Data-driven marketing case study for early-stage SaaS

Vishnu Vankayala
CustomerLabs
Published in
5 min readFeb 27, 2019

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A day doesn’t go by without a roadblock whether it’s a non-performing content, hit on the conversion goals, drop in the conversion rates, product adoption, customer messaging, support. Our approach with data-driven marketing is helping us fine-tune a lot of aspects of our business.

When we started our business most of the decisions were based on our own experience and assumption. However, after we start collecting a ton of data, we now know when we hit a roadblock where and what to look into.

Problem — 1: MRR is not growing

A good number of trials, however…

We’ve had a decent number of signups after our Appsumo launch. However, our conversion rate from free trial to paid conversions is a big problem. As I’m writing this article we’ve completed an audit and formulated a strategy to revamp our on-boarding experience.

When we started the audit we first looked into our funnel data, where is the biggest drop off and why is it happening.

Choices: Positioning to Developer or Marketer

Two types of customer profiles generally use our platform, a developer and a marketer. Though our vision is to help digital marketers reduce their dependency on external resources. However, marketers are not moving into the funnel which is hurting our revenue badly.

There’s a choice we had to make, either re-align the positioning towards the developers or stay focused on marketers. But, our vision is to help marketers so we did not want to re-align our positioning. The decision is to remain focussed on the marketers and help them.

When we decided to stick to our vision, we needed a way to improve our adoption. To take this decision, we should have our funnel metrics handy to define

Nail your Funnel to fix the conversions.

Our funnel looks like this: Awareness -> Trial -> Activation -> Paid

To be very specific, our event-tracking looks like this:

Awareness (Website Visit) -> Trial / Free -> Code-verified -> Recorded their first Action -> Tested an action (Aha Moment / Activation) -> Sent the data to Integrations -> Paid

Our definition is as follows:

Code-verified is an Marketing Qualified Lead. Recorded their first action is an Sales Qualified Lead. Tested an action is an Activated lead.

We use Action Recorder to track the customer data and their interactions across the customer lifecycle.

CustomerLabs Action Recorder Debugger Screen

From the tracked data above, we use Action Recorder’s Google Sheets Integrations to plot our funnels:

CustomerLabs Funnel

Once you nail your funnel, you’ll understand where to optimise the process.

Problem — 2: Bringing users back into the funnel using email

We use www.Drift.com as a messaging platform for reaching out to customers. Drift is an awesome tool, however, it needs to sync with our above funnel.

Events being synced with Drift in real-time

We run a five email onboarding sequence to re-engage our users if they drop off the funnel on the day-1.

All the above events which we’ve created using Action Recorder will be synced automatically with Drift in real-time.

In the Drift, we’ve created segments which matched similar to our funnels and started reaching out to our customers.

Engaging the users based on their funnel stage is way better than sending random emails to everyone.

What’s next in onboarding?

As I said earlier we are relying a lot on data-driven marketing, we will focus on in-app engagements and optimising the flow for the users using playbooks.

Onboarding Playbooks:

Our next release will have something called onboarding playbooks which will guide users to do their tasks. We are hoping these playbooks will play a major role in increasing conversion rates.

Problem — 3: Which blog content influences the awareness

This quarter we are doubling down our efforts on the content, however, our major issue has been which content engages the users and which content influences the user purchases while they on their buying journey.

We started tracking the users who are reading the blogs and signing up. We created an event called read_blog and track the users who are reading the content while in the purchasing funnel.

We use this data to find which blog categories are influencing users, and how they are consuming the content while they are on the funnel.

We also track the whole customer journey and have a look at this individual user journey.

This user landed on our website using www.google.com for the article woocommerce event tracking. The user then registered in less than 5 minutes and subscribed see the event plan_changed.

Customerlabs 360 view of a customer

If you’d like to drill down into detailed categories, you can add categories while triggering the event for more advanced analysis.

Tools we’ve used to adopt data-driven marketing:

CustomerLabs Action Recorder: Our Customer Data Platform which lets us track customer data from the website, and other sources like CRM, Email, etc.

Google Sheets: Action Recorder syncs the data with Google Sheets in real-time.

Google Data Studio: It gives us the flexibility to create our own visualisations and it’s free.

Adopt Data-driven Marketing today

There are tons of reasons why you should adopt data-driven marketing today, it’s not too early to start because while running the SaaS business you’ll need answers for various questions on a day-to-day basis. It’s better to get started today.

Originally published at www.customerlabs.co on February 27, 2019.

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