We are thrilled to announce that Kissmetrics has added email campaign automation to our behavioral analytics platform. We’re calling it Customer Engagement Automation. Now you can seamlessly analyze, segment and engage your customers all from within our platform.
Why did we do this?
The main driver was the massive market shift and we were feeling the pain first hand. Effective customer engagement needs to happen beyond the top of the funnel, lead-capture and nurturing stages, and we were fed-up with the endless struggle to engage with people based on their activity, behaviors or traits.
Sure we had a marketing automation tool, but to get a segment from here to there and then try to measure results was a pain. And why do we need this costly, heavy lifting when all we want to do is connect with people based on their behavior, with a message that’s going to help them out through the buying, trying and using process.
Marketing automation is great for lead capture and lead nurturing, but it stops right there for us. We needed a better way to automatically engage with people, based on their behavior, to help them at just the right time. We needed a tool built that our growth team and product team could use to engage people from prospect to advocate. And I’m not talking about simple open-and-click type behavior, I’m talking about signed-up–>logged in–> did feature A but not feature B within 3 days — type of behavior.
Like you, we’re trying to deliver the best experience possible to our prospect and customers. To make their process easier, more pleasant, fun or whatever you strive for in your business. We’ve been providing the insights into what works and what doesn’t for years. But to take action on that insight was tough, and to truly understand the results even tougher.
So we closed the loop. Now you can understand who you want to engage, when and why. Set up a campaign to do just that. See the results, and tweak and tune. It’s an opportunity to continuously improve the customer lifecycle. You learn where they’re getting stuck and help them along. Everybody wants that kind of help, and everybody likes to give it. It’s a win-win.
We built Kissmetrics Customer Engagement Automation platform to serve as a great way to understand and engage our prospects and customers. It’s a powerful analytics, segmentation and engagement tool all in one place. It enables us to deliver that great customer experience through timely, relevant engagement. And lo and behold, a bunch of our customers feel the same way. So away we went.
Acquisition of Knowtify
We didn’t want to start from scratch or learn along the way. In order to accelerate the development, and to bring on great people with deep expertise in email automation and message delivery, Kissmetrics acquired Knowtify. The release of Kissmetrics CEA is the integration of Knowtify’s products into our behavioral analytics platform. And additional Knowtify features will be coming soon.
It’s Here and Now
Campaigns is available today. And we have a bright new bold look too to reflect the changes in our solution offering.
With Campaigns, you’ll create automated or manual email messages based on any combination of behavior, or profile data, to drive engagement across your entire growth funnel.
- Want to create an onboarding campaign for new trial users based on what they’re doing in the product and who they are?
- Want to announce a new feature (like this) to users who fit a specific profile – and then follow-up 7 days later if they haven’t tried the feature?
- Want to try drive more repeat purchasers to your ecommerce store?
- Want to target messages to customers who sign-up from a specific ad campaign?
- Want to win back previously loyal users?
Or anything you can think of to improve conversions, engagement and retention.
Why Kissmetrics Is the Perfect Platform for Customer Engagement Automation
For nearly a decade, Kissmetrics Analyze has been used by marketing and product teams to understand the behavior of their prospects and customers to increase customer acquisition and retention.
What we’ve learned is that deeply understanding user behavior is paramount to knowing what actions you can take to drive engagement. Doing effective engagement requires a view of customer behavior well beyond opens and clicks found in many engagement tools. It requires a much broader view of behavior in order to properly segment and engage people at the perfect time. Likewise, in order to measure the true impact and effectiveness of the engagement, a broad view beyond clicks and views is also required. You need to see where people went after the click and if it led to your ultimate conversion goal.
We like to use the analogy of a guy standing on the corner looking at a map and looking up and around. His behavior indicates he’s looking for something or lost. You engage him by offering to help with directions. That’s what CEA does – we see the behavior and provide the perfectly timed, relevant engagement that makes your customers happy and loyal.
Doing effective behavioral analytics is required for effective customer engagement. So don’t settle for lightweight reporting or you’ll be flying blind. Behavioral analytics is our core competency and differentiator.
Analytics is Our Differentiator
We want to be clear – our analytics platform and our focus on delivering great analytics isn’t going anywhere. Analytics is the enabler of CEA and a great differentiator for Kissmetrics.
In fact, we just rebuilt our entire analytics infrastructure to make it better in so many ways. Bottom line, you can’t do proper customer engagement without a deep analytics platform like Kissmetrics.
The Three Features of CEA
We’ve broken CEA into three key features – Analyze, Populations and Campaigns.
1. Analyze – Understand User Behavior
Analyze is a collection of our analytics reports that allow you to slice and dice to surface the insights that matter most to your business. These reports help marketing & product teams understand user behavior to see how people are interacting with their website and product. This isn’t merely visits and clicks. You’ll learn what’s working, what’s not, and who’s doing it. These reports include: Funnel, Metrics, People, Cohort, A/B testing, and the Power Report.
2. Populations – See How Key Groups are Performing
Populations makes it easier for growth marketers and product teams to track and understand segments that are key to their growth and business.
You’ll quickly see how these critical Populations are performing, and in just a few clicks easily segment your Populations for greater insights.
The image below is tracking signups over the last 30 days, and comparing it to 90 days ago.
From the main Populations page, you’ll see the list of Populations you have and the general trends:
See where you stand in every stage of your growth cycle with Populations – from acquisition to retention & engagement.
