Category Archives: Analytics

Why Senders Matter: A Look at my Last Year in 63,961 Emails

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Emails Per Day over the Year

In the last year, I’ve received an average of 175 emails per day excluding what ends up in my spam folder.  Assuming I spent an average of 30 seconds per email, that’s 90 minutes per day, 10.5 hours per week, and 22 days of my year. Give or take, this means I spent about 6% of my year on email.

While I only have the data to understand my email experience, pulling apart this number yields some anecdotal nuggets that might be useful in improving that 6% of my life that’s spent on email. If my email is at all representative, I’d propose we need a solution that both helps the receivers (who are consuming the email) and the senders (who are using email to send notifications, newsletters, etc).

My Year in Email: The Numbers

To start, let me share more detail about the emails I’ve gotten over the past year. If I ignore replies and forwards (and a few oddities like email I sent to myself), I’m down to 108 emails per day.

My first step was to categorize my emails as follows:

  • Work is any message I received from an individual about Klaviyo (the intelligent email marketing platform I co-founded)
  • Business is any email I received from a business or organization (LinkedIn, Meetup, Threadless, alumni associations, etc),
  • Family and Friends are any personal messages from individuals
  • Politics is anything Barack Obama or Mitt Romney sent me

The result:

Emails by Category

A few things jump out:

  • Friends, Work and Business emails dwarf everything else.
  • The number of work/Klaviyo related emails is actually much lower than I thought it was – I think because of how often we rely on chat and skype internally.
  • My family doesn’t do email that much – we mainly rely on phone or skype chat.
  • The contribution from politics, even in an election year, wasn’t that high of a percentage of overall email.

The Typical Email Week

Now let’s look at this over time. Here’s what a typical week looks like:

Emails by category over the week

Two things jump out:

  • The weekends really are quieter
  • Monday and Friday are intense workdays email-wise (with Wednesday following shortly after)

3,000 Emails a Year from Linkedin

From the week breakdown, I focused on the business segment. I counted this as anything I get from a company (that I don’t work for).  Facebook friend requests, Meetup announcements, newsletters from stores I shop at – it’s all in this bucket.

Here’s what it looks like for me:

Business Emails by Sender

By far the biggest surprise here was that 25% of these emails come from LinkedIn (in my case, almost 3,000 emails a year). I’m sure I’m an anomaly (these emails consisted primarily of connection requests and group notifications), but it was amazing that I hadn’t really noticed how bad it was. I remember feeling general annoyance, but hadn’t reached a tipping point where I’d waded through their settings to adjust what I received.

Conclusions from this:

  • The big tech companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Facebook and Amazon) account for nearly 50% of the emails I get from businesses.
  • Notifications (x needs your attention, y meetup is happening this week, z commented on your blog post, etc) are the next major contribution
  • Ecommerce comes in third (actually significantly lower than I expected). My biggest surprise with these emails is how consistent they are – they’re basically a modern equivalent of those inserts that used to come in the Sunday paper.

4 Email Frustrations

As I synthesize my feelings about email based on my experience and the data above, a couple notes:

  • I don’t really have any complaints about emails I get from friends and family.
  • Most of the completely spammy or unwanted email are already getting pulled into Gmail’s spam folder (Already excluded from this analysis)

This leaves the 80% of email I get that is for Work or from Businesses. My frustrations with this 80%:

  1. There’s too much of it: I get nearly 100 of these emails a day. That’s a lot – and I’m guessing I get less than some people.
  2. Lots of different types of message but one format: An email can be a direct message to me, a notification, a cc to keep me updated or a to do list item.  I could just look at a list of 50 notifications and pick out what matters, which is very different from 3 emails directly to me.
  3. It doesn’t adapt. Even if I never read emails from linkedin groups, they don’t stop coming or come less often – I have to go and dig through setting to unsubscribe.
  4. The Emails aren’t that relevant. Nearly every Ecommerce email is the same regularly scheduled newsletter. If you sell backpacking equipment, it’s pretty easy to get me to buy if you hit me with an offer as its warming up in Boston.  Same goes for down coats in the winter.  Even if I get only 1/10 as many emails from you as usual, I’m 10 times more likely to buy.

