Empower your business with the customer development funnel in Onboarding forms

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an experiment that looked at you know what's more effective sending curated content that's related you know we accelerate users based on what they engage with or just front-loading the most popular content that we have and just delivering that more quickly up front good morning and thanks for coming today out of interest how many people here have heard of autopilot oh wow okay great and anybody using autopilot alright so we have a few well thank you for having me as Peter described on the CMO and head of growth at autopilot we are a visual marketing software for automating customer journeys and we're based in San Francisco as well as a lot of our core engineering is actually in Sydney the three founders the brothers are Australian Sharky brothers they're called and the CTO moved back to Sydney last years we actually have a split working arrangement which is great we also have Delon in the back room here if you ever put in support tickets on European hours he's had a lot of our support in the last has run the sport out here for the last two years and is moving to work with partners soon so my background is the for autopilot which I joined two and a half years ago sort of pre-revenue pre customers when we were really ready to launch the product as Enda square I was the head of online sales which really was a growth role spanning sort of online acquisition growth and retention and then before that I founded my co-founded my first company which we which also had a highly automated business approach that we sold to an enterprise business it was called CVS dude so without further ado I'm going to proceed here there we go so this is autopilot the reason why autopilot exists is we've felt for a long time that automation and marketing automation has been too complex and too expensive I've been a power user myself for many years using systems like Marketo and HubSpot and a Lacroix and integrating product into Salesforce and triggering off of it but it's expensive and it takes a lot of you know time and sophistication to set that all up and really we're trying to do is make it possible for pretty much any startup to be able to develop these personalized and contextual journeys that allow you to engage it the right way kind of like the last speaker from crow box I really liked his description around drivers of persuasion and engaging at the right time and the right and that's really what we're about is able to pull your data together so you can trigger in segments in real time and then engage ingly so some of the things we do is we help people build automated onboarding for example or reactivation of cold dead leads or nurturing or segmented emails or just newsletters it's visual software for automating customer journeys we connect to over 800 marketing applications as well as many other tools including through zapier and segments and we offer the insights and intelligence to help you do better marketing also one piece you know we've been growing quickly and one of the ways we've been growing is through SEO just really focused a lot on developing the right content for the search terms that people are searching for on the web particularly around nurture and onboarding and user acquisition you know we've grown we launched two and a half years ago we're averaging 18% months a month revenue growth over 3,500 customer ads and I show this really to show that we have been so far working very hard to maintain strong growth and a lot of that has come from using our own products and the strategies that I'll talk through today which is about automating your growth engine so first of all why automate why is it important to do this and again I've been a proponent of this for many years the idea is if you can lock in your best practices and identify the real triggers for growth then automation allows you to scale very quickly with a small team and do things like differentiate your company around the experience of the actual service as we all know you having a great product is important but the product experience is what really is what turns heads for users online creates virality and so on so you know it's about creating that initial impression is one of the key reasons to automate companies like slack you know they focused on zero learning curve and creating this really strong experience Zendesk is all about keeping customer service software beautifully simple but also it's intelligent the way it nudges you and helps you along the way and with autopilot really about trying to empower our users to have access to the the data and the channels they need to create these these experiences so one is to really create like win on customer experience and you know differentiate against your competitors not because of better pricing you're discounting but because actually it helps you have a you actually providing a better experience for your customers than your competitors are that's one benefit another key benefit of automation is you can grow lead faster so research we did two years ago in our annual State of Industry report nice growth Act by the way is you can create a survey monkey survey you can use since com by you know 500 marketing executives or users from around the world to fill out your data and then from that put together a pretty impactful report that we got seventeen press pickups from the last two reports that we've done and that's not hiring some expensive outsource research firm it's just doing that ourselves but anyway one of the things we learn there is that those who automate it and stayed in touch at least weekly with their customers generated on average twice the leads of those who did in so that's one benefit is just frequently being in touch with customers the second thing is really what I'm showing here which is growing your