Top software analytics company grows multi-stage engagement with personalization at scale

Challenge

Personalize multi-channel messaging at scale

The software analytics company had more than 100,000 accounts in its SMB and mid-market segments, each with multiple users. And each of those users corresponded to a different persona: product managers, front-end and back-end engineers, executives, and many others.

But the growth team also needed to message to different customer lifecycle stages across the customer journey, from pre-sales to onboarding to post-sales support. Essentially, the team needed personalization along two different axes: customer persona and lifecycle stage. It realized this type of messaging strategy should be foundational for all customer segments, not just its smaller accounts.

“We started this project thinking about the long-tail of our customer base, but found we needed to scale significantly,” states the Senior Director Growth. “But when you consider these tactics for self-serve, such as personalization and automation and building a solid self-serve experience, everyone benefits.”

Solution

The Tray Platform connects customer data to messaging platforms

The company was already capturing behavior and usage patterns using its customer data platform Segment and was also recording major account changes in its system of record, Salesforce. But actually transforming this data to deliver personalized messaging at scale through Intercom and email would be an entirely different project.

Obviously, any kind of manual methodology was out of the question. Which meant that the team would have to decide whether to build or buy a solution.

“We’re fortunate to have extremely talented engineers. But like our customer support team, there are only so many of them, so we need to deploy them in the best way possible,” explains the Senior Director Growth. Instead of committing valuable development resources to build an internal solution, the team chose to search for another way to transform its customer data into personalized messaging, which led them to Tray.io’s General Automation Platform.

“At our company, we prefer to focus our developers’ efforts on building better products that delight our customers, rather than fixing internal processes. We’re probably not the only company that feels that way.”

Use Case

Sync customer data, CRM, data warehouse, and messaging

The company's growth team partnered with Tray.io’s customer success team to integrate customer data from Segment and account data from Salesforce into a centralized data warehouse, Redshift for data warehouse. To connect these applications, the team built an automated workflow on the Tray Platform to bi-directionally sync customer data among them.

The team tracked updates to customer records, such as a late-stage lead converting into a closed-won deal in Salesforce, or a new customer logging into the company’s platform for the first time as logged by Segment. The company then layered its analytics solution Periscope Data onto on top of its data to create real-time reporting for user changes, and export to CSV format.

The workflow also integrated this data on the back-end on a regularly-scheduled basis to update and tag customer accounts for personalized messaging to be delivered via Intercom. On the front-end, when new customers log into the company's platform, they’re greeted with personalized first-time welcome messages, new product feature descriptions, or new-user product tips.

Results

The company doubles open rates and increases click-through 600%

The company observed a measurable increase in engagement. “By connecting our growth stack, we personalized messaging at scale for hundreds of thousands of customers and doubled our engagement rates,” says the Senior Director Growth. In addition to increasing open rates 2x, the company also observed a 6x increase in click-through rates. The company was also able to better segment its customers to ensure high-value accounts were prioritized for customer support, while smaller accounts received an outstanding self-service experience.

In addition, the Senior Director Growth explains that exploring customer data has empowered his team to derive even more value from strategic accounts. “By monitoring product usage data for our enterprise accounts, we can see which ones are actually consuming their entitlement allowance,” they explain. “Accounts that aren’t consuming their allowance may be churn risks, which we can proactively address on the support side. Accounts that are consuming significant amounts of their allowance are potential upsell opportunities. All these insights help us drive more revenue and growth across all customer segments, not just smaller accounts.”

Next Steps

Driving even higher engagement and improving security

The growth team is already future-proofing the company against constant market changes with specific roles to manage automation-based responsibilities.

“I can see our marketing and sales operations teams taking advantage of these automation capabilities as well,” predicts the Senior Director Growth. “We have potential use cases like data enrichment for marketing, as well as GDPR-related security processes. We’ll continue to use the Tray Platform to help us integrate our cloud apps and automate processes, so we can keep using our resources wisely while delivering a world-class experience for our customers.”