Early on in the life of StatusPage.io, their conversion rate from trial to paid sat at 5%.

When you’re a new company, no one knows about you. You move mountains to get 100 people in the door. Thirty days later, only 5 of them become paying customers, and you have to get back to mountain-moving to bring in another 100 people. That can hurt.

The bright spot for StatusPage.io was that when prospects did dig into the product and go through the somewhat lengthy setup process, they stuck around. In the life of the company, average monthly churn has never gone above 3%, and over the last 8 months, they’ve performed at 1% churn.

The StatusPage.io team knew that they’d built a useful product that filled a real need. They just needed to get customers to really try the product to get to that realization too. So they turned their focus to improving their trial onboarding, and those changes ultimately increased their conversion rate by a whopping 2.4x from 5% to 12%.

Here’s how they did it.

Quantifying Real Usage

StatusPage.io makes it easy to communicate your service’s server status to your customers and your team. (We use StatusPage.io for our own status page here at Customer.io.)

Customer.io’s status page

The activation focus during StatusPage.io’s onboarding period is getting customers to set up this public-facing web page. In fact, you won’t get prompted to pick a plan and start paying for the service until this page is ready and you hit “Activate My Page.”

The team noticed that certain concrete steps taken during onboarding correlated highly with conversions from trial to paid. Actions like adding a metric to display on the page, adding a “chatops” room for internal communication on server status, and inviting several team members indicated that the user was actively using the product and integrating it with their systems.

This insight gave the team the idea that drove their subsequent onboarding design and 2.4x improvements.

They created an “activation score” for each user that tracks onboarding progress. When users perform specific actions in the app, their activation score increases. More significant setup like adding a team member is weighted more heavily than a smaller task. While the number isn’t incredibly scientific, it’s incredibly useful and lives in the company’s admin dashboard to provide context when chatting with customers and for lead scoring.

What’s most important about the activation score is that it gives the company a focal point — one single number that they aim to maximize for each user during onboarding.

The Drip Campaign that Drives 2.4x Conversions

To maximize their activation score, StatusPage.io’s created its drip onboarding campaign in Customer.io to focus heavily around video walkthroughs that show off just 5 features in the app.

• Day 2 and then day 30 if no action: Add StatusPage.io activity to team chat
• Day 3 and then day 45 if no action: Set up metrics
• Day 5 and then day 60 if no action: Set up third-party infrastructure component status
• Day 12 and then day 75 if no action: Create an incident template
• Day 16 and then day 90 if no action: Create a component group to organize page

When a trial user watches a video about a feature and then sets it up on their own page, their activation score increases.

In the past, StatusPage.io had included case studies and links to blog posts in their drip series. But switching to these more feature-focused emails made more sense for their trial users. Why? CEO and co-founder Steve Klein explains, “People who sign up have at least bought into the idea of having a status page or get why it’s important.” So the goal of the onboarding emails is to get people to try as many of the key features as possible, not necessarily to provide additional context, background, or philosophy.

Notice that even though their drip emails could amount to as many as 10 emails, the campaign isn’t scattershot. Each pair of emails corresponds to a single feature. And the second email in the pair is conditional, so that it only gets sent if the prospect didn’t convert and carry out the desired action.

In general, people who have an activation score above a certain threshold within the first few weeks after signing up are significantly more likely to convert to paid. Nevertheless, the fact that they continue to win customers 90 days after first signing up to try StatusPage.io speaks to the power of steady communication around your product’s value prop.

Perhaps what’s most motivating about what StatusPage.io accomplished is that it isn’t terribly complicated and didn’t involve complex regressions and statistical analysis. It’s knowing your customer, making simple and actionable objectives, and experimenting to find out what works.

Not only does increasing your conversion rate 2.4x mean that you’ve massively boosted your revenue, you also gain some precious breathing room. StatusPage.io team doesn’t need to worry about conversion rate as much, and that’s a freeing feeling, especially compared to those mountain-moving days.

