The Best Way to Communicate with Customers: Three Practical Examples

When you work with a project that has its own client base and previous work experience, it’s much easier to analyze the existing data and develop an effective plan for further communication.

Our customer is a SaaS company. Stripo is an online email template editor. It’s a drag-and-drop and an HTML editor, which makes it one of the most effective email builders.

The following client categories use Stripo:

• agencies;
• business owners;
• in-house marketing specialists/designers;
• freelancers;
• SaaS (ESP, CMS, CRM systems).

Today 40,000 customers use this email builder. However, it took much time and hard work to achieve that.

We started working with Stripo in 2017, once a project was launched. There were many tasks to complete, and some of them are still in progress.

We’ve worked hard to build customer profiles and create an email automation map.

However, our main task was to develop a plan for communication and customer service.

How to achieve that? As long as the service isn’t big, it’s enough to just receive the customers’ feedback and communicate with them to define their needs and tailor the end product to the end customer. In this article, we’ll focus on only 3 solutions that were implemented by Stripo.

Stage One: Segmentation by the Language

If you want to sell successfully, speak with potential clients in their language. The Stripo’s audience speaks different languages. Therefore, a website is designed to identify the browser’s language and to redirect a customer to a page in a relevant language.

Furthermore, it’s important to not only offer the service in a selected language but also send all service emails in that language. This is why we’ve immediately set up the collection and transfer of the customer’s language data. When a visitor fills in a register form, the data on his language preferences is sent to our service:

From now on, transactional messages to this user will be sent in his language. The interface of the editor is translated into 7 languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, and Ukrainian. We also send all the transactional emails in the customer’s preferred language.

We have implemented the following workflow:

The value of the language is transmitted in the body of an event that launches the script:

In this case, the goal of a condition block is to check the linguistic variable from an event and edit the further workflow course depending on that. If English is set, an email will be sent in English. If not, verification is continued down the chain until the language match.

Stage Two: Building Good Communication with Customers

The reviews of those who’ve already started using a product matter a lot at the initial stage of the project. Therefore, we’ve analyzed the behavior of the users who performed certain actions in the account:

• created a template from scratch;
• edited one of the existing templates;
• added their own links, and so on.

When a service just starts to develop, it’s easier to track the users’ actions and try to affect them. We’ve been monitoring the first customers since the moment they’ve registered to the time X: if they stopped using the service, we tried to contact them and find out the reason.

We sent emails manually to each customer in their preferred language. We used the plain-text email signed by the Stripo’s CEO.

The first email looked like this:

We tried to achieve the following goals: understand our customer, receive feedback on a product, and establish communication with customers. We changed an email template several times to understand which format generates a better response, and come up with the appropriate wording.

Client facing communication helped us develop a campaign plan for all stages of a customer’s lifecycle.

After that, we automated this plan. This helps us send not only transactional emails regarding payments but also emails reacting to other customer’s actions (or lack of action):

• a customer didn’t start creating a template;
• a customer uploaded its HTML, but didn’t adapt it;
• a customer didn’t finish editing the default template;

• a customer didn’t replace the default email links with their own;

• a customer created an email but didn’t export it.

In this example, you can see the statistics showing how many customers read their emails with a triggered message.

It’s important to remember that the service is still growing and developing. Therefore, the map that was created at the beginning of a product development should be adjusted as the service evolves.

Stage Three: Adapting the Editor to Customers’ Needs

In 2017, users were able to export email templates created in the editor into 4 systems: MailChimp, our service, GetResponse, and Gmail. Newsletters became an important step towards the service’s improvement.

In February 2018, we conducted a survey among Stripo users to pick the systems for further integration with the editor. In order to get more responses, we offered a bonus for taking the survey: 1 free week of the Business pricing plan.

The survey contained the following questions:

We conducted it among our English-speaking, Russian-speaking, and Ukrainian-speaking audiences.

Special Request Inline

Following the survey, in March 2018 we introduced the export of emails and templates to new ESPs, particularly to Campaign Monitor and Unisender.

Survey emails helped us improve the editor by adding the exact features the customers needed, specifically email export as a PDF file.

Why Pay so Much Attention to Emails

As Google Analytics shows, the email channel has the best behavioral indicators (number of pages per session, average session duration, etc.)

GA data helps identify which channel allows to keep the conversation going with the users who don’t use the editor on a regular basis. The chart shows that the email channel can reactivate over 40% of passive users in a week. For comparison, the chart also provides the same data for Direct and other channels to show what percentage of the total audience visits the editor each day.

Conversions

The email channel helps sell 10,66% of premium plans and has one of the highest conversion rates. Both promotional and automated campaigns are counted.

Assisted Сonversions

The email channel took part in a series of interactions with customers. It takes 4th place on the list of assisted conversions.

The development of the email channel doesn’t stop. We still have a lot to work on. We develop new strategies and emails based on the customers’ behavior and redesign of the Stripo website.