Email is 2-sided: Improving Emails for Receivers and Senders

Focusing on these frustrations, it’s clear to me that fixes need to come for both email senders and email receivers.

Tools for receivers are ideal for making it easy to deal with different types of messages and the volume of email. Whether it’s the priority inbox in gmail or smart ways to separate notifications from emails requiring response, better tools for consuming email can significantly reduce the time burden required for email.

Tools for senders are well positioned to make emails adaptive and relevant – and it’s in their interest.  If companies can link emails directly to outcomes and use that data to continually improve and tailor what’s sent automatically, there’s no reason that the interests of companies and customers can’t be aligned – giving us all better, more relevant email.

The Case for Focusing on Senders

As Des Traynor pointed out in the “The Future of Email Products“, the last great innovation in email was threaded conversation and unlimited storage in Gmail 8 years ago. I’ve read countless articles on how to improve my email client since then, but I’m still using Gmail. Why? It turns out getting people to switch is hard – and maybe it’s not as easy a problem to solve as we thought to build a significantly better email client that’s worth switching to.

That said, from the senders side it’s a different situation.  Email senders can use different tools for different emails, and many tools are easy to try out with a small group of customers and a test email. Furthermore, senders are strongly financially incentivized to invest in new email systems if they really can drive better outcomes. Finally, senders have the data needed to know which emails are driving real results since this data lives in their own web apps and purchase databases.

In short, driving real improvements in the “email experience” is much easier by providing better tools for senders: they have money, they have data, and they have the ability to easily try improvements.

As Dave Girouard pointed out on Techcrunch in “In Defense of Email”, the email problem probably isn’t as bad as we like to make it out to be; however, this covers up the fact that our approach to email is still closer to an instant version of snail mail than it is to a highly-linked and intelligent web app.  It’s time for more innovation for senders and receivers – but senders might be the right starting point.

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Building tools to empower Web Apps and Ecommerce stores to send better, smarter and more automated email is our complete focus at Klaviyo.  Sign up for a trial today.

FREE!: What the Obama Emails teach us about Email Marketing

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Having previously found that the Obama campaign ended 1 in 6 of their email subject lines in colons, I decided to dive into the last 30 days of election emails (available online thanks to ProPublica) to see what they might tell me about Americans and how we respond to email more broadly.

From free car magnets to exactly which friends we should tell to vote, I realized that the emails we get are about to radically change as political campaigns and businesses get even more sophisticated at poking our psychological triggers and leveraging our social networks.

Do vs. Believe

I decided to create two word clouds out of the subject line to see how the language of each campaign differed.  For each campaign, I took all of the email subject lines, took out the candidate names and extremely common words / combined words with the same meaning, and then sized each word based on how many times it was used.

Take a look at the word cloud at the top.  Which campaign do you think it’s from? Now, look at this next word cloud:

The top cloud is President Obama, and the bottom is Mitt Romney.  The most common words in Obama’s emails were share (or forward, like an email), calls and free – compared to America, help and love in Romney’s emails.  Many of Romney’s email subjects wouldn’t have been out of place on motivational posters, while Obama’s would fit better as the names on Facebook buttons.

1. Jump on Facebook, 2. Make some Calls

Diving deeper, this change seemed to be reflected in the purposes of the emails sent.  Nearly half (46%) of Obama’s emails explicitly asked the recipient to do something in the email subject line – whether that was to make phone calls, forward a message to friends, or sign-up for something – compared to 28% of emails.

Romney’s emails tended to focus on ideas:

  • “A Strong America”
  • “This is a time for greatness”
  • “We Will Recover”

While Obama’s focused on taking action:

  • “Three Things you can do right now”
  • “Forward this:”
  • “RIGHT NOW: President Obama Needs you to make some calls”

These emails represent strategic choices and differences in voter base certainly, but given the deep sophistication of the Obama campaign covered elsewhere, it’s very likely that giving people you email a direct next step in the subject is actually just more effective in many cases.