“We feel [that our conversion rate] is really great so we’ve been able to concentrate on other things,” Steve says. With that, the StatusPage.io team is able to put more love and value into the core product and keep growing their business.

Do you structure your onboarding emails around features? Share your thoughts and experience with us in the comments!

Photo: Raimond Klavins/Flickr

VideoBlocks has A/B tested millions of emails — and that’s just since 2013 when Bill Zhang joined the company as its director of lifecycle marketing. What has he learned? “Every rule that they say is a best practice, I can give you five examples of why it’s not,” he reports.

Testing is huge at VideoBlocks, which provides a subscription service for downloading stock video, backgrounds, and effects (its sister sites, GraphicStock and AudioBlocks, provide images and sound). In fact, being data-driven is a stated company value — and it’s this approach centered around data, testing, and iteration that’s helped build this fast-growing, multimillion dollar company.

“We test something and if it works, we go with it, even though it might be the most ugly creative or template,” Bill explains. For VideoBlocks, continuous email testing is a way to listen, find out what the customer wants, and keep steering towards more relevance — which, of course, is the key to successful email marketing.

What VideoBlocks Learned from Testing Millions of Emails

1. Length

Typical advice for emails is to keep them short, limit choices, and direct recipients towards clear calls-to-action.

But through testing, Bill found that for GraphicStock, this didn’t hold true. Here’s one of their lifecycle emails:

“It’s a long template,” Bill explains. “It has eight huge banners and takes about two or three scrolls on the mouse, so it’s not a direct one-button, one-CPA, click-now type of email — but it converts at twice the rate as some of our other emails.”

2. Photo in Email Signature

For some onboarding emails, the company features a customer representative’s face in the signature to humanize the message and to help build trust with new users.

They A/B-tested whether showing a female or male customer representative would make an impact. The answer: it depends. It turns out that for Videoblocks, the female picture won, and for GraphicStock, the male picture won.

3. Subject line

Often, marketers want to get clever or pique curiosity in email subject lines to grab readers’ attention amidst the sea of inbox message. But sometimes, the simplest approach wins.

Bill reports, “We found the hierarchy is that direct response [copywriting] is the best — it’s ‘Come get your free stuff or ‘Download these awesome things.’ Second are pun-ny, humorous, funny subject lines.”

Take Advantage of Your Own Data

Sure, VideoBlocks’s testing results in interesting insights about email marketing – but more importantly, the practice sheds light on their customers.

When first creating drip campaigns for GraphicStock, for example, they basically plugged in what they’d been using for VideoBlocks users and just changed the logos. “They didn’t do very well — no surprise there — because it’s a totally different audience,” Bill laughs. “But we were like, ‘Hey, it’s the same business model. Why can’t we just do the same thing?’”

After digging into why they were seeing such contrasting results, they realized that GraphicStocks users — many of whom downloaded images for smaller-scale use, like a PTA newsletter or an Etsy shop banner — needed more proactive guidance. In contrast, the self-sufficient video crowd required a lighter touch.

The topic of email testing often gets wrapped up in all the things you can test — but the whole point of the practice is to use it to listen to, learn about, and ultimately deliver more value to your customers. It’s s continuous feedback loop.

As Chad White from Litmus points out, you gain some of the best knowledge about how to drive results by turning to what’s already in front of you:

[T]he data that is most relevant to your company’s future success is your own data. Especially in the Age of Big Data, marketers have tons of information about their subscriber and customer behavior at their disposal.

Bill agrees. “It’s about being patient and not just taking a cookie-cutter approach. Saying
‘Apple does this, or Amazon does this, and therefore I’m going to do the same thing,’ can just lead to it tanking, and you don’t know why.”

What lessons have you learned lately about your audience from A/B testing emails? Share in the comments!

Photo: Jason Devaun/Flickr

Are you letting your true colors shine through in your emails or are you too afraid to let them show?

Businesses often fall into the trap of making their first emails product-centric and come up short on personality. They throw a bunch of features, links, and stock words at recipients without securing them to the “why” driving their product and company — and that’s an opportunity wasted.

