You’ve got your customer acquisition funnel dialed in. Your retention strategy is all plotted out. And you’ve got a warehouse full of customer data. So why aren’t enough people converting, and where’s all that churn coming from?
Chances are, your marketing messages just don’t line up with your customers’ actual needs in the moment. And when they don’t see immediate value in what you send, they’ll quickly walk away. That means you’re sacrificing a lot of time and money on campaigns that have no hope of converting at a high enough level.
Right Message, Right Time, Right Channel
Customer.io is a comprehensive automated messaging platform built to help marketers connect, convert, and retain customers for the long haul. Behind all the robust features of their platform is a simple, powerful idea: send messages that people actually want to receive.
Every business that serves customers has the challenge of making their lives better. Customer.io uses behavioral data to determine an individual’s intent, allowing companies to better help customers with the problems they came to solve.
Colin Nederkoorn, CEO, Customer.io
The secret recipe for achieving that: combine real-time data with customer profiles. Here are three of Customer.io’s key best practices for cooking up campaigns that convert.
- Listen to your data. It might seem like marketing messages are a one-way street, but your customers are actually talking to you all the time through their behavior. Every action someone takes on your website or in your product generates data; all you have to do is pay attention. That data tells you exactly where a customer is in their journey and what they need to do next to move through the funnel. The moment someone takes an action (or fails to do so), you can trigger a message that meets them where they are in the moment, nudging them forward.
- Make it personal. It takes more than a first name merge tag to make customers feel like you understand their needs. Truly personalized messages take into account what you know about someone (like purchase history or the last time they opened your app) with what they’re doing now (like viewing your cancellation page or using one of your product’s features for the first time). The combo of these two types of data is where powerful personalization happens — your message is truly personal because it delivers what a customer wants in real time.
- Follow the 4 Ws. You know your who (customer profile data), what (customer behavior data), and when (stage in the customer journey). The next step is to identify the where: which channel will most effectively get your message across. Too many marketers rely on email alone, but that’s not always where your customers are most receptive to your message. Say an app user completes a milestone and you want to deepen engagement with a congrats message. Do it right away with an in-app message! Or imagine you’re doing a 24-hour flash sale. Push or SMS lets customers know in time for them to take advantage of the deal. To drive your strategy home, layer messages across channels for maximum impact and engagement.
Why Customer.io? Efficient, effective automated messaging
Without the right tool, implementing best practices for high-performing automated messaging campaigns is labor-intensive at best, and impossible at worst. Customer.io is an all-in-one platform for marketers who want to translate ideas into campaigns that deliver the right message, at the right time, in the right channel — with workflows that save time and resources.
- People-centric view. Within Customer.io, person profiles track and store customer profile and real-time behavior information for each individual. This combination allows you to act on your data — building campaigns that align with each user’s journey and delivering highly personalized messages that engage and convert. You can feed in data from any platform you use to collect it, allowing you to leverage everything you know about your customers.
- Data segments. You can create behavior-driven customer segments that begin as soon as a person takes their first action on your website. Customer.io’s segmentation engine is incredibly flexible, so you can narrow down audiences based on any criteria you like and configure the conversion criteria that’s meaningful for your goals. Segmentation makes it easy to deliver highly personalized messages at scale.
- Cross-channel messaging. Customer.io brings together four key channels for engagement — email, push notifications, SMS, and in-app messages — because where you reach your customers matters as much as what you say. Every workflow can combine different types of messages based on the triggers you set, enabling you to effortlessly implement a consistent messaging strategy across devices.
- Workspaces. Make it easy for different departments and teams to collaborate with separate workspaces devoted to your different products, sites, or apps. You can create as many workspaces as you like, each with its own people, data, campaigns, and metrics. Role-based permissions ensure each contributor has access to exactly what they need to work efficiently.
- Real-time analytics. How do you know if your campaigns are performing? Customer.io shows you at a glance with a clear dashboard, and you can dive deep with analysis reports. Test hypotheses and experiment with every aspect of a campaign, and leverage your test results to optimize your strategy.
- Visual workflow builder. Building sophisticated automated messaging campaigns is easy with intuitive drag-and-drop functionality. Stitch together all the elements in one place: triggers, messages, time delays, and even reminders and notes for your team. You can use logic-based conditional statements to create branches within a single campaign, targeting customers with the just-right message based on their profile and behavior data.
See The Visual Workflow Builder In Action
Customer.io Success Story: Olivia
Olivia is a financial advisor app, powered by AI technology, that helps analyze customers’ spending habits and deliver personalized recommendations on how to better manage their finances.
- The challenge: As Olivia’s customer base continued to rapidly grow, their existing messaging provider wasn’t keeping up with the evolving needs of the company. Their previous platform yielded less-than-ideal testing capabilities and lacked sufficient reporting tools. Olivia’s marketing team began searching for a solution that would help consolidate separate systems to work more efficiently together, continue to scale with growth, and be cost-effective for their small-but-mighty growing business.
- The fix: Enter Customer.io, the platform that fulfills Olivia’s software must-haves: testing to gain maximum efficiency, segmenting audiences based on region/language, and harnessing data for personalized and targeted messaging.
Through Customer.io’s cohort testing capabilities, Olivia immediately made progress with its greatest primary activation challenge: getting customers to connect their bank accounts immediately after sign-up. As a result, Olivia found that asking customers to connect their bank account one day after signing up yielded a 5.4% conversion rate, compared to the previous 2.2% — more than doubling their conversion rate.
With Olivia’s products ranging across multiple countries, languages, and B2C/B2B products, Customer.io’s flexible segmentation created manageable workspaces. With separate workspaces, the marketing team was able to keep users’ information isolated and greatly reduce errors. From global audiences to B2B audiences, Customer.io can coordinate the separation of corresponding data and associated API calls.
Olivia’s previous practices in accessing data to fuel the segmentation process took up to two weeks. Once implementing Customer.io, Olivia was able to segment with just the click of a button. By creating manual segments through a user’s unique ID instead of email, concerns with long security protocols were no longer an issue, and Olivia now had easy access to accurate real-time data reporting.
The result: Olivia doubled its customer onboarding activation rate, and they now have the tools to test and verify hypotheses to drive the best results, as well as drive operational efficiencies as they grow.
Ready To Transform Your Marketing Automation Programs?
Colin Nederkoorn, Customer.io’s CEO and founder, shows you how it works in this walk-through.
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