Tell Jason, Jim and Leah to Vote

One of the most interesting emails from Obama came on election day and had a personal list of your friends in swing states you should encourage to vote – all mined from your Facebook account if you’d given the campaign permission to access it.  Based on other accounts, the Obama campaign knew who the voters on the line were in swing states – and based on these emails, it looks like they also knew which of their friends could encourage them to vote for Obama. 

FREE Shipping (and $5 off!)

At varying points in the campaign, Obama was offering free t-shirts, free car magnets, free tickets to see James Taylor and Dave Matthews, free shipping – all to get people to donate.  While the idea of free stuff to get people to do things isn’t new, the prevalence of these offers in the campaigns may mean that it’s poised to take over all the marketing emails we get.

3 Key Trends in the Future of Email Marketing

  1. More and more marketing will come through people we know. By getting people to engage their friends, marketers are able to increase their reach and give a personal touch to an otherwise impersonal ad or email. From mining Facebook data to tracking your demographics and actions around the web, marketers will know who you are, who you know, and what message will be most likely to resonate with you and your friends.
  2. Direct and clear next steps will become more pervasive. As social psychologists and marketers have long known, giving people an explicit action to take significantly increases the likelihood of them doing it.  The Obama campaign emails suggests more and more advertising might include a direct call to action that is tailored explicitly to you.
  3. Marketing will become better – and harder to resist. As marketers become more sophisticated and metrics-driven, they’ll be able to stop sending you marketing that doesn’t have an impact.  If I show that I like celebrities and contests, more of my emails may include free contests to hang out with celebrities.

If the 2008 election was the first election where donations of the masses played a bigger impact than the donations of the rich, then the 2012 election might be remembered as the election where email meant that even the concept of the masses has ceased to exist. We’re entering an age when political campaigns (and business) will send us personalized emails based on who we are and what we like – and they’ll ask us to bring our friends along with us.

Follow Klaviyo on Twitter for more analyses like this on the changing role of email marketing.

Re: “Hey:” – An Analysis of the Obama/Romney Emails

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Early in 2012, I signed up for the Barack Obama and Mitt Romney campaigns’ email lists with a rarely used old email address. While I knew that this small dataset couldn’t reveal the extreme sophistication of their email strategies, I set out to analyze the emails I’d received (and rarely read) – and discovered some surprising differences in strategy (at least as it related to the emails I was sent).

The Emails in Numbers

From June 1st through November 5th, I got 35 and 37 emails from Mitt Romney and Barack Obama respectively (see chart above showing cumulative # of emails sent to me over time since June 1st).

There are two main differences you’ll notice – first, the sharp daily dose of Romney emails right after June 1st.  Second, the month-long gap that immediately followed them. This gap began June 18th – the same day that I clicked the unsubscribe button on the Romney emails from another email address (once I realized I was signed up twice). While I can’t prove it, impressively, the Romney campaign seemed to realize I might be close to unsubscribing and put me on pause for a month.

Who Sends the Emails

When we break the emails down by who sent them, the results get interesting:

Percentage of emails from each candidate by who sent them

The Obama campaign is twice as likely to send emails from Barack Obama (49% of overall emails coming from him) than the Mitt Romney campaign is to send them from Mitt Romney (23% of overall emails coming from him). While the campaigns are roughly equal on the number of emails coming from Michelle Obama vs Ann Romney or Joe Biden vs Paul Ryan, there is a major difference in the use of others – a bucket largely made up of Zac Moffatt and Matt Rhoades (other Romney staffers) and his son Tagg.

A few hypotheses for why this might be true:

  • A difference in strategy to add increased importance to emails from the candidate by sending fewer of them.
  • Less candidate allegiance from Republicans in this election (and a greater emphasis on the party).
  • Individual targeting or testing differences based on who I am. Had I exhibited some personal behavior that I liked emails from Obama but would prefer other people on the Romney campaign to Mitt? Is there someone out there who see the exact opposite of what I see?

