How Hey Jude tripled their trial-to-paid conversions with Customer.io
Hey Jude saves people time and money with a 24/7 virtual assistant service that can take care of pretty much anything. Scoring a table, booking a trip, nabbing concert tickets, getting the perfect last-minute gift — Hey Jude makes it easy to get anything you need, anytime.
That kind of promise relies on personalized service and adaptability. So naturally, Hey Jude turned to Customer.io to make their messages as attuned to customer needs as their service.
Going beyond onboarding for higher conversions
Hey Jude originally implemented Customer.io just to handle basic onboarding: a welcome email and a message after users submit their first request.
But the company quickly realized that Customer.io could be much more powerful. “Our use of Customer.io morphed into actually trying to influence user behavior,” says Marcus Smith, Hey Jude’s Director & Innovation Architect.
“Our conversion rate from free trial to paying member was 6% before using Customer.io, and now it’s around 22%.”
Behavioral messaging helps them nudge customers along free trial user to paid subscriber. Marcus explains: “This is what I quite like about Customer.io. If someone submits their first task and doesn’t submit another task, we automatically fire off an email to say, ‘Hey, did you know you could do x, y, zed,’ or ‘Why don’t you load your card and do a transaction through us and see how beneficial that is to your life?’”
This helps customers get genuine value from the app and motivates them to convert to paying subscribers. “When they use our app to make a transaction, they really get the wow factor and see how the service saves them time.”
Hey Jude triggers an email to remind users of their remaining free tasks.
This targeted behavioral messaging approach has driven terrific results. “Using Customer.io has been awesome in helping conversions,” says Marcus. “Our conversion rate from free trial to paying member was 6% before using Customer.io, and now it’s around 22%.”
From easy implementation to ongoing improvements
Easy implementation was key in getting great results fast, as the team at Hey Jude didn’t have a lot of experience with behavioral data before they started using Customer.io. “The API was just incredibly easy. I think it took us half a day to set up, max,” says Marcus. “So we could quickly start pushing information up, and it was a piece of cake to start using it.”
By using Customer.io’s webhook action, Hey Jude also triggers push notifications. “It’s important that Customer.io is more than just an email system,” Marcus comments.
“The API was just incredibly easy. I think it took us half a day to set up, max.”
The power of segmentation in Customer.io gives Hey Jude lots of ways to improve. “The way we communicate through Customer.io is really good, so we’re going to expand it even more,” Marcus notes. “We’re planning to do some propensity modeling and machine learning to put people into certain segments and communicate in different ways based on that—we’re about to set up a heck of a lot more workflows!”
And because Customer.io provides rich analytics, Hey Jude can build on their success with ongoing improvements based on solid data. “We get reasonably good email open rates, but we want higher click-throughs,”’ says Marcus. “So we can actually analyze why we’re not getting conversions and have now started doing A/B testing on our campaigns.”
Driving better customer support with internal communications
Customer.io also serves as a customer intelligence tool to keep your team in the know and responsive to customer needs. “We use it as an internal tool too, which has been incredibly helpful,” says Marcus. Hey Jude asks customers to rate their satisfaction after each task, and Customer.io sends an alert to the team if a customer isn’t happy.
“If a task gets one or two stars, Customer.io fires off a Slack message to the team so our staff can call the client within minutes,” Marcus explains. “So aside from the customer tool, it’s actually great for us because we can fire off triggered campaigns internally, based on user behavior in the system that we might otherwise miss.”
When customer rates a task poorly, Hey Jude sends a follow-up email plus alerts the internal team via Slack notification.
Using Customer.io to support internal customer service needs is a clever way to get even more value from the tool, and another great example of how Hey Jude responds to customer behavior with targeted communication that drives conversion and retention. With their behavioral messaging strategy and the power of Customer.io, it’s no wonder Hey Jude’s free-to-paid conversions are soaring.