In this post I’m going to show you the difference between e-mail marketing and in-app messaging.
In my work I talk to our customers in a way of “One-to-Many”, which means I target several customers at one time. An example of this is to do a sendout by email and tell 1000 users about news in our web client. But I also want to target the right group at the right time when they most need the information. In the example above I maybe want to target those users who have version 1.0 of the web client (when the new version is 1.1) and another sendout to those who have older versions and encourage them to upgrade. Two different ways of communicating to a lot of people.
D.A.T.A is the key
As I mention in previous posts the key is measurement and data. If I have user data which tells me that some users are most likely to read my sendout at 7 a.m and others at 3 p.m I should most definitively target them at that specific time. And if I have data showing that a user recently have created a API key I want to target that group because I know that when creating a API key they want to integrate my product with other products and for me as a Customer Success Marketer this means that my product is being more “sticky” and the customer is moving from an “active” user to a “retaining” user.
With a several key points of data I can measure from my product, the more I can automatic target these One-to-Many users by simply trigger a series of communication send outs when they are doing an event – e.g if I can measure that a customer is creating an API key and straight after the event is trigged, do a sendout with information regarding a free webinar with the topic “How to get started with API keys from Lime Go” – the user will most likely attend the webinar. I can continue this measurement and trigger more event if a customer attended the webinar or not. The customer journey is infinite.
The power of In-app messaging
Speaking of which. Sometimes e-mail marketing isn’t good enough and you will always have a low open rate and an even lower click rate from e-mails. This works with different types of communication with for example important news and updates, but maybe not for small and fast communication as when an event is trigged after a user created an API key.
For this, you have in-app messaging. As described above, measure and send a series 7 e-mails in one day if you trigger events like logged on, created a new project in your product, viewed a page or something else – well, this will not work. With in-app messaging you can target your users straight inside your product and depending on what they are doing (or not) you can start communicating in the way when the user is most likely to read your content. When a user is creating an API key you can seconds later send a automatic and personal in-app messaging with an encouragement to register for your webinar “How to get started with API keys from Lime Go”.
And the result?
For a couple of months I have been communicating with both e-mails and in-app messaging with my customers and the result is really amazing in how much likely my users are to engage with in-app messaging instead of e-mails. Here is some examples.
Before I did e-mail sendouts to customers about upcoming webinars. The customers love our free webinars where we talk about how they can work even better with our products. But we only have around 30% open rate and 8% click rate. When I tested the “B” version of this test I sent by in-app messaging and got an open rate of 70% and a click rate of 20%. And yes, nowdays I only send in-app messages for invitations to our webinars and with the same open rate and click rate. We now have double our registrations for webinars by just trying another communication channel.
Some final thoughts
The power of creating value for the customers inside the product instead of offside (e-mail) is a really great way of getting them more engaged. With this said, you can’t just start sending a series of in-app messaging because of you are getting better results. I always keep in mind to not disturb the customers more than I have to. Instead, focus on a marketing plan and how many e-mails and in-app messages you want to send. The most important part is to always keep track of how many customers is receiving too much messages? Too many in-app campaigns can kill your customers and always think through if you need to send manual in-app messages to ALL of your customers. Some of them can be in different in-app or e-mail campaigns at the same time. Keep track of this and only communicate when necessary and valuable.
Keep It Simple Stupid.