The most interesting aspect of this finding is that it may reflect very real perceptions of what drives voters for each candidate – namely, more voters relating to Barack Obama on a personal level, and more potential Romney voters holding deeper party than candidate allegiances.

The One Word Subject Line

In a similar vein, while none of Romney’s emails had single word subject lines, about 1 in 7 of Obama’s did. Examples:

  • Joe
  • So
  • Hey (this was a common one)

The one word subject line evokes a certain casualness and personal relationship and this difference seems to parallel many of the media portrayals of the candidates.  Are the one word subject lines actually less effective for Romney? It’s hard to say, but what might be most clear is that the campaigns have developed real stylistic differences in how they talk to their constituents – and those could be rooted in the real differences of who their constituents typically are.

 The Enigmatic Colon

Very unexpectedly, 1 in 6 of the Barack Obama message subject lines ended in colons (and none of the Romney subjects). Here are a couple of examples:

  • Real Quick:
  • Urgent:
  • This Matters:
  • Deadline:

Given how high this number is, my guess is that the Obama campaign has tested (and shown) that ending a message in a colon makes people more likely to read it.  While the circumstances of a presidential campaign are obviously very unique, this isn’t a piece of advice I’ve heard elsewhere (and certainly not one that the Romney campaign has acted on in their emails to me).

The Future of Email may contain more Colons

First off, all of these analyses are based on a single person, and as ProPublica’s attempt to reverse engineer email strategies is starting to show, there are wide variations in what you’ll receive based on where you live, how old you are, whether you’ve donated, etc. As these systems get more complex, it will become more and more difficult to analyze any company or campaign’s email strategy – because that strategy might actually be 300 million different strategies.

That said, the emails will likely always say more about the particular cultures and moods of a campaign or organization at a given point in time. Would Obama letting Biden send more emails have changed how much money was raised? Would a “Hey:” from Mitt Romney have increased his chances of winning my vote?

The email strategies of the political campaigns are among the most sophisticated in the world and are a great indicator of how email will be changing as companies get better at linking the emails they send to the behavior of consumers. Just as Obama and Romney know what makes you press the donate button, companies are getting better every day at knowing how to make you purchase. In the future, it might not just be presidential candidates who are ending emails in colons and varying senders to figure out who you connect with – it might be your local farmers market stand.

 

Please tell us more about the Obama and Romney emails you’re receiving in the comments and if you want to know more about the future of email marketing, check out Klaviyo. And – go vote. 

Analyzing the Impact of the Ecommerce Newsletter

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“A lot of people will tell you that sending newsletters isn’t worth the effort. They’ll say it’s time consuming, expensive, and doesn’t provide enough of a return on investment. I disagree.”  - Opening lines from the Guide to Email Newsletters by Mark Hayes on the Shopify blog

The line above is a pretty accurate summary of the opinions on whether any business should put the time into sending a newsletter.  In a world where content and quality is very important, sending email newsletters isn’t free, but many of us have a sense that they are worth that effort.

Ending the debate

The problem is that both viewpoints make a lot of sense and each is probably right for some businesses. So what do you do?  At Klaviyo, we’ve been spending a lot of our time lately figuring out how businesses can understand the impact of their emails on the metrics that matter (look out for more on that soon from us). We’re convinced the answer is measuring the impact of newsletters on purchases (as well as opens, clicks, website visits, unsubscribes, etc though all of this is secondary).

Defining Success

A good first step is figuring out what your goal with your newsletter is.  If you’re going to send a newsletter no matter what anyways, measurement is a good way to compare which content does better than other content…but measurement is a lower priority because you can get the basics from opens and clicks.  That said, if you’re either strapped for time and debating the value or you’re store has been off the ground for awhile, there’s a good chance measurement can generate sizeable profits.

Based on what you decide, you should also get a sense for whether your goal is short term gain (meaning purchases alone are probably king) or long term customer engagement (in which case unsubscribes, opens, clicks and website visits gain in importance).  Track what you think is important.

