Customer Marketing Deep Dive

Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a quick shout out to Knack for sponsoring today's episode. Knack is a purpose-built email and landing page platform, and they're also one of our longest running sponsors. When I create our newsletter each week, I spend a bunch of time, more recently, with Claude, my friend Claude, as my editor. But once I'm done editing the newsletter, it's not as simple as just getting my copy from a Google Doc and hitting send. If you're a B2B marketer, you know that. So what happens? Someone has to take that output and turn it into an actual email that renders in Outlook follows brand guidelines and ships. You know this story. The last mile still feels slow and manual. Knack has made this a lot shorter. They just launched an MCP server that connects your AI assistant directly to their platform. So now you can describe the email you need in Claude or ChatGPT and draft it like normal, but it automatically starts building in Knack for you. You get an email that comes out following your brand rules automatically. No manual cleanup, no broken HTML, and even better quality than anything your team built by hand. The marketing ops team at OpenAI is actually running this workflow right now. They intake internal campaign requests from Slack, an AI agent structures it into a ticket, Knack MCP generates the email, and a marketer refines and ships. This is the future of marketing. You should go check it out at knack.com. That's K-N-A-K dot com. Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a quick shout out to Vectr for sponsoring today's episode. Vectr is a contact-level ads platform. You probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel, people you can't identify or follow up with, people you can't target with any real precision. So you end up throwing ads at job titles and hoping the right person sees them. Vector fixes that. Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people, the ones on your site that are clicking your ads and checking out your competitors. They're launching an MCP server that lets you connect AI like Claude or ChatGPT directly to their platform. It connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Hey, which ad creatives are fatiguing? Which companies are engaging but not converting? What's actually driving pipeline right now? It turns your data into something you can use in the moment.

Go and check them out.

It's vector.co. That's V-E-C-T-O-R.co. Vector. You're listening to the Dave Gerhardt Show.

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Exit 5.

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Exit 5. All right, welcome everybody. Let's see, let's look at the chat. Let's look at the numbers. Okay, people are here. People are joining. Welcome everyone. If you could just chat in first of all, let me know. Let's just do our first technical sound check here. Make sure you can hear me. And then for people that are joining, we're going to get started here. You still have technically 30 seconds, something like that before top of the hour, but if you're here, you're getting ready, it's Friday. Could you chat in and tell me your win of the week? I'd love to hear what you accomplished this week. It's Friday. My win of the week, we've been doing a lot of interviewing for new roles. I think we're closing in on some candidates. That feels really good. Hiring always feels great. I haven't got any chats yet. Can anyone hear me? Can someone just confirm that you can hear me? I want to make sure I'm not talking to myself here.

All right. Thanks, Jada.

Appreciate it. What's up, Molly? Richard. Everyone's just like thinking about their win of the week here. I hope it doesn't have to be very long. It could be an easy one. Think of a quick win of the week. Did you launch something this week? Did you launch some content, a new product feature? Do you get a promotion or a raise? Do you have a good performance review? Someone tell me something exciting that happened in your life this week while I have a sip of coffee and get my brain online here. No, I make my own coffee, Jonathan. Molly, I have a bell pepper growing in my garden. That's exciting.

What?

I hope it's delicious. I hope you, I don't know if it means you're ready to eat it yet or how you'll prepare it, but that's awesome. Gardening is so hard. I've tried it many times. It is actually harder than it looks. You think you just plant some seeds and it grows and it's not how it happens. Jayda said, not a win of the week, but shows great rapport with a client of mine. Got to see a video of her being tased for a training certificate. I had to read tased 5 times. Tased like a taser gun. Is that what you're saying? Wow. That's intense. Chrissy's company turned 2 today. Congratulations, Chrissy. That's exciting. What kind of company? Tell us about your business a little bit. Gardening is very hard. Yep. I've struggled with it. All right. It's been a minute. You didn't come here to me vamp about gardening. Let's get rolling here. Allison, I'm going to have you share that slide for us. Before we get into today's session about customer engagement, first of all, I have 3 great panelists here that are going to join and each present some very specific— each is bringing— we spent 30 minutes together earlier this week and each is bringing stats, examples, visuals. They're bringing all this stuff that you want to see about what these companies are doing in terms of customer engagement, in terms of turning their customers into a superpower for their business. But before we get into that, I want to tell you a little bit about our friends at Customer.io, they are our sponsor for today's session. They help marketers turn first-party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS, and push. It's built for marketers who actually care about the craft, not just blasting the same message to everyone on the list on a Tuesday morning. Guilty of doing that in my past life, for sure. Because the best marketers, like all of you who showed up today, are trying to figure out customer engagement for growth. And you know that not a lot of people are talking about how to engage your customers for growth. They're not just handling customers off to CS or moving on. They're treating it like a real channel. Customer.io helps you do just that by unifying your data, messaging, and AI into one platform. So every interaction with your customers is stronger and more relevant than the last. They also surveyed 750 marketers, product managers, growth leaders, and engineers and put together this great resource for all of you about how their teams are engaging with customers right now. It's the best way to engage with customers in 2026. They put all that together in a report for you. It's linked here. I don't know where it is in here. It's linked somewhere in here. You'll look for it. You'll find it. But if you don't find it, their team is going to send it to you after. It's a great report. You should check that out. And without any further ado, we will jump into our first presenter. Sue is going to join on the stage here. Sue from Monarch. And she's going to tell you a little bit about a referral program and some surprising data that she got from running a test fairly recently. So Sue, welcome to, uh, Agency5 Live.

Nice to have you here. Hi, Dan.

Thanks for having me.

