How Mailgun Uses Customer.io’s Audience Sync to Focus Their Efforts on What Matters

Mailgun is an industry-leading email service provider (ESP) with a developer centric focus and product offering. Founded in 2010, Mailgun uses the power of its email API combined with its deliverability services to ensure their customers are getting the highest rates of deliverability in the industry.

Challenges with Ads

Historically, paid ads through Google have been the main focus of Mailgun’s paid media strategy, with two goals:

• Driving signups for their core email API product
• Driving leads for their deliverability services

Mailgun’s target buyer persona tends to be software developers.

“This crowd is very in-touch with the tech community and a traditionally tough group to market to,” Nick Lafferty, Mailgun’s Paid Search Manager, explained. “You’ll see competitors in our space getting trolled on Reddit and other places where devs hang out for their marketing tactics –– we have to be careful not to be that company.”

This makes it increasingly important for Mailgun to run authentic paid Google ad campaigns that speak to real problems their users are having. While Mailgun’s marketing team already had the ability to segment their specific audiences, the entire process getting these segments into Google Ads as a customer match audience was still entirely manual.

This meant manually uploading segmented lists as CSVs and pairing with the right messaging every day. The uploading alone takes away valuable time and effort that could be spent towards more meaningful tasks, like evaluating the performance of different campaigns or identifying new segments.

A New Focus with Customer.io

Nick is a newer member of Mailgun’s team and part of the refreshed focus and initiative into Maillgun’s paid media strategy. Additional spend, channels, and segmentation have all been a core focus, with the idea of building the Mailgun brand in the minds of its customers and driving conversions and leads for their sales team.

With these refined initiatives, Nick and his team were looking for a tool that could help them streamline their processes and provide opportunities to improve their already successful campaigns.

Utilizing Customer.io’s Segmentation and Ad Audience Sync, Mailgun has been able to refine its audiences to stay true to that authentic voice they want to maintain by creating messaging they know will resonate to that particular audience.

Before, Mailgun was having to manually organize, segment, and upload audiences via CSV files, their process is much more streamlined with the ability to have this done automatically, and they’ve even been able to create new segments because they know the current ones are always accurate.

“Customer.io’s Ad Audience tool has been an amazing way to keep all of my core audiences automatically up to date. I used to upload customer lists manually which was a huge pain and lead to gaps in ideal targeting” says Nick.

The Mailgun team is targeting current, active customers, sales hit-lists of high value prospects, and cross-sell opportunities. Since Customer.io updates these audiences hourly, Mailgun never has to worry about the wrong persona getting served the wrong ad.

“It really shines as a ‘set it and forget it’ tool, so I never have to worry if my audiences are up-to-date and I can focus instead on running the best possible marketing campaigns to those users.”

Spending Time on What Matters

So much of running a successful ads program has to do with being able to spend your time effectively and efficiently.

“That’s exactly what this tool lets me do,” said Nick. “The ad audience tool lets me get past the tedious and boring stuff and lets me spend my mental capacity on creating awesome copy, visuals, and ads––with a strategy I know will resonate. That’s what it’s all about”.