When people sign up for your service, they’re excited to learn more about you. They’ve voluntarily opened a brief but valuable window of opportunity to make a positive long-lasting impression, even before really getting started. By telling your customers who you are and sharing your company’s mission and purpose in your first emails, you provide an immediate way to connect.

Yes, it’s email marketing according to the wisdom of Cyndi Lauper, who sings of seeing “Your true colors, and that’s why I love you.” Your true colors help people figure out how they feel about you — and your first few emails provide pivotal moments to let them show.

When Product-Based Welcome Emails Fail

The point of a welcome is the person being greeted, not the greeter. That’s why welcome emails that overfocus on product usage fall flat.

When Groove tested hundreds of emails to optimize their onboarding messages, they found that centering welcome emails around the product proved to be the least productive approach. Why? Product-based emails usually reflect the company’s priorities instead of the customer’s.

Let’s look at Groove’s old post-signup welcome email:

As Groove CEO Alex Turnbull admits, this email contains “useless product tidbits that had little to do with what the customer actually wanted.” And it showed in the metrics, with open rates of 28% and overall trial-to-customer conversion rates of 8%.

From this email, you’re left wondering who Groove is and what it’s all about. Nothing in the message — from subject line to body copy — really acknowledges that the recipient is somebody new to the Groove universe, besides the command to create a mailbox. This email communicated what Groove wanted rather than helping people understand why they would want Groove.

Avoiding Your Product as the Key to Revealing Who You Are

What did work for Groove? Surprisingly, the welcome email that outperformed all the rest used a call-to-action that didn’t ask recipients to do anything in the product.

In fact, it doesn’t really talk about the product at all.

Instead, it establishes a personal relationship between the company and the customer through Groove’s mission, “to help small businesses grow.” The rest of the email focuses on how Groove can best help make that a reality.

The “true colors” company mission anchoring this welcome email isn’t an abstract notion, nor is it totally untethered to the product. The message provides context for the product by:

• Showing, not just telling Groove’s value — personalized service — by establishing a personal connection with the trial customer.
• Starting a conversation around the product by asking trial customers why they signed up for Groove to identify specific needs and gain qualitative customer data.
• Planting the product seed — setting the stage for subsequent product emails in the onboarding sequence.

It’s simple: write not about what you want from your customer but what your customer wants from you. Product emails are me-centric. Connecting introductory messages with your mission and vision help make them customer-centric.

You have more than one chance to talk about specific product features and actions you’d like people to take in a trial period. Lead with your company’s purpose, and you’ll make an impression that will stick in your customer’s mind and frame the onboarding interactions to come.

How to Win Customers By Sharing Your Company’s Purpose

1. Garner trust through transparency.

Effectively communicating your philosophy helps gain trust — one of the core assessments your new customers make in their purchasing decision.

Check out how this works in Ello’s welcome email:

Ello positions itself as the anti-Facebook, a social network you can trust with your personal data because they refuse to show ads. They prove this by committing to that vision front and center. In fact, it’s nearly entirely on the back of this origin story that got Ello to over 1 million users and $5 million in venture funding.

It’s not uncommon for B2C companies like Ello to rely on philosophical notions or mission-based marketing in their outreach (think of companies like TOMS or Starbucks),
but why should the case be different for B2B companies? Here’s a B2B example from iDoneThis:

Like Ello, iDoneThis explains its mission in their welcome email, but with an even more personal message from the founders. New signups gain an understanding of why iDoneThis exists for them and experience the transparency of a company that leads with its origin story and welcomes conversation from the get-go.

2. Create product differentiation by framing with vision.

Sharing your most basic beliefs, concepts or attitudes sets you apart from the crowd. These “true color” details of your company’s philosophy and reason for being are unique to you.

For example, the writing app and productivity space is extremely crowded, but BlankPage zooms in right away on its mission: to reach your writing goals and write more than ever before.