So the example today that I'm gonna share is for our referral program. We revamped our referral program from a credit-based system where we give you Monarch Money credits to a gift card system. So we were trying to figure out the optimal time to promote our referral program. And initially, I think most people would think like, hey, someone should be a paid subscriber. And have been using the product a while to be committed enough to want to refer another friend. We were wrong. We had our data partners do an analysis of when people refer the most, and shockingly, it happens during trial, especially the first day of them starting their trial. So I was skeptical, but I went ahead and tested an in-app message, which I'll share. We built this mobile in-app message to display to people who have just started a trial, and data also showed us that they need to have at least one financial account connected. Again, just a reminder, Monarch Money is a financial aggregator app. So if someone has at least one account connected and they've started a trial, it's a good signal that they're ready to refer someone. And how we built this flow, and here's CustomerIO. Hopefully everyone can see this. But this is how I built this in CustomerIO. We have every event streaming into CustomerIO via Segment. So with the trigger of this workflow that I built was a free trial started trigger. And the next step you see, there's a wait until condition. I think this is pretty cool. I've been doing email for about 16 years and I really haven't seen a filter like this, but it says wait until, and it basically listens for a credential sync to happen. So users will stay in this state after a free trial starts until they do this. If they don't, they don't move along. And we check to see, make sure that they haven't shared a referral already. And then we go back to showing this in-app message.

So someone signs up for a trial, Sue, of Monarch. It used to be time-based, right? And now it's based on this condition. It's waiting until they hit the condition. Is that how it, one of the changes?

No, we actually had no referral program during trial. We didn't want to touch it.

Okay. It came from nothing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so the mission was like, can we get some of these people that are trying our product or, or your first hypothesis was this isn't going to work because you need an aha moment for people to like be a customer and love and find a feature to actually refer someone. But what you found was this offer and it was right after they signed up for a trial to like, you know, use more offer to share it with a friend. This had? What was the increase in lift and referrals that you got?

So we took a very scientific approach to all of our experiments. We had to write a hypothesis, we had to do a Bayesian analysis on how long this will take. So I estimated a 20% lift. The actual was a 64% increase in referral share during trial. And that's not all we look at. We look at the downstream effects and the downstream effect was we had 50% increase in paid subscribers via referral. Wow.

And so this is mobile, but, but one thing, so you were telling me about was like, I think you had this discovery after, was it after this initial test mobile that this might work on desktop as well?

Yeah. So this was a twofold. So phase one of this was just introducing referrals to our trial audience, which shockingly it worked. So we continued and then we always try to optimize what we're running. So I think I was just thinking about this on a weekend as we do, and it just, I had an aha moment myself, like, wait, I'm showing this on mobile, except most of our free trial traffic is coming from web because now we're trying to push people to a Stripe payment instead of Apple and Google, so we don't have to pay the Apple and Google tax. When I looked at the actual mix, it was 80% of our traffic is starting their free trial starts on a desktop app. So we decided to expand this in-app message, not just on mobile, but also on web. And this is the Customer.io screen that I use. Choose your destination. They make it really simple. You just choose your platform, web, iOS, Android. Obviously our devs had to connect all of this and specify the page that you wanted to show on. And so we did it.

Boom.

And that's the desktop version.

Yeah, this is the desktop version of the in-app message or a pop-up, whatever you want to call it. And with this, we had some pretty, pretty incredible results from this. Ultimately, we wanted to look at how many referrals, like, was there a percentage lift in the referrals shared as well as downstream effects on AR and incremental subscribers? So what we found here was there was a 16% relative lift in referral shared, and that ultimately led to, yeah, it was a 20% increase in referrals redeemed, and that equated. And another interesting thing that we found was that users who actually send a referral during trial have a higher likelihood to convert from trial to paid. That was a secondary metric that we were not expecting. And once we did all the calculations there on the incremental lift, it equated to about a half a million ARR lift. Not expecting that at all. So that was a big one for us.

That's pretty incredible. I, you think about like the psychology though of like, okay, if I'm going to tell someone I know about this app and I'm gonna get some incentive to do it, obviously it's why I'm gonna start by doing it. But if I'm going to like make that commit, like I'm going to show someone else like, hey, you should use this too. Like it makes sense. You might be a little bit more tend towards like, all right, I'm going to use this or I'm going to be more committed to trying out this app and making it work, which is awesome.

Okay.

We got a question from Jacobo. Jacobo, I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing your name. Was this lift due to the change from credits to gift cards? And what made your, the question credits in the first place? What made you question, excuse me, the credits in the first place? Was it a credits or was it more of a placement of when the referrals came up?

It was literally credits. It was Monarch credits, so you can use it toward your next Monarch subscription. We did not feel that it was strong enough. Our referral channel wasn't pulling. I like to think of referral being the top 3 acquisition sources. It wasn't landing there. So we had a huge change in the growth team. We had a new CTO come in and just shake up the program. The lift wasn't due to this change because we never tested it against the trial audience. We never pushed referrals to our trial audience. So the lift was purely just taking this moment in time that we knew from data was a good time to promote this and shooting it off. We actually, honestly, to be clear, we didn't see that huge of a lift when we went from a credit system to a gift card system. We thought we had a hypothesis that people would prefer a gift card where they can use it for whatever versus Monarch Credit, but that actually didn't really lift referrals. What is helping our referral program right now is the way we're marketing it.

Okay. Other questions, if people have other questions, I, I should have said this at the top, but feel free to jump in on the chat panel. I'll check the Q&A panel.

I see Phil asked, what type of tools do you track for your metrics and measurements? Customer.io, definitely, but that feeds directly into Amplify. Amplitude. I'm a big Amplitude fangirl. So for us on the marketer side, I build funnels that say, hey, this in-app message was delivered. How many people shared a referral, which we have as an event within 7 days. 7-day window is what we like to look at. And on the data side, they use Statsig to do all the in-depth statistical analysis within every, like, we have to wait for statistical significance. So everything is squeaky clean on the data front.

