a marketer, you can secretly sneak in these little calls to action to help get them to more of that value and get them deeper into your product. So I love these type of emails.

Would love, I'm gonna scroll through the chat here because we're kind of wrapping up. But does anybody do any super cool version of this? Or I'd love to hear from the audience. What are the top kind of scorecard things that you count and add up for your users, and do you send these type of emails? I would love to hear results there.

Q+A

Alright. So I will actually pop back over, and then we can do some kind of scroll through the chat here.

Let me see. Let me scroll backwards.

Oh, Melanie, thanks for jumping in.

Tyler Cole, I'm gonna get to your question here.

For onboarding campaigns oops. It's jumping on me.

For onboarding campaigns, what are best practices on where to end the campaign, especially around the campaign goal? For example, in the example that we've seen, an important milestone was project export. Let's say a user is coming back five times in a week is the ultimate goal. Or having somebody come back is I'm reading it right now. Getting somebody to come back to your product five times a week is the ultimate goal as they understand the value enough to come back. Is it best as two separate campaigns or just one?

Yeah. So I'm actually I'll jump back to that campaign just as a nice visual.

Tyler, great question. I think that's one that we've kind of wrestled with as well is when do you split something into two campaigns?

I've seen people do it two ways, so I don't think there's a right answer. You could have a individual campaign for each of these key actions.

So maybe you have multiple actions that are equally valuable. So it could be like a project export or a teammate addition. Maybe both of those things, you've looked at the data. They're equally correlated to someone activating and staying on your platform.

I think that's a situation where maybe you have two different, campaigns sort of getting them to each of those. You also could see, even as I say it, there's it just depends on your business use case. I think you could do it here and get some pretty wild branching going on.

The one limitation would be if you're trying to drive two different actions in one campaign, you'll have to pick which one of those is more important because you can only set one one goal there. So if project export is the end all be all most important thing, maybe that that makes sense to have it in one campaign. If you have two different actions that you care about, maybe having two different campaigns that try to nurture them towards certain things will help at least show you, oh, yeah. This one's getting people to add teammates a lot more. This one's getting people to add, you know, export projects a lot more.

So I don't have a magic potion answer for you.

But one thing I will say is when in doubt, test it out. One of the cool things that, in customer. Io is you can do basic AB testing, but an another thing is you can actually take a whole experience.

So I'm gonna just select this whole onboarding campaign, and you can throw that.

Of course, it's gonna give me a little, heck doing it live. But you can throw that experience into one path and then build a different experience in another path. So if you wanted to test out a very focused project export path versus a very focused teammate added path, you could kind of do that and and see which one converts the best.

Awesome. I'm just scrolling through some questions here.

I know we're at the thirty minute mark. We're gonna hang around for a bit, as long as there's questions. So if anyone wants to stick around here.

K. We got some folks in the travel industry. Awesome.

Evan asking segment segment templates would be useful. Not seeing too much in the way of practical examples in the docs or the churn example on the screen.

Yeah. Let me pull up the churn example again, and we can also follow-up with screenshots or or other examples of these type of things after. So please don't hesitate to reach out to those emails that you received from us after this, and we can we can send over any of this as needed. But here's the churn risk segment again.

And this, I think, can be as complex as you want it. Again, maybe start with just a couple of those key actions or lack of actions that makes sense, and then you can always add to it as you go or add to it as you start to see certain trends.

For our onboarding, I know our growth team, focuses a lot on you know, when you open up customer for the first time, you've gotta do a couple of things to be able to use it. Get some sort of people into our platform, get some data in, and then actually set up and send the first message. So those are some of the, like, kind of four key things that we need a user to do. And you could do these in different orders. Some people wanna jump in and just start playing with the workflow builder that I've been in.

Honestly, that's how I usually test platforms is I get in and I wanna get right to the most fun part right away. So that's a great core action, but then we need that person to come back and actually add some people to the platform to send to. You also may be having more of your developer type who comes in and wants to get data into the platform first to test out all the data things, and then later, they send their message. We're totally fine with either direction.

So our growth team is kind of set up, couple different models for where somebody can go. So I would say as you I know we're talking about churn here, and I was kinda giving you an onboarding example. But as you build out any of these flows, I'd say be okay with a few different options because people are different. People like to approach products in different ways.

And if you can remove the friction of trying to get them to do the exact thing you want and just kind of adapt to how can I get them what they want the fastest, I think that's where you kind of cut out, some of the stuff that might be blocking somebody from finding success?

Akshay, yes. We can definitely send over the deck, afterwards. Happy to do so. Yep. And recording. Thanks, Jenna, for chiming in. Recording will be sent out too.

Scrolling through questions in chat. Does anyone else have anything on their mind? I'd love to if anyone has any things that I missed, that have been really impactful for your business. Would love to see those in chat.

Let's see. What else is interesting?

One thing I will say so something that's interesting about customer owned if if you're a customer owned user, maybe you're already using this feature.

But one of the biggest challenges sometimes in businesses is that people are related to other people. People are related to companies. Like, I am a user within Customer.io.

We actually rolled this out last year, our objects feature, which basically lets you kind of associate, people with non data things. So you could see this if you if you're a SaaS company, the classic one is people within companies. So maybe a company upgrades and you wanna send all users at that company a message.

You can kind of manage that data relationship so you can say when account takes this action, send everybody this.