BlankPage has some neat outlining and editing features, but highlighting those in the first message risks getting muddled in a crowd of other writing and word processing products. Instead, they highlight their vision in a way that directly connects with the motivation of the reader, which also sets up a lens for understanding any features written about or experienced in the future.

3. Identify your tribe.

It can be scary to come right and say who your product is for, because you’re afraid of losing customers who don’t fall into that group. This is especially tough for young companies who feel incredibly grateful for any customer they can get.

The problem is that the more that you try to market your product as being for everyone, the more difficult it will be for people to connect.

This onboarding email from Freckle doesn’t just give an identifying shout out to its target customers: agencies and freelancers. It sympathizes with the greatest struggles that they face. When you read this email, you get the sensation that you’re using a product built by people who understand your pain firsthand, and that’s a powerful affinity to build.

4. Build a long-term relationship by selling the vision

Window shopping these days can take the form of signing up for something without being really ready to buy. Someone trying your product today might not be ready to use it in that moment. Or people try your product as it is today and find that it’s not quite what they’re looking for — but the need may very well persist.

Establishing a connection over your company vision paves a clearer path forward. Build for the long-term with your audience instead of getting caught up in short-term conversion. Quip’s welcome email illustrate this point. Their vision is to be the first productivity app that really works well across every device.

Say that Quip didn’t quite yet have a feature that you needed. Knowing Quip’s goal to build support across all devices, you’re more likely to go back the next time you’re considering productivity suites.

Plus, by sharing your company vision, you build a hook for your reactivation and win-back emails. Every time you improve the product in a way that serves your vision, you have an opportunity to trigger a message to people who never converted to check in with them on how you’re making more progress towards fulfilling your company vision.

If you never include your company vision, then you throw away better chances to reconnect, and your trial periods will be one-and-done.

Show and tell your true colors by sharing your company philosophy, your passion, and your vision — beginning with your very first messages. That’s a powerful way to “start with why,” as Simon Sinek puts it, to connect with people, build a strong brand, and make a lasting impression.

What’s your company’s purpose? How does it affect the way you approach new customers?

Photo: Mike Bitzenhofer/Flickr

Once upon a time, email marketing was all about email blasts. You’d set up a single message to broadcast to the masses, rinse, and repeat.

Now, this “batch-and-blast” method of bulk-sending promotions willy-nilly to any email address you can get a hold of is obsolete. Not only are there technical capabilities to easily segment and target our messages, we’ve developed a smarter understanding of effective email marketing.

Despite this, the lingo and attitudes of batch-and-blast haunt the way many people still talk and think about email today. Think about it: “blasting” people with email or employing the ol’ “spray and pray” approach uses the language of violence and recklessness. Marketing isn’t a war but a process of persuasion, getting people on your side rather than assaulting them.

The supposed collateral damage of batch-and-blast actually harms your email marketing performance. It subtracts rather than builds goodwill, it’s counterproductive to your deliverability, and it’s just not a smart way to work.

So what’s the modern, more peaceful, model for how to approach email marketing?

Moving Beyond Batch-and-Blast to Message/Market Fit

Batch-and-blast’s focus on the outward action of broadcasting skews your goals to aim for quantity instead of quality and indicates a lack of regard for your recipients. As email marketer Kristin Bond explains, even using the term “blast” signals a lack of understanding of email marketing:

To me, when someone refers to an email as a blast, what they’re really saying is, “Email marketing is easy, and any idiot with a Constant Contact account can do it. It requires no skills at all, and isn’t a field that people spend years learning and specializing in.”

The problem with any batch-and-blast mindset is that it inherently disregards the fundamental rule of email marketing to always be relevant. Working on and with scale isn’t an excuse to be indiscriminate.

Whether it’s egocentrism or naiveté, the batch-and-blaster’s approach towards relevance is one of one-sided assumption. “Because it’s my message, of course it’s relevant. Take it or leave it,” goes the thinking. Yet that’s the equivalent of building a product that nobody wants.