So tell us a little bit about your background. How'd you get into this? How'd you end up doing growth at Monarch?

Oh my gosh. So I've been doing growth retention engagement, email marketing work for the past 16, 17 years. Yes. So I've been doing this.

Where, yeah, where else have you done it beyond Monarch?

So my expertise is in subscription e-com, right? My first Oh my goodness. I'm gonna date myself here, but my first job in this department was in online dating and this was pre-app, pre-app online dating. So a website like eHarmony.

Is that dating yourself?

I don't know. I don't—

it's just dating, the era of OkCupid, but I don't know if anyone knows the website JDate.

Yes.

Yes. JDate.

My wife's Jewish, so yeah, I didn't meet her on JDate, but my wife is Jewish, so yes, I, I know JDate. Yeah.

Everyone knows someone who met on JDate was our catchphrase there.

Like that.

Yeah. But they asked—

someone just sent heart emojis. I don't know who showed up on our screen. Someone sending the heart emojis to us.

Amazing.

Thank you for that.

But okay, so you started in e-commerce and then also online dating apps. What was your first role there? What, what were you doing for them?

I was an email operations coordinator. So that's where I learned all the technical, by the way, just So you guys know I'm a team of one at Monarch Money and Lifecycle. So I'm the one that builds all these workflows. I'm the one that directly works with the data partners. My first job is where I got most of that experience. I was a technical coordinator. So they had me build all the segments, work with all the engineers, and this is why startups love me because I can build the things, I can do the strategy, I can do the data. Yeah, never did I think being a coordinator at JDate would land me on a 16 17-year trajectory of this role, but I love it. Before Monarch Money, I was doing the same thing at Calm, like calm down, the calm down, like calm app meditation and stuff like that.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I used to use that for a minute, but okay. You were at Calm. Okay. So you, you have a ton of non-B2B background in marketing, which is really interesting because we bring a lot of people with B2B marketing background to us. And so this type of stuff is, I think, what a lot of beauty marketers or some group obviously who are here today want to know more about, especially like on the push and the SMS and email side. So it's really awesome to hear a little bit about your background and some of your experience there.

Awesome.

Thank you, Dan.

Cool.

All right.

There's no further questions for Sue as of now. If you do have a question, Sue is going to be backstage. She will answer your questions in chat. I believe Jonathan is going to go next and Jonathan is going to talk about a couple of cool things. Jonathan, we talked Wednesday. You shared a very specific example and a very specific sort of like couple of different sets of stats and things you wanted to show and it's very clear cut. And then this morning, Jonathan sent us like 5 slides with like 10 different charts, all these different graphics. It looks like he spent all night working on an update because he wanted to show you everything he knows. And seeing this is a very interesting business. He's going to tell you a little bit about it. Jonathan, thanks for joining. Excited to kind of go through some of the stuff with you today.

Yeah, no, I appreciate it. I recognize a lot of folks in the chat as well. So really my goal here, like this webinar is all about not only how to acquire customers, right? We do that every day, but how do you keep customers? And the marketing playbook that goes behind that. So at first I was gonna share like one strategy that works for us, and then I thought, you know what, why don't we take a couple plays out of the playbook? So my goal here is that maybe one of them resonates with you and you can take it back to your desk and maybe it'll work. Who knows? But I'm here to answer questions. So I'm gonna go through a few plays that we use at our own organization, some context. This will really help too. So when you're seeing this stuff, you're like, what? Team of 12, not a team of 1. Sue, props to you, by the way. That is some awesome work that you're doing over there. We love Segment, Amplitude, and our CustomerIO stack as well. For real, they're doing some really cool things. But my team focuses on end-to-end marketing. We focus on the entire customer journey and a little bit of more. So we have your classic demand gen, we've got content, we've got creative, I have a dev, but we also have customer education that lives on the marketing team. And I'll explain a little bit in terms of why that's important. Product marketing is also absorbed by the marketing team. We also handle recruitment marketing. So we're not only recruiting for new users and trials and customers for the platform and the software, we're also recruiting for the people that are going to work for us to help us get more of those things as well, including retaining customers. So We have our hands full, but that's what you do. You take the opportunities as they are presented to you. So a little bit different from organizations that I worked with in the past. And what's also different is the way that we're compensated, however you want to put it, MBO, bonus, commission. We're compensated on 3 pillars. Net new revenue, makes sense. Net revenue retention or NRR, which is like revenue retained over a period of time. You want to try to get that as high as possible, ultimately more than what you were originally getting in the year prior. And profitability, right? Profitability in the business. We've got one of the larger line items across the org. So the money and budgeting is part of my role, including the activation of campaigns like I'm about to share with you. And then our motion, this is kind of what's a little bit different from orgs that I've worked with in the past. We have 1 million users on the platform. We have 18,000 paying organizations and about 40,000 paying users from those organizations. So things move very quickly at Seamless. Our velocity is very fast. It's a freemium motion. A lot of data comes in and out all the time. And the really cool thing about that is that we're able to see things happen very quickly when we test, for better or for worse. So I'm going to share it.

A million users, you've got statistical significance all day long, right?