Next steps

Most importantly, you need to stop debating, get emails out the door and then commit to listening to whatever analysis result you get back. You can always dismiss measurement based on methodology or specific circumstances – so if you don’t commit not to do this ahead of time, don’t waste lots of time doing analysis.

At the end of the day, you write newsletters for the customers.  Make them happy.

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Try Klaviyo today to measure the impact of your newsletters and other customer outreach with our 2 week no commitment trial.

 

How to Measure the Impact of Customer Lifecycle Marketing in 5 Steps

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You are almost certainly losing money based on the emails you don’t send to your current customers. For some businesses, you are losing a lot of money.

From what I’ve seen, companies tend to fall into one of three buckets regarding customer lifecycle marketing emails:

  1. They don’t send them because they think customers will find them annoying.
  2. They don’t send them because they don’t think the value of setting them up will outweigh the cost in terms of time.
  3. They send too many and those have limited impact on customers.

These aren’t acceptable buckets to fall in.  In each of these cases, they can know the answer by testing and then measuring what happens.

 

Here are 5 steps to help you get started:

Step 1: Implement something.

If you are reading this and haven’t put anything in place, stop immediately and go identify a set of customers and send them an email.  One starting point is everyone who used to be very active but hasn’t been recently.   If you’re worried about putting too much time into, focus on the simplest group possible and don’t worry about automating it.

Step 2: Pick a group as a baseline

In short, you want a group who lets you know what would happen if you didn’t implement the email you are planning on sending. For many of us, a great starting point is to just use what’s happened historically as this benchmark.

Over time, you probably want to consider holding out a set of customers as a control group who joined at the same time, from the same channels, etc. It’s not worth worrying about perfecting this at first.

Step 3: Measure Quantitatively

Once you’ve been sending emails, it’s time to see what’s happened. Two key things here:

  • Focus on multiple metrics – sales, profit, site visits, unsubscribes, purchase size, etc. Even if a customer doesn’t change their buying or usage patterns immediately, you want to see if there are related positive (or negative) effects.
  • Focus on impact over time, not just what’s immediate.  Because it’s easier to track, too many companies focus just on the impact they see from clickthroughs, but you really care about what happens over the next 7, 14 or even 30 days.

The simplest way to do each of these is to look at average performance of customers at different times frames – 24 hours after email, 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days – of both the customers who received the email and those who didn’t.  Over time, you’ll want to get more accurate and detailed about this, but this is a good starting point that will likely get you 80% of the right answer.

Step 4: Measure Qualitatively

It’s also worth identifying a random subset of customers and having quick conversations with them. The goal is to better understand the customer impact but also to generate new hypotheses about emails or approaches they might find helpful.  Something to keep in mind is that what people say doesn’t always match with what they do.  When Google initially tested many of their ads, they found that people reported not liking them when explicitly asked, but they also reported being happier on pages with ads than those without ads.

A final note – we have seen that offering a small token of appreciation (gift certificate, shirt, etc) helps engage people more quickly than otherwise.  Depends on your business, but if you’re struggling with low response rates, might be worth considering.

Step 5: Automate

If it worked, go ahead and implement it.  If you’re unsure, increase the size of the group or modify the email to try to create a test that you’ll be more certain about.

Summary

The main barrier is sending the first email. Measurement is a great way to figure out what’s working, but if you take it too far, it too can become a barrier to getting started. Good enough actually does tend to be a great place to start – once you know how your first efforts went, you can focus on optimization later.

A Warning about Customer Lifetime Value

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The deep dark secret of nearly all analysis or metrics is that 99% of people will tell you they are a good idea, about 10% of people are actually looking at them, and about 10% of those are actually using them to significantly change their decision-making. This doesn’t change the fact that they are a great idea, it just means you need to be really careful not to waste your time.

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value is a concept taught in countless marketing classrooms and is simple to grasp – it’s fundamentally the total value that a customer will spend with a business over their full life as a customer. What makes Customer Lifetime Value powerful is the realization that customers have relationships with businesses – so when we acquire a new customer, we’re actually acquiring all the purchases they’ll make with us over time. And the same goes when we lose them.