customer lifetime value first of all is through monetization so as we are well aware bringing customers to your site and converting anonymous into known users into paying users is a key objective for any web-based business and you know the last talk did a really nice job of breaking that out and the micro moments along the way you want to convert around so you know obviously increasing conversion rate of trip of visitors to purchasers is a great way to drive revenue without having to drive more top of funnel the second is driving better engagement and retention right so the most successful customers are those that you onboard right the first time and set them up from early on and then secondly you know on most SAS companies I've ever seen or worked with at least half your customers are sub-optimally using the product if not more and so one of the things you can do if you start to pull a lot of your activities and usage into your platform is start to nudge users to take the right steps are they trying to do this but maybe they should try this you've congratulations on connecting your CRM now read this article on how to get the best practices and the third of course is virality so you know net promoters those who like you they drive greater word-of-mouth and they drive more referrals and they tend to buy again and stay around longer so you know similar to having an expensive or a nice entranceway in an expensive hotel if you can create this experience that people are going to talk about and tweet about then it's a tremendous way actually directly to carry through it a better lifetime value so talk about stick six steps to automating your growth engine first of all is build a great stack and this can start very very simply and then you evolve it over time second is map the customer journey yourself how do your customers engage with your service or product through their life cycle third is automate all those sources of leads that you're actually have out there whether it's form downloads signups and so on fourth is create personalized experiences around key moments through your customer lifecycle fifth is get a quick win so you don't have to you know boil the ocean all at once use you in a prioritize and say what's the number one most important thing right now and then six is track optimizing room so first of all your stack we live in a time that really there's never been a better time to be in growth or in marketing there's more you know as we're all aware the market a clan scape is exploding right now there are thousands of apps that are available so it's important to try out and dabble and be using all the latest technology at the same time be pragmatic and thoughtful about where you put your time really you need to be thinking about what's your stack and how is it going to ultimately enable you to achieve the outcomes that you have which are to enable onboard and retain customers so you know I sort of think about and we we've thought through our stack fairly closely you really need content and conversion rate optimisation so we use into the page Optimizely in WordPress across all of our different properties whether it's from ads or content downloads our site and so on you need to capture leads and lead gen so you know we use a combination zapier to be able to pull in data like Eventbrite registrations or go to webinar registrations into our automation into autopilot third you need your marketing automation layer which in the past was a big heavy thing but you know it doesn't have to be there's services whether it's autopilot or others out there that allow you to be able to effectively pull different sources of data and from there if you have the trigger automated follow-ups fourth is you need to have that integrated with products and billing again don't have to do it all at once you can all into it but at a bare minimum if you can just pass a couple of key events into your platform then you can start to do much more personalized engagement that has a big impact on conversion fifth is your CRM if you're using one we use Salesforce mainly because we've a deep integration with them and it's still despite being heavy it has a lot of data capabilities and then six is attribution analytics again we start off with just reports and heap and Salesforce and some on autopilot and more recently have been investing in infer for predictive scoring which I'll come back to and visible for attribution because really it's that multi-touch view of your customer funnel that has a big impact if you're investing a lot in content and a lot in ads you're probably going to be finding as we did that you might be as much as 40 percent over attributing to paid sources it might be under attributing unpaid by as much as 30 percent so you know it's important to start to measure that all the way through and and so that's an area that we've focused on a lot in the last six months so the second step is mapping the customer journey and it sounds at this really high level esoteric Act but you know we did research again last year and we found that seventy what we split out the high performers from everybody else and the high performers were defined as those who hit 80% of their goals or more and one of the things we found is that 71% of high performing marketers have defined a customer journey map internally in 88% of those say it's driving better customer acquisition satisfaction and retention particularly when they bring data in and use data in different ways to drive customer satisfaction so here's some examples of an acquired nature drove framework that we are really evangelizing with our customers and providing a way to think through how and when to engage with customers you know acquire it could be things like following up with lead inquiries routing leads to either an online experience or to a sales team and then onboarding customers and our customer live chat has done a