It is. And like I mentioned, it sometimes works and in our favor and sometimes, you know what, you learn very quickly and both of those things are a gift, right? Yeah. So I'm on two screens here. I'm going to pop mine up and kind of go over a few of the plays that work for us. We've got our charts, right? We're going to go back one. So because things are moving so quickly throughout the funnel, right? We have tens of thousands of users that are leveraging the platform every week. We're not only focused on just the top of the funnel. We're also focused on retaining customers, growing customers, and of course in partnership with sales and CS. This is just a little bit of a snapshot. And really the point that I wanted to make here is that when I came to the organization almost 6 years ago, we did things like most orgs I've worked with in the past do when you acquire new customers, new users and such, you throw them over the fence and let CS deal with it. That was Okay. You know, for a very, very short period of time, but the obvious, we find out the obvious, right? Marketing's winning. CS isn't winning or CS is winning. Marketing's not winning. You always want to win as an organization, right? And because of that, you know, we're all sharing the same type of goals across the board. That's why we have NRR and profitability as well as net new. So we stopped treating customer engagement like a campaign. This is one of the big takeaways that helped impact our organizations. We went away from like campaign, let's do this for this period of time and then stop and try this new thing and try that for a period of time and stop and really went for a full 365-day trigger or let's make behavioral-driven multichannel campaign. So we stopped thinking of things like this month we're going to do G2 reviews, right? This month we're going to do testimonials or it's case study week. And it's just baked into the entire experience that you have with our platform today. And what does that mean? It means right message, right time, right place, right? It's a combination of email. It's a combination of in-app. It's a combination of SMS and even personalized outreach and training. It's a lot, right? But really what we do, and CustomerIO makes that super easy, is that people are getting those messages when they're engaging with certain parts of our platform. right? And I'm going to go into what some of those parts are and what some of the results are. One of the big things that we realized, you know, years back is users and customers would come on the platform and they'd kind of drop off over a period of time. And there was a lot going on within that period, right? We kind of dropped them into the platform and said, hey, tooltips, those are fun. Just go on your own way. And We had a lot of support tickets, a lot of them, and all these little squiggly lines you're looking at here, managing those support tickets is not scalable at all. So like, why is marketing dealing with this? Because we are tasked with driving engagement in the platform as well, right? We want people to use the product. We want them to come back. We want them to find value, aha moment, whatever PLG acronym you want to use. And we just couldn't handle human-driven support and training. Anymore to a degree. So what we built was an agent, right? I think you hear a lot about these days, but this has been up for about 2 years, almost 2 years now. So in other words, we created an automation chatbot agent, if you will, using Voiceflow and a combination of CustomerIO for some of the in-app interactions as well as some of the email interactions to literally answer any possible question there is. You know, in the past, You can see the numbers here. We have over 7,380 conversations that have been mitigated via chat. That's a lot of conversations in this period of time, and those conversations would've ended up becoming Jira tickets, which is lame. You might love Jira tickets, right? But you send 8,000 customers, 7,000 customers to open a ticket to get an answer to a question that is very easy to answer and you're going to end up losing customers. They're going to turn off your platform. They're just not going to be as interested as they would be otherwise. So little picture of a little chatbot Sarah there. What makes this powerful? It's not like, hey, I built an agent chatbot. Let's see how it goes. Is that we invested into this strategy. We have a full-time AI engineer that works specifically on our chatbot as well as some of our other automations and workflows. But Training this thing and keeping it trained and on task and not hallucinating is almost a full-time job. And I think you're starting to hear that more and more as people are adopting it for a longer period of time. You know, agents and AI, right? You can't just let this run loose. You have to train it. So it's trained with over, you know, 3,000 hours of our training videos, our articles, our entire knowledge base. It constantly has to be retrained, refreshed with the amount of conversations that we get. There's always a new question that it can't answer every day. We don't let it run off the rails. We have guardrails for it so it doesn't try to make stuff up. And trust me, people try to do that all the time, especially when it comes to pricing. Not going to let it happen. But the results so far, I mean, we've seen a deflection rate on our tickets by about 55%. For us, that's meaningful, right? That's thousands and thousands and thousands of tickets, but tickets aside, it's thousands of customers that couldn't get the answers to the questions that they wanted. Maybe they were in the knowledge base, but they didn't want to go through the knowledge base. Who does, right? We were able to provide an experience that keeps them on the platform to this day and helps them move on. For higher level escalations, of course we have people, right? But this was a huge win for us and it was a big bet for us too. We didn't really know if this was going to be a great solution or not. This happened at a time where At least I was a little bit skeptical about having AI answer questions instead of people, but it's been a fantastic job so far.

Jonathan, if I could ask one quick follow-up question, and I am going to take the bait because you mentioned something about AI, and of course we can't do anything without talking about AI. You're AI engineer. I mean, they've got plenty, obviously, of data to look at, but I'm kind of just, maybe give us a little bit of like a, what is the day-to-day or kind of a weekly schedule look like for them? Like, what are they actually doing with, like, you said it's coaching, it's obviously looking at the data, but I'd love for everyone to hear a little bit more about what that AI engineer actually does on a day-to-day basis. Yep.

That's our guy, Falsif. Shout out Falsif at Seamless. A lot. So part of it is the training of the bot, right? That's relatively easy. A lot of it is analyzing the questions, the answers that are coming through on a daily basis. Yes, some of that could be solved with AI, but you can't quite trust AI all the way. So it's a lot of manual intervention in terms of what's prompting the answers. How do we readjust the prompts or readjust the answers based on the uniqueness of prompts? As well as he, he's also working on some other projects for us related to automations and workflows within N8N, some of our AI capabilities within our app. But this is a big part of his job because It's servicing so many of our customers every single day, and it's the primary way in which you get support inside of our platform.

Today's episode is brought to you by Compound Growth Marketing. They're a full funnel demand generation agency that I've actually personally hired twice.

That's right.