That sounds great – what’s the problem?

If you accept that Customer Lifetime Value is inherently a good idea (and the right way to think about things), you run into two problems when you try to use it to make decisions:

  • It’s backward looking.  Because you’re trying to figure out not what a customer’s value is today, but to predict what it’ll be over the next several years, you usually end up trying to factor in multiple years of past performance, or you end up trying to predict it off of a cohort analysis or regression model.
  • It’s complicated. The reason we use metrics and analysis is to be able to evaluate decisions we are making – in basic form, you do X, you get Y.  For this to work well, you need to have a ton of faith in Y and you need to be able to see it quickly.  Because customer lifetime value is a prediction, we’re likely to spend more time trying to understand it, calculating it or debating it.  Think back to how often analysis doesn’t get translated into action.

An Alternative Approach

Now, while trying to predict Customer Lifetime Value will remain crucial for some decisions, there’s an alternative approach:

  1. Try ideas often
  2. Observe the impact on clear metrics
  3. Measure those customers over time to understand long-term impacts

Let’s take an example. Say you are debating whether to send lapsed customers a discount offer to entice them to come back. If you take a subset of those customers and try it out, you’ll quickly know the answer to questions you could only speculate about before:

  • How many customers come back? More than would have otherwise?
  • How much do they spend? On what?
  • Do they come back again over the coming months?

Customer Lifetime Value is an important reminder that we need to focus on the complete customer relationship over time – but as with all analytics, you need to make sure that your work gets translated into action.

Klaviyo lets you quickly implement and measure the impact of customer lifecycle marketing for your web app or ecommerce business.  Try it today.

Don’t Fear what you can Measure (and an idea for improving Email)

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All of us make a ton of decisions everyday, but most of us also spend a lot of time not making decisions – debating the merits of doing A or B, questioning a decision we’ve made, etc. This debate doesn’t really make sense – in many cases, just trying something out and then measuring the outcome is the most effective, efficient and valuable way to make the right decision.

Let’s take email as an example (though the same idea is relevant to many of the other decisions we make on a day to day basis).

The Problem of Email

Email is a problematic – it’s overwhelming, it’s annoying, it shows up whether we like it or not, but it’s also the most effective tool businesses have to communicate with users and customers.

The real problem with emails for most businesses is that the fear of the downside of email (becoming annoying spammers) is not justified by the risk it takes to test emails to actually know their impact and what customers like. In short, we can just take a subset of people and send them different emails, more or less emails, etc and see how their behavior changes (and even assess their customer happiness).  This isn’t how most companies do it – instead they either A.) just spam the heck out of us or B.) stick to the most basic and minimal of emails, even when more emails might be helpful to the customer.

Be More Creative, but use Analysis to see what Happened

The core idea here is that rather than companies just keep doing what their doing or doing nothing, they could just go out and try ideas and see what happens. I’m not talking about comparing slightly different message content here – I’m proposing comparing radically different approaches, such as:

  • Not sending users emails
  • Sending personalized emails individually
  • Sending only trigger based emails (you’ve done X but not Y so here’s how to do Y)
  • Sending one more / one less email
  • Sending more casual emails

What does it take to know what the impact actually is?  Not as much as you’d expect.  If you are a web app with 100 sign-ups in a week and devote 20 of those to testing new ideas, you’ll start to gain real data into what new approaches would actually do. If you see one being successful, you can expand the test, run it for longer, etc.

Stop Pointless Debates

I used to work with a large web storage company that was in the midst of a long debate about whether to collect more information about users during sign-up. The core issue was whether the value of knowing the information (which allowed targeting emails and better support) was higher than the lost customers who wouldn’t want to answer the question.

There’s no reason to sit around debating this for months when you can find out the right answer by taking a small subset of new sign-ups and treating them differently.

