Developing a Lifecycle strategy from scratch
It’s rare to be given the opportunity to develop something from scratch. So if you’re reading this with the opportunity in front of you, cherish it.
In my experience with lifecycle marketing, it’s most often already happening in some capacity — whether it be content or brand marketing sending a monthly newsletter, or product sending one off emails to unique cohorts whenever and wherever, or developers crafting and sending specific transactional event-based emails.
But to build something from the ground up is a dream.
There are two goals I think of when it comes to building a lifecycle program:
Develop a predictable cadence of communication
Use email to drive product adoption in a natural way
Let’s dig into how I tackled (am tackling) both at Parcel. The callout I have is that although I’ve previously worked with multi-channel (email, push, in-app, SMS), my main and primary channel for Parcel is email. Makes sense since it’s an email developing tool.
Develop a predictable cadence of communication
With any relationship, if you meet someone once, say hi (welcome email) and never talk to them again, it will most likely not be the most budding of friendships. If you’re open to building a new relationship, put in the effort (use the product), you may expect the counterpart to put in the effort with you back. Now, that’s not the ideal situation for everyone in the context of receiving email, and that’s why we have opt in’s and opt out’s, but those that want to build that relationship should hear from you!
Introducing, !important-tips. An opt-in once-a-week newsletter pertaining to something email related. This is what we first introduced to Parcel’s audience to build engagement week-over-week before anything other major email in the traditional “lifecycle program”.
When you are starting from the ground up, the world’s your oyster!
In addition to the newsletter, sure, we also had the occasional product update email filled with better-communicated updates from our changelog, as well as the magic-link login transactional email, but !important tips was a predictable touch point subscribers could look forward to in their inbox once a week.
What part of the lifecycle did this predictable communication piece touch? Technically, the entire lifecycle. Since this was a piece of communication subscribers could opt-in to without an official Parcel account (many subscribers originated from emailresourc.es), it not only was an email that provided existing users visibility of Parcel in their inbox, but also was a lead generation tool to which I would measure the success of conversion to a Parcel signup.
The goal of this email was first and foremost to provide subscribers a piece of valuable learning that they could apply to email development. The secondary/third/fourth goal and subsequent benefits were that:
It provided leads (people who haven’t signed up to Parcel) an opportunity to learn about Parcel, and perhaps discover it’s a tool they are interested in enough to create an account
Reminded existing users about Parcel, and potentially would lead to account activity
Gave all subscribers a door to reply back and start a conversation about the tip, email, whatever they want to chat about. Whenever I get the opportunity to chat 1:1 with a subscriber, I feel like a real human and not just someone who sends out emails, which I find rewarding.
I didn’t look at open rate, click-through rate, or any vanity metrics with a fine tooth comb, because I didn’t have specific asks from the subscriber in mind when I send the email out each week. It was moreso a piece of “hey! you signed up to hear about some cool email tip, and here’s what I think this weeks is going to be” . Some weeks have higher click-through rates, some rates have low click-through rates.
Forward thinking I’d love to categorize the types of content we write about, and understand what hits home best with our audience. I do strongly feel like the time of day, day of the week, seasonality, and life’s external factors play a large role in how people engage with these emails, similar to how I feel like A/B tests results can sometimes be a total fluke, so it hasn’t been on the highest of my priorities. That being said, now that I write about it, I’m actually quite curious.
All that being said on my first goal when building a lifecycle program… does every brand and business need a newsletter? Not necessarily in the same way I’ve built Parcel’s, no. It’s essential to consider the value you and your business provide your subscribers. In my case, Parcel is an email development tool. One key thing we strive to do is to make email development easier for both the creator and the subscriber. We want emails to be accessible, we want to avoid clipping, and we want them to look great in all inboxes. Avi can build features all day, but someone needs to continue to write about why the features are essential to development success, and it can’t be me that is always writing about them because I simply don’t have all the answers! So !important-tips was designed to highlight members of the community that are experts in their ways and share things they’ve created to help other developers. It’s a great way to lift up brilliant voices in the space while at the same time maintaining a presence with Parcel subscribers.
Use email to drive product adoption in a natural way
Time to talk about email automation that is going to do a lot of work for you!
To begin with this, it’s important to ask… what do you know about your subscriber? Is it just their email address? Are you sure you don’t know any answers to questions they answered when they were signing up? Or things that they’ve done on your tool since you’ve collected their email address?
