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How Livestorm closes the marketing automation loop with Customer.io

Livestorm makes it easy for companies to host better webinars. Hundreds of companies trust their service to power live sessions for tens of thousands of viewers each month—and their high customer ratings drive ongoing growth.

The challenge: scaling up with a small team

All those successful webinar streams are even more impressive when you see the size of Livestorm’s team: only ten hard-working people. “With just ten team members, we couldn’t do all it on our own,” says growth engineer Thibaut Davoult. “So we love using Customer.io for our customer relationships.”

Co-founder and CEO Gilles Bertaux adds, “As we grew, we needed to scale. We always try to really personalize our messages, but we also need to give the same level of onboarding, support, and service to every customer—without having to hire someone else.”

The solution: using Customer.io webhooks to close the marketing loop

“We’ve all had to try other emailing automation systems,” says Thibaut, “and Customer.io always wins in our discussion as to who’s best.” This is because Customer.io is about more than just sending email for the team. “Customer.io helps us a lot with email and onboarding,” says Gilles, “but the webhook action has become one of the top features that we use.”

Gilles explains how Customer.io has become so central to Livestorm’s marketing stack: “As soon as someone creates some kind of bond with Livestorm—a new account, a trial, or anything—their data goes into Customer.io. Then the whole lifecycle is taken care of from Customer.io automatically.”

Reflecting this lifecycle-first approach, Livestorm’s marketing tech stack is made up of a wide variety of tools—including Zapier, Pipedrive, Satismeter, Chartmogul, HelpScout, and productboard—not all of which easily integrate with each other. But Customer.io brings it all together. “The Customer.io webhook is a way for us to keep data unified across all our tools, even ones that don’t integrate with Segment,” Gilles says.

“In my previous experience, unifying data was a real pain,” says Gilles. “Now, Customer.io is really at the center of everything. It’s more than just an email tool—it’s marketing automation that closes the loop among all tools.”

Customer.io webhook action

NPS data from Satismeter now in Customer.io sent to Zapier

And this setup reduces friction as Livestorm expands. “It’s quick and painless to get new marketers up to speed with how Customer.io works, even if they don’t know much about adding logic to emailing or about HTML/CSS,” says Thibaut. “And it is much more efficient in the long run than to rely on strictly WYSIWIG solutions. It makes our lives so much easier!”

“The Customer.io webhook is a way for us to keep data unified across all our tools.”

The strategy: creating meaningful experiences and rewarding loyalty

That seamless integration of data and tools helps Livestorm deliver on their key marketing strategy: dynamic personalization that creates a meaningful relationship with every customer. “Now that we have hundreds of customers with really different backgrounds, we need to be specific in our messages,” Gilles notes.

One way they achieve that is by creating lots of specific attributes in Customer.io and leveraging them to send relevant messages, including personal touches like birthday greetings. This approach also helps Livestorm segment their users for more relevant messages.

Gilles gives an example of what they’ll say to someone who fits their ideal customer profile. “We can identify a customer that’s, say, a SaaS with between 50 and 250 employees, and send content that will actually speak to them — for example, an article on how to scale sales demos for SaaS. Also, if the person is a founder or the CEO, we’ll have a different approach specific to that role.”

Customer.io Slack action

Using Customer.io’s Slack action for an internal team notification

Rewarding loyalty is another key aspect of Livestorm’s customer experience strategy. “Each time they reach some kind of milestone—let’s say a thousand attendees or a thousand webinars—we send them a message and some goodie,” Gilles says. “It feels really cool to give customers a personal, meaningful interaction when they reach a milestone.

“I see Customer.io as a role model of what an email software should be.”

The success: converting 3.5% users within 12 days

Your first webinar on Livestorm is free, which means the trial has no defined end date and Livestorm still have to convince you to upgrade to a paid plan. That’s where lifecycle messages come into usher new users along and provide the support they need. Livestorm’s approach pays off in high customer engagement. Customers consistently thank Livestorm for their great onboarding and relevant content.

“Half that success is thanks to Customer.io being a tool that enables us to have that level of relevancy,” Gilles says. And the relevancy of their messaging translates into high conversion rates. An average of 3.5% (and 4% in France) of users convert from trial to paid subscriptions within the two-week window of the onboarding campaign sequence.

Customer.io Slack action

Upgrade campaign triggered to first-time webinar users

Livestorm looks to Customer.io as a crucial tool for building on that success. “I see Customer.io as a role model of what an email software should be,” says Gilles. “Having something that’s really simple and really powerful at the same time—that’s well-thought-out in terms of segmentation, templating, and workflow—is really cool, and I haven’t found it elsewhere.”

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