Get Sh*t Done

In summary, if you can cheaply and easily test something, it’s better to see what actually happens than to sit around debating it.  Email is a great candidate for this – it’s cheap, easy to target, directly reaches customers and for most businesses on the web is a huge area of improvement.

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Klaviyo is a new kind of CRM that can handle this entire process – seeing your customer behavior, sending emails and understanding their impact.  Try it today with no commitment.

 

 

The Big Data Value Gap and What it Means for Boston

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Big data is likely the most hyped term in tech of the past two years; however, amidst all the hype, we may have actually missed the point of having all of this data in the first place: to generate more value for businesses and consumers. Importantly, it’s this gap between hype and value that speaks to why Boston might be at center of what’s next in data and analytics.

Why We Have Data – Big or Otherwise

What’s often lost in the big data discussion is that data and analytics tools generate no value until they lead companies or individuals to make different (and better) decisions than they would have made otherwise.  While we do occasionally read about big data success stories (for example, Target’s marketing to newly pregnant women or Ginger.io’s health monitoring), most companies still aren’t clear on how they actually could use big data to impact their business. For data to become valuable, companies need to have a direct path from that data and analysis to tangible action.

The Unique Position of Boston

As companies start to look beyond buzzwords to value, the unique qualities of the Boston ecosystem put it in a powerful position to have a major impact on how data and analysis get turned into action.

Boston combines three key qualities that don’t occur together elsewhere:

  1. Boston has world-class data and analytics expertise. From university research groups like MIT’s bigdata@CSAIL to the more than 100 big data companies in Massachusetts, the ecosystem around Boston is uniquely endowed with deep knowledge of the technologies used for data collection, storage and analysis.
  2. Boston has a critical mass of leading marketing software companies. From more established companies like Hubspot, DataXu and Constant Contact to new companies like ThriveHive or GaggleAMP, Boston is filled with companies focused on helping marketers generate measurable business value by using their software.
  3. The Boston startup and investor scene is highly revenue focused. As the stereotypes would indicate, Boston’s investors and entrepreneurs are more likely to be focused on companies generating measurable revenue quickly than their west coast counterparts historically have been. This means that companies are more likely to solve immediate problems for paying clients.

In short, Boston’s emerging companies have the ability to draw on a wealth of technology and data expertise, as well as significant experience using software to drive immediate business value – all while being healthily pushed to find paying clients to generate revenue.

A Personal Experience

Klaviyo, the company I co-founded, is proud to be a part of this movement in Boston, and we wouldn’t exist without the unique Boston qualities described above. Our focus is on helping our clients better understand and market to their customers based on things those customers have or haven’t done – whether that’s helping software firms find users who may need more help getting setup or helping Ecommerce companies reach out to customers who haven’t purchased in awhile to offer them a discount.

In our case, the data volumes we deal with are what many would consider “big” (since we let our clients combine customer interactions ranging from emails opened to items purchased to features used in a single place), but our core reason for being isn’t the size of our data – it’s that we can generate real business value for our clients by solving the problems they were already struggling to solve.

An alternate version of this appeared on BostInno as a guest post.

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Try Klaviyo today to drive higher conversion and greater lifetime value for your existing customers through better marketing based on what customers have or haven’t done.

Freedom of Data + Subscription Models => CRM for the Web

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In April, Jon Bischke wrote an excellent article on Techcrunch entitled “The Rise of Full-Box CRM”.  In short, Jon describes a future where CRM systems come populated with potential leads right out of the box – with no need for manual data entry. While Jon does a great job of capturing how LinkedIn and Rapportive may change who is in your CRM at the start, there’s another “Full-Box CRM” movement afoot about what is in your CRM initially – and this movement opens the door for CRM’s for the web that fundamentally change the relationship between companies and their customers.

The Freedom of Data

First, as usage, email, help and other customer data become more free (easier to pull out of the systems it was generated in), CRM’s can be pre-populated with a complete picture of your customer interactions almost immediately with minimal technical work. Companies like Mailchimp, Desk.com, Zendesk, Shopify and even existing CRM solutions all become incredibly valuable inputs that pre-populate a broader CRM that gives everyone in the organization the ability to use and interact with this information. No matter which system generated the data, teams across organizations can now have access to it.