Getting access to this data is one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced as a Lifecycle Marketer.
Product and Lifecycle Marketing work in silo’s. Product launches questionnaires at time of signup that can’t be used by marketing to personalize how they experience the platform at all!
Data collection at signup — an example. From the consumer perspective, what are you going to do with knowledge of what industry I work in? I scroll through 20 options of industry types, only to find my specific one isn’t included so I select a random one. Will my experience with an expense tracking app, really change between if I work in Agriculture vs. Healthcare? Does the Lifecycle Marketer really use this data? Probably not.
My personal opinion is that these questions at signup are so often driven by Product to prove that a certain persona “exists” instead of looking at “how will this extra hoop a user has to jump through benefit them in the immediate future.” I could be very off on this, but that’s how I feel.
So, back to starting from the ground up at Parcel, I wanted to not only aid the personas we think exist right away, but I wanted to implement questions that I could use, not only for product research, but directly for the journeys I’m going to take said user on in my lifecycle marketing program.
The first few minutes, hours, days, are the most crucial to adoption. If someone struggles to find value within that time frame, you’ll lose them. If can offer any marketer a piece of advice, it would be to connect with whoever internally owns that onboarding experience, those signup questions, and get moving on having access to their answers or influence on what is asked.
I’m lucky enough to have shaped the signup experience directly, again, almost rarer than starting lifecycle strategy from scratch. At Parcel, I wanted to make sure I could leverage every piece of data that someone voluntarily offered us, so that I could better their experience. This is what I came to:
First Name (so I could say hey to them directly and not make it a weird widow hey at the start of every email)
What their role was internally — ie. what role resonated the most with them
There are a lot of job roles out there, but thankfully if you’re signing up to an email development tool (Parcel), you probably resonate with a job role of one of either a developer, a marketer, a copywriter, or a designer… if you are reading this now and are like “I’m none of those, and I’m offended” can you please message me so I can think about adding your job role? I am sorry.
Their goal of why they are using Parcel
This is the most important question and it has completely changed the way I communicate with users. I don’t want to blabber at people, with such a short attention span these days I want to make sure I’m giving people the content they need to get to where they want to be. So with this, I want to know what the user is going to be focused on. Are they coding, editing content, focused on QA?! ALL OF IT?! Which is totally fine, but if you’re only going to be here to test emails in some inboxes with existing code quickly, why am I going to tell you about things specific to code editing if that’s not your jam?
So far, I’ve developed specific streams of communication based on the information they provide me, and it’s been pretty neat to see how people interact. Of course, I don’t have a baseline to compare it to, but this will most likely be a V1, which I’m beyond excited to test against in the future.
I use this information in my email automations to guide users towards specific actions in their first few days. Looking at the average session count in the first 30-days of a user’s life with Parcel, we’ve selected delays between these automated touch points to hopefully hit them when it matters without overexerting ourselves and making it as if we’re desperate for the user to complete the goal they said they wanted to.
Because our emails are plain-text, I know the irony of an email development tool sending plain-text emails, I’ve actually built in various questions I am hoping the subscriber will respond to. They look to the naked non-lifecycle marketer eye to be a very genuinely hand-typed out email, which of course, they once were when I originally made them! Here I am again, just praying for someone to reply. The replies don’t come en masse, but when they do I feel a sense of success, and it’s a great opportunity for me to try to build that relationship with a subscriber, whether it be just a casual conversation or to discuss any questions they may have in further detail.
TLDR
A long story short, and summary of starting a lifecycle strategy from scratch is to first consider who you want your user to be at their most successful point by using your product. For Parcel, I want them to feel capable, confident, excited for how easy the tool is. I want them to feel like they have discovered something they are excited to use, or keep to themselves as a silver bullet tool, for it’s just that good. From there, you craft how you’re going to hand hold them to that success. For Parcel, I’m going to provide them with content that will continue their development education, and I’m going to point them right to the direction of how to do it when they signup so they don’t have question marks. I’m also going to give them a really easy avenue to reply-back anytime should they
My greatest learning since starting to build a lifecycle strategy at Parcel is that things are 10x better for everyone when Product and Lifecycle work as a cohesive unit, instead of in silo’s towards similar, but different goals. At the end of the day, we’re most likely working towards the same thing, but with different wording.