Before I was a thought leader, I was an actual marketer, an operator, a VP of marketing myself. And CGM was one of the best agencies that I've ever hired. They help high-growth cybersecurity, DevOps, and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are actually forming opinions about which products to use. CGM is great because they offer the combination of AI SEO, modern paid advertising strategy, and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team that you need today. So everything CGM does gets tracked, measured, and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by a former VP of marketing who gets this space. They really understand B2B. So if you're in search of a new agency that can help you hit the number this quarter, and you need help with things like SEO and paid media, you should definitely go and check out Compound Growth Marketing. I call them CGM, Compound Growth Marketing. Go and check them out at compoundgrowthmarketing.com and tell them that Dave and ExitFive sent you.

Totally. And then, Jonathan, when we were talking about this before, are you going to talk about training next? Is that— I don't want to jump ahead. If you want to talk a little bit about that.

I sure am.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right. I'll just shut up and let you talk us through this one.

All of this is like at other organizations, right? I wouldn't really be diving into things like support and in-app experience and training, right? My job used to be, this was a while back now, you get MQLs and you throw them to sales, right? And then you're done. Then they throw it over to CS. Good luck. The good old days. Good old days. I do miss, no, I'm just kidding. So we took that campaign type of strategy or campaign sort of point of view on treating customers, turn that into a strategy. The same happened with customer education. So we turned that from, uh, hey, there's our knowledge base, or here's some videos you can watch, which by the way, we have. Anybody can watch any video on demand. We have tons of training in the app. It's all good. We have courses, cool stuff. But at the end of the day, we found out two things. There's a subset of customers that just want to be heard. They just want to get feedback from a real person in I can empathize with that quite a bit. If you've ever gone through a drive-through lately and you got the robot, like, sure, the robot can take the order, but I'd rather tell a real person that. There's just something there that I don't quite trust. So that aside, we also started treating customer education as a marketing strategy. What it really, what it comes down to, found two things. One, they wanna talk to real people. Two, they want to be taught how to do the things that they need to do in order to do their job better. That means more than how to use Seamless. That means What are sales strategies that are working today? What are marketing strategies that are working today? Having guest speakers on sometimes to talk a little bit about their experience. So they're not just hearing it from us. They're hearing real life use cases from customers and sometimes not even customers. You want to bring in somebody that is a trainer in cold calling. We do that too, but we have live trainings and we started that around the same time, about 2 years ago. To date, we've done 4,982 customers trained, and we do our live trainings about 4 times per week, sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more depending on the calendar, right? But we have trained a lot of customers and anybody can take this. It's not just for new customers. It's not just for enterprise, right? It's for anybody. If you've been on the platform for 8 months, you can take a training anytime you want. If you're a user and you haven't paid, you can take a live training with us. Anytime you want. It's all self-serve, up to you, real people, real interactions, lots of Q&A, different themes per day. Sometimes you can kind of see that in our little Notion tracker backboard. We've got some on intro, we got some on our features. It's a big mix, but it's been another huge win for us.

And I think, Jonathan, you had said once you got this program live, there was a drop-off before, after 3 months. Couple questions I want to get to in the chat. I'll get to this in just a second, but there's a drop-off before, and then once you implemented this program, you saw that drop-off start to flatten out. Is that correct?

Yes. So we had customers that came in, come out of our engagement, i.e., out of our app. The average for customers was about 3 months, and then it would decline, and then it would kind of stay steadily throughout the period, meaning they used to be weekly users, now they're monthly. Seriously, that's not a good sign if you're looking at your customer engagement, right? It's a potential for churn. Yeah. Especially, you know, a platform in the space that we're in. So yes, as we started to do more live trainings, hearing our customers out, providing them with optionality to meet with real humans, as well as easy ways to get questions answered quickly, that has definitely helped our business out pretty tremendously. And I'll have a grand reveal of how it's hitting the bottom line.

Wow. Perfect.

All right.

We won't ruin that. A couple of questions that came up, one from Richard. You kind of just spoke to this because it was, I think it was mostly about the first 3 months of their journey with you. But to bring up Richard's question, curious about your approach to customer engagement plus education at the start of a customer's lifecycle versus existing. Find getting people to join is easier said than done. So maybe that's a little bit of a secondary question there, but John, maybe you could talk to that a little bit for us.

Yeah, none of this is easy, so I hope it's not coming off that way, right? Like we don't have full capacity in our webinars, but it's marketing within itself, right? It's the marketing inside marketing. So we have to market our training. People aren't just going to naturally come. We love when they do, right? That's a picture of a button in the app that they can always get access to if they want to. But ultimately, we have to market ourselves and market our training inside the platform as well as throughout their journey, whether it be on phone calls with CSMs, if they have one, through our marketing automation workflows, you know, CustomerIO and NAB. We also use some behavioral triggers too for finding— we use Amplitude, by the way, awesome— for finding that people are, you know, rage-clicking, for lack of a better term, on a certain area of the app. Maybe they're hitting these filters over and over again. We can cohort those customers and offer them a live training on the spot in the platform. So we're able to identify where we think users and customers are finding friction, but yeah, we've got to market. It's not easy. Let's see the other part of that too. Versus existing, start is easier than existing. Start, you have all their attention, right? First month of usage is an engagement's like 98%, right? It's so high. And it's just that over time, if you're not constantly getting in front of your customers, you're not constantly providing value. They're going to drop off and you know what, they're going to drop off anyway. They're not going to be 97% engagement for the next 12 months, but you want to mitigate that as much as possible.