3. Campaigns – Engage and Retain More of Your Customers
Campaigns is where the rubber meets the road with analytics & engagement. Send behavioral-based & automated emails to people that match a criteria you set.
You undoubtedly have some place in your funnel that you’d like to improve. Some place that is a bit of a “dark area” and needs customer engagement. Here’s some general ideas:
E-Commerce companies:
Using the Funnel Report and seeing that most people drop off after adding a product to their cart but not completing the purchase? Create a trigger that emails them a few days after this occurs to nudge them towards completing their purchase.
SaaS companies:
Noticing free trial users signing up but not logging in? Then it’s time to fix your onboarding! Set up a Campaign that sends users a reminder to login so they can discover value of your product.
No matter your use case, you’ll be able to track these emails and Campaigns all within Kissmetrics. It isn’t just tracking opens and clicks, it’s setting a success criteria and then seeing if your campaigns are succeeding. Easily make adjustments on the fly to continually optimize.
The Campaigns overview page shows the campaigns you have running, as well as how each are performing:
Click on a campaign and you’ll see the messages that are in each campaign:
From here you’ll be able to monitor the performance for each message, create a new message, or pause any messages.
You Have All This in One Platform
With CEA, you’ll get behavioral analytics, segmentation and engagement tools all in one place.
Use analytics to see what needs attention, and take the action all in the same tool. No longer do you have to use analytics in Kissmetrics and export the data to another tool to try and then track those results in multiple tools. Everything you’ll need to analyze, segment and engage is in one place – Kissmetrics.
That being said, we are not a proposing to be a replacement for MailChimp, Pardot, or any marketing automation platform. Those tools and great for top of the funnel lead capture and nurturing. In fact, you may find yourself using these tools alongside Kissmetrics as we complement each other.
What’s CEA Good For? And What Isn’t it Good For?
To best understand who CEA is and isn’t for, let’s first go through some common use cases.
SaaS:
- New monthly visitors – Go beyond just tracking the total amount of people coming to your site. Create a Population to find how many new visitors have come to your site without ever previously visiting. Then segment it to see what’s driving the Population.
- Active trial users – Getting people to see the value of your product during the trial phase is the most important step to getting them to convert to paying for your product. Creating an engagement to track active trial users (the ones who are actually using the product) will help provide clues as to whether your trial process does a good job at showing customers your product value.
- Monthly trial conversion – Tracking the conversion from those trial users into paying customers will help you see if the changes you make over time are impacting this conversion.
- At-risk customers – Engagement is crucial for SaaS companies, and if users aren’t logging in, it may be an indicator of a future churn. Track these people and prevent the churn before it happens by creating a Population.
E-Commerce:
- Monthly buyers – Purchases are the lifeblood of e-commerce companies. How many people bought this month? How many of those were new customers purchasing for the first time? Tracking these Populations can help you understand how your overall sales are performing.
- Loyal purchasers – Repeat purchases are necessary to sustain an e-commerce company. A Population that tracks repeat purchasers over time will show if you’re gaining loyalty or if you’re losing it.
- One and done buyers – Are there people that purchase but never return to buy anything again? Hopefully not, but with Populations you’ll quickly and easily see how many (or how few) one and done buyers you have.
- Browsers – How many people are browsing your store without buying? If there’s a lot (of a large percentage of your overall traffic) it may indicate that your site doesn’t convert well or it isn’t attracting your target audience.
Just as it’s important to understand what CEA does, it’s equally important to know who CEA is for and who it isn’t for. We’ve made CEA for a specific group of users. Here are some people that will be a good fit:
✔️ Growth teams – These teams improve marketing efforts based on user behavior. They are focused on improving engagement through email campaigns and optimizing nearly every stage of the funnel.
✔️ Product teams – Launching a new feature or iterating and want to see the traction and engagement? Use a Funnel Report and improve the weak areas with Campaigns. Track product engagement among segments of users with Populations.
✔️ Customer success managers – Populations will track your “at risk” customers and then you can use Campaigns to send triggered emails to these customers. Identify, track, and engage all in the same tool.
✔️ Demand Gen marketers – These marketers work on the top of the funnel, doing everything they can to bring in more quality leads. CEA can help show where people are dropping off and if making changes to the site will drive conversions and increased engagement.
Here’s who will not be a good fit for CEA:
✖️ SEO managers – Kissmetrics is not an SEO tool. If you’re looking to improve rankings, gain more organic traffic, and insights on how to improve your SEO, you won’t find it in Kissmetrics.
✖️ Social media managers – Kissmetrics will not help you increase your Twitter followers to get more Likes on Facebook. If you’re looking to get more engagement on any social media platform, we’re not the tool for you.
CEA is the New Phase of Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics was born out of a frustration with other analytics tools. Most tools only provide metrics, but they weren’t all that useful. Kissmetrics was started to show you more than just what’s happening on your site – it started to help you understand who is doing it and the patterns of user behavior that you need to change to increase conversions.
With the reports we’ve created, we helped marketing and product teams understand their users and easily identify where the weak points are happening.
Now, we’re taking the next step in helping them take analyze, segment, and engage users to deliver more of what they want and love – all in the same tool.
We would love to tell you more about it. Visit our website here to read more, sign-up for a trial or to see a demo.
About the Author: Brian Kelly is the CEO of Kissmetrics.
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