This has been super helpful to me as an end user as well because maybe you have one person at an account is in a trial. One person is at this webinar today, and it's difficult to use all that context in your messaging. So, this kind of data relationships type feature lets you save whatever kind of data object you want and then associate it with with people. So as you can see, this fake person, Joseph Barbara, would fall under any kind of the campaigns we wanna trigger associated with this rat coach company name.

This is really cool, and I don't think there's too many other players in the space, doing this.

And if if you're looking at this and saying, I don't know how I'd use this. Other good use cases are if let's say you're back to the fintech example. If you're a fintech app and people are following certain stocks and you wanna trigger things based on when that stock price moves or something, instead of having to save the stock on every single user who likes that stock, you simply just have to associate the person with that stock. And now whenever that stock has a change, you could trigger that message to them. You could also imagine it like a university or in if you're an EdTech company, if you have a course, whenever that course has an update, you can trigger all the students within that course, that same message or that same that same customer journey.

Oh, here's a good question.

Akshay, was curious how you recommend pulling data for the gamification campaign.

Should we be updating the customer profile and Customer.io, or should we be pulling dynamic data from an endpoint per email?

Let me go back to that just as a visual.

There we go.

Okay. So we've got a few data points in this example.

We've got the active projects data point, number of projects that someone's published, and teammates.

So the question is, should you actually, let me go back to the the exact question here. Should we be updating the customer profile and customer IO with all this type of info, or should we be pulling dynamic data from an endpoint, basically going out to a database or something and pulling it back in?

Actually, you're gonna not like my answer, but I think it depends, what you and I think it depends on what is your team equipped to do.

If maybe you don't have a bunch of developer resources to help set up a new integration of this sort of stuff, you can pull this off by just doing a, simple CSV upload and download. I'd say, in that case, it's it's probably better if you're doing these weekly up or, like, making them a monthly end of the month thing or an end of the year thing because, obviously, you're manually uploading a list and then sending the message.

So I think if it's not too often, you can get away with that. But if you're wanting to send, like, the the daily update or the weekly update, then, obviously, I think you've gotta, integrate that data into Customer.io, in a dynamic way.

If you're asking, do you want it on the customer profile, or do you just wanna bring it into the message with, like, a webhook or something?

Again, probably depends, whatever works best for your business. I like having it on the customer profile. This actually the user I clicked into does not have the best dataset, so I clicked the wrong one here. But I like having it here because then the rest of the marketing team who maybe is not very technical, you've kind of unlocked their ability to to bring it in in a way that doesn't require coding. It doesn't require excessive technical ability.

So my preference is whenever possible, get it on the user profile, get those, you know, events coming in that somebody is doing, and then you can go from there.

One thing that you can also kind of hack, again, if you're if you have limited developer resources or if you as a marketer as a nontechnical marketer kinda trying to do this yourself, you can actually update people based on what they're doing or what you already have in Customer.io. So say every time we wanted every time Roxanne added a teammate, we wanted to update a number on her account. Maybe she has her number of teammates number, for example, teammates on account.

We could kinda build a a simple, easy workflow here that says teammates on account.

I'm not gonna do this live because I'll probably mess up the little formula, but you could say to, you know again, this is not good liquid, but add plus one whenever, you know, she performs that event to that attribute.

So there's some ways to hack it.

Cool. Just scanning through a couple more questions.

Jason, thanks for tuning in. Yeah. We can look at some gaming templates that we have and and send some of those over.

Tyler, would be awesome to have customer help power this type of report. All the events are already in the platform. Feature request. Love it. Thank you, Tyler. Yeah.

I feel like this one is a pretty standard one that lots of businesses are running and finding value in, so that would be really cool to have this kind of be a a pretemplated pretemplated version. I'll definitely pass that along to the product team.

Asks, do you recommend any course for beginners?

I'm guessing on kind of, like, marketing automation topics. If anyone has anything there, in the chat, chime in. I know Reforge has a ton of good courses, online courses. Sure. Other folks probably have some recommendations as well.

Yeah. Which course on Reforge? I actually haven't done a Reforge course, but there is an interesting one on experimentation, and then there's some interesting ones on growth marketing.

Karan, let me ask a teammate. I know I have a teammate who's taken, some of those series, so I'll get back to you on that.

Alright, y'all. Well, we are coming to the end.

So thank you so much for tuning in. I'll pop back up here.

Yeah. This has been fun. I hope you got something valuable out of it. Again, a lot of these things are just examples, but examples that we pulled from working with a ton of different companies in a ton of different industries.

So I hope whether or not you were kind of relating to the SaaS business model that I was kinda using as the fake company, You can pull those examples whether you're in fintech or we had some folks from the travel industry here today. I hope you can find some of those actionable things. And, really, the core to it is what are those most important data points, and can we build our campaigns around getting people to those or catching them when they aren't getting to that those value points? I had to simplify it down into some keys.

But thank you so much for joining us today. We're actually gonna send out a follow-up email here that will trigger from customer l, of course, an hour after, this event ends, and that'll have some follow-up resources. And then for anybody who asks kind of those specific questions around, examples and templates, we'll kind of follow-up with you as well. Please respond to that email that that comes from us here in an hour if you would like us to send over anything else specific, we'd love to to be as helpful as we can.

Alright. Thanks, everybody. See you soon.