In fact, let’s apply the concept of product/market fit from the general startup world to email marketing. According to Marc Andreessen’s definition, product/market fit is being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. That market is made up of people — and when you’ve made something that those people want, that’s what gives you the footing to scale.

Think about your messages as your product. Fit is another way to think about relevance that reminds you that the mere existence of a message isn’t enough and you have to think about who’s on the other end of the line. How much have you found out about your audience’s needs and desires in relation to your business? What are you doing to achieve message/market fit?

The power of email is that it can feel like such a personal channel — and still scale. And moving beyond the batch-and-blast approach means thinking much harder about the one-to-one experience instead of assuming that one-size-fits-all.

What That Means for Your Email Marketing Strategy

When your lodestar is message/market fit or relevance, that means that some popular questions on email marketing no longer apply:

• There is no overarching best time to send an email. In other words, the best time to send an email depends on the type of email, individual context, and at a group level, on your audience.
• Growing your subscribers or new user accounts has to be based around real engagement and permission. Forget about purchased, rented, and third party lists — which make more sense for batch-and-blast tactics.
• Even thinking about lists as static categories for email addresses is on its way out. Segmentation isn’t something that just happens once. Relevance is much more fluid.

There’s no trick or hack to relevance. You have to focus on content and context, connecting your business goal more closely with human beings in real life. Talk to and write for real people: your tribe, audience, users, customers — and the right segments for your message fit. Heed the wisdom of our resident email expert and customer success director Diana Potter to “Make emails, not war. Stop blasting your email. Send them. Gently, with great care, and thought.”

There are already so many negative feelings of anxiety, nerves, and annoyance swirling around our voluminous inboxes and thoughtless, outdated marketing approaches. It’s no wonder that the general populace recoils when they think about their email. A bit of care and consideration will go a long way.

What’s one of your pet peeves about email marketing? Share with us in the comments!

Were you nodding along to this post? Here are 33 email recipient segmentation ideas to inspire your strategies for message/market fit!

Photo: Luc Viatour

Are you preaching to your email choir?

Let me explain. While the phrase “preaching to the choir” usually suggests a waste of time trying to convince people who are already on your side — when it comes to marketing, most people have the opposite problem. They’re trying to broadcast their message to anyone and everyone — and that’s a waste of time and goodwill.

One of the most counterintuitive laws of persuasion is that the more you try to appeal to everybody, the more you end up connecting with nobody. Aiming for the indiscriminate masses dilutes your message. Writer Chris Guillebeau puts it well:

Too many marketers are like panhandlers. “Hey man, spare some change? Check out this great offer I’ve got . . . it’s just what you need, you’ll love it, really.”

Segmentation is the not-so-secret key to email marketing success, because it’s all about preaching to your choir. Segmentation is when you group people based on certain shared characteristics in order to customize your message to strike a chord. It’s a way to personalize your communication that’s still scalable.

Using segmentation to communicate with instead of communicate at your audience simply works to improve metrics across the board. Your opens, clicks, and conversions go up while unsubscribe and spam rates go down. Because you’re sending better targeted emails, you also end up sending less email. That means happier subscribers, better deliverability, and increased revenue.

How to Segment Your Email Recipients

The segmentation possibilities are many and range from simple to sophisticated. It all comes down to your email goals, data associated with recipients’ email addresses, and the creativity and hypotheses you have about that data.

At your disposal, you’ll have:

• information captured through sign-up forms
• details that users provide for a profile or settings
• data gathered by your site, app, and/or email marketing tool
• your observations, inferences, and theories based on this data

Here are some broader categories of data that are commonly used, mixed, and matched to create segments:

1. Basic biographical details

Basic biographical and demographic details include location, age, gender, job title or role, industry, education or income level, marital status, and language. While some tools can automatically track certain details like location, this type of data usually relies on people to proactively providing it at some point.

