5 Ways Hunter Amps Up Engagement With Segmentation
Hunter helps people find professional email addresses and use them to make meaningful business connections. After just seven years in business, the company has over 3 million users, several distinct products, and a variety of audience personas. And they do it all with a small-but-mighty three-person customer success team.
An intentionally minimalist organization that serves up major value, Hunter chose Customer.io to power their trademark hyper-responsive service at a scale. A couple of their latest wins:
- A re-engagement series that bumped open rates by nearly 50%
- An abandon campaign with a 47% conversion rate
The key to success has been Customer.io’s robust segmentation, which allows Hunter to send targeted, personalized messages to improve engagement at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Read on to discover five smart ways they’ve put it into practice.
Use case #1: Seamless, personalized onboarding
Initially, Hunter matched new users to one of four onboarding campaigns based on their sign-up location. Often, however, the location didn’t reflect the customer’s true needs. And managing four different campaigns was confusing and error-prone.
Customer.io’s segmentation engine changed the game. Hunter rebuilt the signup process, asking customers to indicate whether they planned to find, verify, or send emails, and used these choices to place them in separate segments. With the right data in place, they could create a single campaign that created a personalized experience for every customer.
“The segmentation enabled us to build a massive, unified onboarding campaign that helps us visualize all the emails we are sending and match them to every path users can take.”
–Giovanni L., Head of Customer Success, Hunter
Use case #2: Reengagement campaigns
Given Hunter’s many audience personas, flexible segmentation is crucial to increasing reengagement without high-pressure sales tactics. Today, every time a Hunter customer cancels service, they enter a segment that corresponds to their cancellation reason.
For example, the segment of users who cancel because a one-time email project is complete go into a campaign that emails them one month after cancellation, because it typically takes a few weeks for email responses to roll in. Since shifting to Customer.io, Hunter’s average open rate for reengagement campaigns has increased by half, from 37% to 55%. Even given Apple Mail’s Privacy Protection policy, this was an impressive increase.
Use case #3: Post-NPS engagement
Customer.io segments also help Hunter respond meaningfully to customer feedback. Customers’ numerical responses to NPS surveys move them into a segment that determines appropriate branching for the post-survey campaign. Detractors get different kinds of communications depending on whether they include comments with their rating, allowing Hunter to engage with frustrated customers in a human way. Hunter sends passives a message asking how they can improve, which creates a valuable source of data for their small team, as they don’t have much time for customer interviews. And by triggering a request for a review or testimonial for promoters, they nurture relationships and drive marketing efforts efficiently.
“Customer.io has allowed us to target different use cases and customers with different levels of happiness, even with a small support team.”
–Giovanni L., Head of Customer Success, Hunter
Use case #4: Seamless connection even after cancellation
Cancellations are a fact of life for freemium businesses, and Hunter is no different. In many cases, there’s little to be done. But if a customer feels the data Hunter provided was inaccurate, it’s critical to understand the problem.
Driven by Customer.io’s powerful segmentation engine, a user who indicates they canceled because they found incorrect data receives a personalized plain-text email, and an offer to book a personal phone call with Hunter’s Head of Customer Success. Thanks to the authenticity of the email approach and personal touch, customers frequently respond, which is pretty rare for cancellation campaigns.
Use case #5: Conversion boosting through education
Hunter uses Customer.io broadcasts to engage users who create draft emails without sending them. One day after the customer abandons the draft, Hunter sends an educational series explaining how the tool works and the steps needed to complete the action. The result? A fresh opportunity to convert, with a 47% average success rate.
Hunter’s next horizons
Now that their core campaigns are optimized, Hunter’s next leap is a French version of their service. They’ll be leveraging Customer.io’s Add Language feature to easily add a version of each message in French to the message library; then they can simply set a language preference attribute to automatically send emails in the correct language to every customer. We can’t wait to see what they do next. Bon chance!