terrific job of showing how they can use personalization as part of that download process to be much more effective in how they generate leads the second is the nurture phase so whether its customers who have not yet purchased from you but they've inquire and shown interest whether its customers who purchased and then churned and you want to reactivate them whether it's ecommerce companies where like the last demonstration maybe they got to that shopping start shopping cart step didn't buy went away and you had a last moment you could potentially run a reactivation and bring them back up either to complete that shopping cart or a month later to come back and say you were interested then would you like to see now and then in terms of growth then once a customer or is a buyer as a buyer or repeat buyer then the objective is to keep them interested and keep them up to date so whether that's events and webinars that you're doing with your customer base or newsletters and we've seen some really interesting examples of people who will ask early on in the in the various forms of content they'll send to their customers are you interested in skiing or snowboarding for example and use that response demographic or behavior based responses to segments newsletters with really tremendous results without a lot of extra work on the front end and also of course things like cross cell journeys that can be run to recommend related products and services so an outcome of that is of going through this exercise is something like this which is an internal working document we have which basically breaks out from anonymous to known traffic Rahl leads to qualified leads and then the customers and we've broken out here all of our initial anonymous sources from paid sorryi sources of traffic from paid for example you know retargeting and search and display and all the different paid programs that we do our organic sources so a lot is SEO and content we do you know contributed content that many third-party services right and third-party blogs we're very active on social so all those and you know organic SEO is our number one source of traffic and trials currently you know press a thought leadership work that you might be doing working with partners and community each of these provide opportunities to add you know a linked a UTM link URL on those referring sites and then segment those refers and provide a customer experience that's built around that so you could run an ad group for example on you know snowboarders who want to purchase in month of may from Facebook group and you could create a you know an email a landing page and then a follow-up it's related to that so the third you know an example what I just showed and all those other boxes on there I should say is a combination of how we convert them from known leads into buttons of paying customers and then areas of opportunity for us to prioritize new avenues for growth so it might be reactivating unpurchased leads or it might be recovering current customers provides a real framework here to prioritize growth an example here is our life cycle nurture so for example at autopilot if you were to go to one of our properties read some content online and then you provide your emails you can download an e-book or read one of our blog posts and subscribe you'll be entered into a life cycle nurture journey and we ran an experiment that looked at you know what's more effective sending curated content that's related you know we accelerate users based on what they engage with or just front-loading the most popular content that we have and just delivering that more quickly upfront and we found that a curated approach is more effective and it's just one experiment we've run the last year or so but a net net is that you know we get 3x higher conversion rates of trials you come to us and purchase from nurture versus net new at about one and a half higher ASP and that's generated seventy Kfar are for us in the last of an you lized recurring revenue in the last year or so so this is an example of initiative we prioritized and now we've got it set it's a lot easier to generate 20% new leads by nurturing the already large database you've built that having to drive 20% top of funnel so the third step is automating lead capture which I've spoken about for a few minutes this graph here so an interesting stat is only about 25% of the people who engage or inquire at the company are actually ready to purchase or even engage in purchasing today of the other 75% though and this is sort of rule of thumb industry benchmarks well the other 75% half of those will be ready to engage within 12 months so you need to have a framework in place or else literally it's like you're filling the bathtub and the drain is open at all times to be able to nurture them and reactivate them and bring them back so the high level we think of our funnel we think organic paid and then reactivated driving then to an evaluation and a purchase and a customer and obviously this is for the inbound online portion of our business which is in our case very much and many times is a small portion of businesses and there's other approaches for outbound for example but um this is based the ideas build up a machine so you're continually recycling them capture leads with lead magnets whether these you know we have something called heads up but there's different services for popups that are non intrusive that allow you to ask you know what brings you to autopilot or would you like to subscribe to our blog if you're related content or whether its forms sign up for a free trial capture you know download this ebook these are ways in which you can effectively convert anonymous users into known contacts and from there take them into a retargeting and a nurturing funnel the second thing once you've captured leads is to put in place a qualification framework so that you can identify those that