Well, I'll have Jonathan respond to a couple more of these questions in the chat after we go through it. Jump over your grand reveal. We want to see some of the—

Okay, we'll go to the grand reveal. Okay, real quick here. We also drive growth plays for higher net revenue retention. If you're not doing this already, identify some of your higher value growth accounts, enterprise accounts, whatever you may want to call them. This sounds pretty elementary and it kind of is, but it's really low-hanging fruit. We market to the users of organizations that currently haven't signed up to the platform. That's all this is. And this works really well for larger organizations, segmented organizations, buying committees that you want to market to. You run the list of users that, you know, we happen to be a data platform, so we benefit from that. But you find the folks that you want to be part of the organization that currently is on your platform. And you market to them wherever they're at, right? Get them on board, show them why, speak to them differently than you would a net new customer. It's going to win. For our growth accounts, it's helped increase 32% in NRR in 2025 doing that. These are big accounts, but I'll preface that. Results over time, right? We're looking at the very end of the funnel here. Are we saving more customers than we're losing? And yeah, we go through a lot of customer right? Just in general, we bring in tens of thousands of users per month. We bring in, you know, thousands of demos held per month. So we see a lot come through. 2024 to 2025, year-over-year change in cancellation cases decreased by about 24%. That's big for us. It's people that say, you know what, I don't want to cancel, which is awesome. They want to renew. We want that. And then Auto renewal removed about a 19.9% decrease. And then overall, it's just money in the bank to the organization. I know that's a lot of charts to look at, but at the end of the day, this is the net revenue retention number. This is the retention number, the EBITDA number, right? We maintain more customers. We're going to have a better chance of profitability without having to market to net new prospects. So it's been a win for us. Couple plays. Hope some of it was helpful. I understand it could be a little unique, but happy to share anything else in the chat.

Yeah, based on the number of questions, Jonathan, there's definitely interest in what you just showed. So hopefully you can answer a couple of those. Hopefully at the end, we also bring everybody back up on stage and we'll try to answer some of the questions. I know there was a question for Sue that came in earlier. We can try to answer that live at the end, but Jonathan, thank you very much. We're going to have you jump backstage for a minute and then we have Naomi jump on stage. Naomi has a really cool role. She works for Customer.io, but she's kind of like the power user of Customer.io, the product at Customer.io. And Naomi, you have a pretty interesting background too. Maybe we can start there a little bit about your background, what you've done leading up to your employment at Customer.io.

Yeah, I'm a career lifecycle marketer myself, which is actually, I've got a slide that kind of covers it in big words, so I'll throw that up and then I'll just talk through some of my career. So yeah, I've been in email very similar to everyone in the industry. I fell into it and I have not been able to to leave it. I don't know why I like it so much. I just really enjoy it. But I've been in email since 2015. About a year before I even joined CustomerIO as an employee, I had a call with one of the senior product leaders just talking about my love of email and how I'm vocal in the industry. And he was like, well, if you ever want a job, like come chat to me. I was like, I don't know what I would do at CustomerIO. I'm a marketer that likes to do email. And then about a year later, I joined the team. And it's really cool for me because I really enjoy the community that we sit in as email lifecycle growth marketers, an end user of the tool. And then that combination, I can kind of help shape the roadmap based on what people like us need. So yeah, I love my job. I love what I do here. And I'm technically, my title is a product marketer, although I'm still like hanging on to the title of lifecycle marketer for dear life. You cannot Claude away from me, 'cause I still believe that a lot of what I do is lifecycle. But instead of looking at how do I generate more top of funnel, or how do I, you know, create sticky retention, I'm like, how do I get people to use the product? And what can I do to get feedback on the product? I'm a horrible salesperson. I'm like, if you wanna use the tool, you can use the tool, but I wanna know if you like using the tool and if you don't like using it, what we can do better. And so.

Yeah.

If I'm in my position.

When I joined Drift, Naomi, they gave me a product marketing title cuz I was a customer of Drift before.

Yeah.

Okay.

And they did the same thing where I had never had a product marketing title. Yeah. And they were like, well, we don't really know what to do with you, but you can do a lot of stuff. You know the product.

Yeah.

We think you're gonna do like marketing the product, so we'll call you a product marketing manager.

Yes.

I know that experience. Yeah.

That's pretty much exactly what happened to me. So I was like, I don't know what product marketing—

Yeah.

—user does. I know lifecycle and I know email. And I know this community and they're like, here's a product marketing title. I'm like, okay, all right, here we go. And I love it.

So let's do it. So you're actually doing some of these campaigns you were showing us earlier in the week, some of the types of engagements in the campaigns you're running for Customer AO. This is like how this happens is made behind the scenes here. Like it sounds like you have a couple examples you wanted to show us today.

