Too often, companies blanket their lists with emails that treat everyone like a prospect who needs education, or someone unaware of the problems their product solves.

They send email after email, packed with great content and stories, and don’t get deals to close.

They forget that someone who’s aware of your product, its features, and how much it costs requires a different kind of messaging—they don’t need education, they need to be sold to.

This is a guest post from the team at Airtable. Read more on the Airtable blog

Talking to your customers helps you build better products. It’s the most direct way of figuring out what problems your customers have and how to solve them before inking...

Today isn’t just any ordinary Tuesday.

With Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday kicking off the holiday shopping season, nonprofits around the world unite to mark the beginning of the charitable season. This global movement dubbed #GivingTuesday encourages individuals to donate their time, money, and talent to their favorite causes.

While charitable giving did uptick to $390 billion in 2016 (a 2.7% increase from the previous year), nonprofits still struggle to maintain fundraising engagement and drive volunteer participation to their organizations.

Similar to their for-profit counterparts, nonprofit teams thrive when they tell compelling stories to their audiences. Network for Good reports that 55% of nonprofits experienced a positive impact in fundraising because of great storytelling.

Nonprofits like Watsi and DoSomething are taking storytelling to the next level. Through personalized messaging, these organizations boost audience involvement — and we’re proud to help make that happen in Customer.io. Let’s take a look at their journeys…

Most users go off the rails from our best-laid plans. And if your lifecycle communication falls off a cliff into silence after signup or fails to strike a chord, the result is indefinite derailment, abandonment and churn.

So we try to get users to do what we want them to do, telling them to “do this” and “click that” and “let us know if you need help with the thing you don’t know or care about yet” — and that’s the problem. Our message is wholly based on what we want and assume. This is the crude railroading approach, as we explain in our post on lifecycle campaign lessons from Dungeons & Dragons. “Railroading”, in D&D, refers to the frowned-upon practice of trying to force players into a pre-written plot, when the fun of the game is in collectively creating the story. Many ineffective lifecycle emails take this approach, coming off as annoying and tonedeaf, because they’re not taking real account of the recipient’s needs.

Email bombardment is a fact of life. That’s why you can’t send random blast emails and expect a response. Your emails get lost and buried in your customers' inboxes.

That’s where triggered lifecycle emails come in. Lifecycle email campaigns work to...