are ready to engage or are interesting qualified versus those that you should continue nurturing so initially we did that just through a combination of just asking questions on all of our forms how many contacts are in your database as well as we've overlay that against events how active they are with our systems like are they clicking emails and visiting pages more recently we've implemented predictive scoring with infer you know it's basically a continuous multivariate regression that infer runs it gathers like a thousand signals about each of your leads including does this company have a crunch based profile is it hiring is it growing does it have you know it look breaks down each of your different email component the letter within your email the phone numbers the IP region the technologies it's running in your site so pulls that harvest a huge amount of independent data as well as the data we provided and then it basically regresses and looks at what's the independent effect of each of these different factors on whether or not a company has purchased from us in the last 12 months and then based on that it then can predict moving forward it will actually score from a demographic perspective each new lead that we capture so you see here for example is our A's converted about 2.1 X our baseline conversion rate which is eight point nine percent you know the bees convert at one point four X higher than that the C's at 0.5 and D 0.1 so putting in places frameworks is provided to sort benefits one is we'd no longer route any DS to our sales team we have a Wii for a long time we base it one or two salespeople and now we've got about six or seven so it's becoming more important to provide qualified leads which is the key element in having a successful business a successful online business so one is we're out all these automatically the secondary criteria to our online self-service experience regardless of how large they will indicate and then B is from a growth and marketing perspective we do monthly D analysis we look at the sources that are driving DS and we obviously work to deprecate those activities or or channels so the third thing is once you have captured leads and qualified leads then it's about routing those leads to the right place and so we have this concept that we call swim lanes which is you know if someone signs up for a service for example in most cases you probably want to take them through it like a self-service type experience and maybe you just want to find a few that are maybe they came from HP for example or Intel or Nike or Procter & Gamble and you want to qualify those out and send them to an enterprise sales team kind of like our customer lift does they basically find all those that are targeted accounts and assign those to targeted accounts team so what you can do is build what we call these swim lanes where based on certain criteria you could say if they meet these targeting criteria assign the sales otherwise continue to drive them through an online channel where they purchase and the experience is independent of sales and then you know we've actually taken three channels we also have an in-between channel that's like group demos self scheduled time with with one of our consultants and it's a very effective way to have a high volume of trials with not so many internal people so it really allows it to scale that up what you see here is you know 57% of our trials go through an online experience 30% go through this velocity and a small portion go through our direct and then those equivalently breakout into M R are that actually velocity is a really big channel for us so now that we've captured leads the next thing is to create these personalized key moments right so again you know our research shows 72% of consumers it turned off by generic marketing there's many different stats you can see out there like this but the key thing here is understanding your buyers are obviously having a really good understanding what their needs are what their decisions are they need to make along the way and what are the touch points they'll best respond to and on what channel is it a nap if it's a product manager is it an email that's HTML based if it's a brand market or is it a text based email if it's a growth growth leader so first of all is doing this internal exercise of building out your persona is going deeper there's also quantified yearsbut quantified your buyers personas you can build which bring in the economics and the unit economics of how much the each one of these represent from an ACV perspective the cost of acquiring them and taking a persona based approach for building either way going through a persona exercise internally is a helpful way to get everybody focused and then secondly a couple examples of things you can do that usage triggered nudges so these are kind of playing again off the last talker things you can do along the way in this case our CEO pops up and says hey notice you haven't added our tracking code one or capture forms track activities and display on-screen messages on the second day of our trial if you haven't yet as a tracking code you know we've got customers doing this from all different industries and types but it's a very very effective way to drive and nudge them at the right point in time in a highly personalised fashion and then you can congratulate them for doing so and provide the next little tip along the way so we do a check a condition check after that the next day and if they have taken that action they'll receive this congratulations note and now they will recommend the next thing they do to get set up so starting to build in place these breadcrumbs you can see 88% response rates sorry opens and 24% response rates so by being personalized you can get very high engagement same thing with our nurturing we have nurture that comes out again and mentions keeps people interested in based on what you