Yeah, yeah. I've got a couple examples that I wanna walk through and again, just hitting home that even though my title isn't lifecycle or email, I'm still very much so a lifecycle marketer of sorts. I'm encouraging adoption of the platform. I sit within the marketing team. I have very specific things that I want from the people that I email or send in-app messages to. And just to give a quick look of like what the team kind of seems like at Customer.io. So we have a very large marketing team. I think in total there's like 30 or 40 of us now. When I joined, there was only 9 or 11. It was a much smaller number when I joined. 4 years ago, and now we're a much larger team, but on the team there still is that traditional like growth marketing lifecycle function. And this team of 5 marketers, 5 growth lifecycle marketers, they own onboarding, they own awareness, they own the upsell, they own like referral techniques. They're, they're really the core foundation of the traditional role of a lifecycle marketer. They're executing on that. And then I am one of 5 product marketers and we each kind of have our own area of specialty. I come from a background of loving email marketing specifically. And so with that, I own our Design Studio, which is kind of our email editor and marketing that. And then with kind of this new adoption of AI in our industry, I have also decided to own kind of like our AI features and how we deliver them to our audience base. So those are kind of like my areas of focus within the organization, but of course there's a million other features of Customer.io, and as product marketers, we own launches and education and awareness for those product areas. And so I sit kind of in that second column there. Now I wanna walk through two examples specifically, but what I believe to be customer engagement is yeah, it's awareness, it's activation, it's top of funnel, it's retention, but it's also how you find out if what you've built is working. And I love like a small startup environment. I thrive in a really fast-paced motion where the CEO is like on calls with customers and you're learning about what works. But it is at some stage, I don't know like what stage of user base it occurs, that like feedback loop between the CEO that shapes the product direction or the product team shaping that product direction at some level of scale, that feedback loop almost breaks at companies. And that's where Jira tickets start to pop up and Zendesk tickets start to pop up. And there's not really this connection point between the end user experience and the marketing team that's talking about these features or like the product team that's, you know, reading these support tickets. You have to play telephone in order to get that. And I, as an individual, like, refuse to do that. I'm like, as a marketer, I want people to reply to me. Like, please reply. Makes my day. Even if someone's like, I'm frustrated, I'm like, but why? Tell me more. And so the two examples that I wanna walk through are gonna kind of talk through how I implement touchpoints to drive that feedback loop. The first is our MCP server. So about a year ago at Customer.io, we launched our MCP server. If you're not familiar with what an MCP CP server is. I view it as just like a new term we use for integrating AI tools with products. So you can integrate an LLM such as Claude or Cursor or ChatGPT with tools like Customer.io or Notion. And now 90% of my workday as a marketer, I just spend in Claude and I use an MCP server to create new pages in Notion. I'm like, create this page on why Customer has a good product, and I will use this page to communicate out with users and share it widely internally. So that MCP server is essentially that connection point. But the one thing with launching an MCP server is I can't necessarily see what our end users are doing in Claude or Cursor or ChatGPT. I can't see what they're commanding that LLM to do inside of CustomerIO. And so I really need kind of a a lifecycle marketing touchpoint to be like, how is your experience? Since I have no visibility into it, like through backend events or conversion events, let's say, I need them to reply back to me. So what I did is I'm just going to jump over. As soon as an admin turns on the MCP server in a user's account, I have individuals enter into this onboarding flow. So after 25 minutes, Usually I would kind of expect action to be taken quite quickly between enabling it as a feature and an end user going to connect to something like Claude or Cursor. I reach out to users after 25 minutes and I have this simple, like, let's get you connected to some LLMs to kind of guide that process. And this first email looks like such. So I send this email out and I'm like, welcome to our MCP server. You are basically part of this. Group now that's using MCP to connect to Claude and ChatGPT and Cursor. And here's like the setup guide. So instead of having to comb through a bunch of our docs in order for you to quickly access this or connect it, here's the information right in front of you. And it's interesting because I actually get quite a lot of responses back, either being like, oh, I was able to connect this super quickly. Thanks so much. Or like, hey, what other prompts do you have that I could use with the product? And that type of information is either a signal that things are working really well for me, which I'm like, perfect, we don't need to change anything here. Or, hey, these questions that I'm getting back from end users, I should use to shape the next touchpoint or just reintegrate into this first one because people are having these questions right off the bat. So this is my first touchpoint. Jumping back to kind of what this workflow Looks like up until yesterday I had a second email go out after a day, but I'm working on redoing this one, so it's been paused since then. But then I have this third email that basically connects to the user asking them how their experience was, kind of after a 3, 4 day period. So I jump into their inbox again and all replies go to me. They do not go to a Zendesk ticket. They go to me because I am like a megaphone internally sharing any questions and concerns with the product team. Of course, if like a bug pops up, I'll share it with our support team that can help debug. But for the most part, I just want to know like real marketer feedback of what they want and what they're using. And I find actually the way that we've templated out this feedback results in quite a lot of responses. People will literally take this and then write in like a tabbed format underneath answering my questions, which is super helpful for me to take that feedback back to the team. The ways in which I've been able to take this kind of response to whether it's the first email or this third one, or even the second one we had at launch, is we initially launched our MCP server with only read capabilities about a year ago. So you could ask it for data around your campaigns, your broadcasts. You could ask it for information on a user profile. You could say, based on this specific user, create like a lookalike audience for me. Who should I be targeting based on what this really successful user does? But the create capabilities weren't there yet. So we have been behind the scenes chipping away and create capabilities so that individuals will be able to create broadcasts and campaigns. Hopefully we're launching it around next week, but this is really what we've heard in response. People are like, the read capabilities are great, but we wanna create. And so if it wasn't for feedback like that, we would just be like, it's silent, everyone loves it. And so we don't need to do anything more here. We can just let the feature be and carry on our merry way. So feedback helps shape our product.

I love that a company of your scale, Naomi, is one, email is still the crown jewel communication tool. It is. Yeah. Like, thank you for validating that for the 11,000th time that we've done one of these sessions or a session, any session we've done, like email is still our number one go-to channel, even with, you know, everything else that's out there. And then two, you're looking for just replies, like to an email, you know, like you look beautifully HTML, like it's not like click here, go here, fill up this form or take this survey or let's get this data point. Like you're looking for the fastest feedback loop possible, which is like, and also it goes all to you directly, right? You're taking it in, ingesting it, and you're the engine. For helping take that data and analyze it and push it within the team. Like, hopefully the rest of the audience here is picking up on that too, but Customer.io is a very successful company and a pretty big company, 35 people in the marketing team alone. Yeah. They're looking for email replies for data. We're letting humans kind of analyze it and get that fast feedback loop. I think that's a really good, important thing to call out there.