The Rise of the Subscription Web

While the freedom of data allows a pre-populated CRM, a separate trend is that more and more companies on the web are moving to subscription models – whether that’s enterprise software or Netflix style models that charge a monthly fee or more subtle loyalty based models like mobile gaming (where users have to keep paying to keep playing). Whereas companies could previously rely on initial sales to drive most of the revenue, in this new world, current customers are likely a significantly larger source of revenue than new customers.

The Dawn of CRM for the Web

As these trends intersect, there’s a significant opportunity for a CRM that allows customers on the web to receive personalized treatment from web companies based on where they specifically stand in their customer lifecycle.

CRM for the web requires several key features:

  • Incredibly easy data integration since data is too large to be manually entered
  • Strong prioritization since you only have time to focus on a subset of customers
  • A direct and repeatable tie to taking action since customers are too numerous to reach out to individually
  • Measurable results since you ultimately need to automate your outreach

With the advent of CRM for users on the web, companies will be able to focus on building happier and more loyal customers, which is good for both companies and for users.

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This is the future we’re working on at Klaviyo. Try Klaviyo’s CRM for the web with no commitment in our 14 day trial.

The Experience beyond the Product: An Intro to Customer Lifecycle Management

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When we talk about great products, we often focus only on the product itself; however, we forget that for the customer, their experience is actually defined not just by the product but by every interaction they have with us.  Take my Apple Iphone – the in-store experience, the packaging, the setup, the support after I dropped it in the ocean – everything has gone to making it an excellent customer experience almost every day.

This is where customer lifecycle management comes in: at each point in the customer’s experience, how should they feel and what is it that they should do next to become an even happier customer?

Because we can build products really quickly on the web, the experience beyond the product is often an after-thought; however, if we’re really going to build experiences people love, it really matters. The goal of this post is to help frame our thinking as we think through how to build that experience using the Iphone as a case study.

The Iphone Customer Lifecycle

Let’s look at the first few phases of Iphone ownership:

  • Getting the phone setup
  • Configuring Email
  • Making your first call
  • Adding Contacts
  • Installing your first app
  • Buying your first paid app

The key thing to note is that each phase is defined in an action (something Apple would want customers to do), and not just a time frame (which sadly is how the web mostly works currently with drip email campaigns). For the Iphone, I’m guided to the next phase in many subtle ways – by employees in store, by ads in Itunes, by emails I receive and by the phone itself (via prominent app store and email buttons).

Why this matters and what You should do

Unlike the Iphone, most web apps don’t lock you into multi-year contracts – so if people don’t reach a phase, they might leave. A simple way to get started thinking through your phases is to use your successful customers as a starting point.

Some questions to consider:

  • What makes a successful customer? If you look at your happiest customers, what do they look like?  How do they use your product?  What’s different about them vs people who don’t do as well?
  • What has a successful customer done by day 2?  By day 7? By day 30? Now – rewind the clock.  What does that customer look like earlier in their relationship with you?  Are they the one who’s logging in multiple times a week?  The one who adds data right away?

You probably won’t know the answers (and over time you can use cohort analysis to get a much better answer), but just thinking through this initially gives you a good starting point.

Pulling it all Together

Based on what successful customers have done, you now have both the phase (the customer should have done X) and a point at which you might want to reach out to them (successful customers have usually done X by day Y – so if you haven’t done it by Y-1, it might be a good time to email the customer).

The great thing about this way of thinking is that:

  • You always have a next step for each customer
  • You have a measurable way to determine how a customer is doing

Once you’ve got a few ideas for the phases and days above, start to experiment with reaching out to users based on what they have or haven’t done.  Perfecting it may be as difficult as rocket science – but doing it pretty well is infinitely better than doing nothing at all.

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Klaviyo helps you easily identify and target your customers at every stage of the lifecycle. Try it for 14 days today with no credit card!