click in will send semi-related content it always needs to be better but and then if people come to our site then we also pop either on-site messages or emails that follow up a third I love this example is again our customer live chat one thing they did is they they really want to build out social reviews and so early on they used an NPS service and they would sink in the promoters to the minds of the tens so anybody if you ask the and how likely are you to recommend a friend or a colleague if you respond back and say a 9 or 10 your Net Promoter and they'll take that trigger a follow-up journey that says thank you for taking time to rate us would you now be willing to write a couple minutes to write a review and get up and in doing so and this is a tactic that they shared on a webinar we did a couple like a year ago they showed the advantage to build over 120 reviews it's having a meaningful impact on their sort of word-of-mouth business again very high open rates and click rates to what's essentially a solicitation it's an outbound email asking someone for something but because the fact it was triggered and it's appropriate and it's targeted to the right segment you get these really high response rates that have a big impact I mentioned earlier that if you in the example of skiers vs. snowboarders you want to make sure you're sending the right you know ski information to the skiers one thing that we've learned from customers and seeing people doing is using what we call the data enrichment emails so embedding with your onboarding or with your nurture just a simple question you know we don't want to send you the wrong information what are you interested in and then you know with autopilot you can grab the you know based on the eutm attached to each of those links you can segment users based on their interests and their preferences and then deliver content that follows up with that or just do as simple as personalizing your next newsletter to speak differently to those two segments so how I do over time here got five more minutes okay two minutes okay i'ma just real quick so it's not completely abstract here I'll show you for two seconds what this actually looks like in case you're interested and then I will wrap up so this is the autopilot journey canvas this is where you actually build where the magic happens and think this is where you build the automated journeys we're talking about so we have what's called triggers actions and conditions triggers or what's will initiate or start a journey actions are the events we can take so send an email add a delay step add to a list and then conditions are ways to create branches in the road so just to keep this really simple I'm just going to go to our home page right here our website we have a tracking code running here I'm gonna grab this URL and I just one of anybody who registers to or who subscribes to stay in touch with us we want to quickly add them into a follow-up so I can just go in here and I'm not this is a demo account so I'm not running the live tracking code but this is a this is there we go register for nurture so I've just pasted the URL from that page and autopilot scans into text fields from many landing page builders like instapage or unbalanced from wordpress and so on as long as you're running your tracking code on that page you can capture forms so you can see here we just detected one field this is just a straight HTML site nothing unusual about it that was the name of the field we're going to capture this and map this to an autopilot field if there were five fields like first name last name email your interest and so on obviously you could capture a lot more there but with that we've just simply captured a form right off our live site and then you know typical best practices we'll add this to a list and we'll call this registrants so I'm going to create a quick I'm going to create a quick new list here this allows me to run analytics off them later as well as to potentially trigger them and nurture them I'm going to add a real quick delay here so I don't bombard this person I can say I want to only contact you during business hours and I'm going to wait for you know five minutes for example so we'll just go ahead and say five minutes here and now when someone fills out that form we are going to wait for five minutes add them to a list why don't we go ahead and send a slack notification as well and that's going to say to a general channel and we'll put in their first name this is going to be called sign up general first name from and we'll add in here company and these are very easy fields you just map in from whichever you either can update fields directly or map them from CRM or from your site first name from company registered so this can go to the entire team so everyone can be celebrating that and then we'll go ahead and shoot that notification and then from there I want to send the first actual email so I'm going to send a new email I'll just quickly run from a template here this is a welcome and are going to go ahead and say to you you know welcome to our service and it's great to speak to you so we do is typically will actually do when you kick off a nurture one thing we've seen well in a best practice is to have a personal introduction thanking someone from becoming part of your your system and again if you're developing content that's solving their problems becomes quite valuable so thanks for registering hmm okay first name all right good there we go and so with that we've created a very quick and simple messaging journey you can throw in some conditions like check the email status if they clicked it then if they've replied or have not opened or have clicked or not clicked you can branch off now into different follow-ups and so on so this is a very simple version here but this can get extremely built out over time as you start to weave together a different experience