In other roles too, this would be the most unsuccessful email ever because there is no click-through rate. Yeah. Most are like unsubscribing or like going through a social link in the footer. My click-through rate is so low because there's nowhere to click. but I have to shift my like success metrics when I'm looking at the results of this email and be like, I got this many replies and 10% of them were feature requests, 10% of them were praise, like categorizing it that way. And like, look at how this feedback then shaped the rest of our product. And I like, I love it. I wanna run through one more example. Yeah, please. Almost at time here, but I'll be quick. The second kind of email outreach that I have instrumented as part of my role as a PMM is helping shape our beta programs. And I really enjoy features that are in beta because you get more feedback than you have ever before. It's almost this like contract where you're saying, this thing is in beta and we wanna hear you yell about its imperfections and the changes that you want because we're still in this phase where things could drastically change. After you launch something and you make a big splash about it, I find frustrated users, they get grumpy or they churn quietly and they don't communicate why. But if something's in beta, people are gonna be like, hey, I know this was recently released in beta and here's what I need. Like, this is a bug. I understand it's in beta. Or like, hey, are you still working on this thing? Like, I really want this as like a feature request. And so what we have is, oh, a year and a bit ago, we launched Design Studio, which is essentially in the left-hand nav here in CustomerIO. You'll see Design Studio. It's a new email editor and we launched it quite early before I would say we had the amount of features that I would even want as a marketer myself. But since then, since over the past year and a half, we've been adding so much stuff into it. And it's email outreach that essentially drives that feedback loop. We had definitely a roadmap of items that we knew we were going to add throughout the beta experience, but when we hear from customers' requests of what they want, we are constantly adding them into the next sprint. And that feedback kind of is a result of touchpoints like this. It's just a simple email from myself. That again is like, okay, here's like a quick overview of what you can do in Design Studio, but like reply back with questions or comments. So although we do have an in-product kind of like capture of people leaving feedback, I get a ton of replies from this, like at least 20 to 30 a week. And some of them again are like, hey, I want to learn how to do this. And then I'm like, okay, that's not clear in the product. How can we make that experience better? So even just general questions, there's no such thing as a stupid question in my books because email is tricky. It's a straightforward channel, but it's tricky to execute sometimes. And I want the product that I represent to be as easy as possible to use. So touchpoints like this, text-based, they don't need like a fluffy lifestyle image, are really easy to just get out the door and get sent to users. So that's my spiel of the second email that we've sent, and that email's been running for a year and a half now, and it still gathers great feedback every single day. So just to wrap up kind of like my long-winded chat here of how I implement lifecycle and customer engagement points at Customer.io is I really don't think you need a full CS team or like a research program to close the feedback loop. You just need the right message and the willingness to listen. Sometimes it can be hard at scale, but if you break it up into kind of like bite-sized pieces like I have, It's digestible and it's usually really valuable to the business. That's awesome. Mm-hmm. Thanks, Naomi.

All right, don't go anywhere. You can stop sharing your screen though. That's okay. We're going to invite Jonathan and we're going to invite Sue back up to the stage. If anyone has a question for Naomi of what she just presented, please put it in the chat. It looks like I can use my window now. So now I can see, okay, nothing in the Q&A panel. That's fine. There was a question earlier. I'm going to go back first to a question that came up for Sue. This question's from Pat Sue. How far into your trial— remember, uh, refresher, the referral program in the trial and earlier on in the trials, what Sue was presenting— how far back in your trial did you find a sweet spot for communicating referral program? Our system is pretty complex and we have 60-day onboarding period. Curious if we should wait until that's completely over or if we potentially should start during the onboarding period and extend a bit beyond. Sue, what do you think?

This is exactly the question that we had before we started the referral program, which is why we tapped the data team. I know this is the standard answer, but I think you should do the analysis with your data team on when referrals happen organically the most and kind of double down on that. Even if you have a 60-day window, I think you'll be surprised. It seems like the consumer mindset, they're more price sensitive. We're just— the price is just top of their mind when they're starting their trial. So I would guess that earlier would be better.

Yeah. And test it, try it out, right? And see what it is. You could always try to find a limited way of testing it, I'm sure. Jumping forward to the questions that came in for Jonathan, I believe Jonathan answered most of those. Jonathan, was there anything that you wanted to expand upon that you didn't get to fully answer in chat that you would want to answer with a mic in your hand, so to speak?

I don't think anything has not been said already. I think the net of it is, is that anytime you're doing something new for the first time, or you're expanding on a strategy or doing things differently, all of it's hard, right? So really the intention was not to say this is easy. It really was about like sometimes the hard stuff is what you should be doing. You know, somebody asked about scaling customer education. It's incredibly difficult skill. It's actually unscalable, right? You'd have to hire more people to do those trainings because our Customer education team, we have two of them. They're building the decks, they're doing the live presentations, they're answering the questions, they are, you know, sending those videos to Vimeo and they're doing all the behind the scenes stuff and it's pretty taxing. So not easy, not necessarily scalable, but worthwhile.

All right. I'm jumping over to Slack to tell Allison to run the poll in the spirit of feedback and growth marketing inspired by, we always do this, but inspired by Naomi looking for feedback, Sue looking for feedback, Jonathan looking for feedback. We are going to ask for feedback on this session today. If you could jump in and rate today's session, 5 being the best 60 minutes of your week, 1 being you're putting together a lawsuit from the 60 minutes that you just lost. I don't know, whatever it is. 1 is not good. 5 is really good. Give us a quick rating. That's very helpful. We appreciate everybody spending the time with us today. Hopefully this was helpful. There's some great questions that came through. And it was awesome to hear from Sue, Naomi, and Jonathan on the different programs and campaigns and the lots of data. Like we're doing more of these sessions, we're sharing, you know, examples and visuals and it's getting more and more interesting to like just pull up your slides and just show me what you would show your board, right? We talked about that earlier in the week. And so it's really fun to see like inside each of these companies and see what you're doing. So thank you to the three of you for spending time with us this week and our audience sharing all of that.

Thanks for having us. Cool.

All right, everybody, talk to you soon. Thanks for the time. Bye-bye.

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