2. Interests and preferences

Grouping by interest, tastes, and preferences are a great way to better connect with readers. For segmentation purposes, consider interest in terms of:

• content: type of topics and media, format, delivery method
• product: categories, genres, grade, and any other way you classify your product/offering
• persona: attitudes, goals, needs, and persuasion preferences that make people tick

Again, collecting this data requires a combination of automatic tracking (of details like user behavior, preferred device, or referral source), self-segmentation by people providing details (like topic preferences), and analysis (creating and understanding personas).

3. Lifecycle stage

Grouping people based on your funnel and their customer lifecycle stage is one of the most effective ways to segment. A person’s level of interaction with your business directly affects the relevance of your message.

If you’re a segmentation newbie, Diana Smith’s 3-step framework of “discover, engage, and convert” is a great place to begin thinking about funnel stages. You’d want to segment newer users, for example, to teach them about how to get started with a key feature.

You can also dig deeper and segment based on the pirate metrics funnel, mapping segments to stages of acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue.

The approximate way to segment people based on lifecycle stage is to base groupings on sign-up or account creation date — and that’s the idea behind many automated drip campaigns. Even more effective, though, is to go beyond time elapsed since signup by incorporating behavioral data.

4. Behavior

Your message is the most relevant when it responds directly to individual activity. Real-time behavioral data provides for the most effective segmentation. Today’s segmentation is a far cry from static lists that require constant updating, syncing, and spreadsheets. Real-time, fluid groupings ensure your messages accurately flow along with your users’ experience, and your recipients are always up to date.

Well-known examples of behavioral data-driven segmentation come from the e-commerce world, with segments based on purchase history and events like abandoned shopping carts. But there are many different types of behavioral data, based on everything from pageviews, events and app actions, and email activity.

Here’s one example of a segment we use at Customer.io to trigger a behavioral email campaign to new users. It’s composed of anyone who hasn’t yet integrated with our app — a key activation task.

Using this segment ensures we’re only reaching out to people who haven’t completed the integration yet.

33 Segmentation Recipes

The point of segmentation is to make your user data useful, actionable, and helpful, considering your business goals and your users’ needs. It’s all about understanding the state of the relationship (are people happy/active, blah/inactive, upset?) and how to make them happier (what do people want/need/like?). Segment with purpose and deliberation.

Since segmentation is tied so closely to your goals and the needs of your base (customers, audience, choir) — effective segmentation is very case-by-case. Nevertheless, we thought we’d help kick off your brainstorming with a few segmentation ideas.

First, a review — segments involve characteristics based on one or a combination of: attribute; action/event; frequency; and/or time. Don’t be afraid to mix and match to create segments such as:

• subscriber for x months and opened 5 emails with the past 60 days
• logged in in the past 30 days and hasn’t received an email from us within the past 3 days
• recently downgraded + wasn’t sent a promotion in the 7 days

Or think about overarching segments that combine subgroups. Here’s how we currently segment our “best customers”:

Now, without further ado, here’s a list of 33 ideas to get your segmentation started!

• has logged in within the past # days
• performed key activation action
• installed app or extension
• did X task # times
• used X feature Y+ times in the past # days
• purchased # times in the past # days
• attended # events + lives in X location
• used / didn’t use promotion/coupon
• is a VIP
• clicked on CTA
• invited or referred someone
• call /demo requested
• nearing a quota / limit
• opened # newsletters
• put in a support request
• has not completed key task X
• hasn’t logged in in # days
• didn’t complete signup or purchase
• hasn’t upgraded
• hasn’t viewed upgrade page
• downgraded
• has not received email from us in the past # days
• type of user / plan level (e.g., new, trial, freemium, customer, power user)
• plan / subscription set to expire or renew
• plan or purchase price > $
• trial users who never subscribed or upgraded
• customer in danger of churning
• role (e.g., team administrator, manager, contributor, editor, coach)
• language is X
• is a user / customer in common with integration/promotion partner
• hasn’t put down a credit card
• blog reader
• referred from X promotion or source (e.g., came in from a twitter ad, a specific landing page, Product Hunt, etc.)

Have any creative segmentation suggestions? Share with us in the comments!