AMA: BlueVine Sr. Director Product Marketing, Anna Wiggins on Self Serve Product Marketing

Product UI real estate is a powerful, contextual tool in introducing new launches. Your customers are most engaged and most likely to take action on your new launch when they are already in the product. And this is especially true for a self-service model because frequently this is the only way customers will find out about a new launch. Depending on how your product is built or your product and engineering capacity, you have many options to highlight a launch in the UI. You can use “new” feature flags, product tours, contextual nudges, banners, walkthroughs, videos, and even interstitial modals. There are also lots of tools like WalkMe and Intercom to help add touchpoints to your UI. Your in-product launch strategy will depend on the size of the launch and your customer behavior goals. For a major launch, you could use an interstitial modal during the sign-up process to really capture attention - however, use this one sparingly because it can be really annoying. For a smaller launch, a product banner or a “new” feature flag could work well. Whatever you do, make sure your strategy is relevant and timely to your target audience. If you annoy your customers, they’ll train themselves to ignore your efforts, or worse they will stop using your product.

This will depend on your goals for the beta. Does the product team just need to test the product for bugs or are you establishing product-market fit? If you are testing the bugs, you can run the beta for a few weeks. In this case, you likley don’t need customer feedback because you can use your own data to figure out if the product is working properly. If you are establishing product-market fit, you’ll need a few months and explicit commitment from your customers to provide feedback. I recommend setting up a formal beta program where you invite customers, require NDAs, and set expectations that customers will need to regularly provide feedback via surveys or phone calls. In a sales-driven org, the sales team handles the beta recruitment process and customer vetting. In self-serve org, you’ll likely be doing this yourself or in partnership with the channel marketing and product teams. As part of the feedback collection, you can cover the following topics. 1. Does the product solve the right problem or in other words is this a problem the customer actually has? 2. Does the product actually solve the problem? If not, what would need to change. 3. Does the product meet customer’s expectations. If not, what did they expect and how should it be adjusted to meet them? 4. Does the customer enjoy using the product -- what are the pain points, what’s missing, what do they really like. 5. How would they describe what the product does and why they are using it.

Optimizing onboarding becomes very important in a self-serve model because you don’t have the benefit of a sales team to guide prospects through sign-up and onboarding funnels. It’s great that you already have a list of new users who dropped off because you can start collecting insights by looking at your own data. I recommend segmenting this list by prospects who didn’t complete and did complete the funnel. Start by understanding where in the funnel prospects are dropping off and how you can remove friction from the experience - a better UX, more in-product education, follow up emails, an incentive? You should also implement a quick poll asking prospects why they haven’t finished signing up yet and potential answers can cover topics like a need for more info, pricing, general confusion, or technical issues. For prospects who actually completed the funnel, take a look at what they did after they opened an account. Did they explore the product, set up any workflows, review any specific help center entries? Also review traffic sources and see if there are any correlations between where users came from and what they did in the product. Is it possible they didn’t return because they had different expectations than what your product actually does? You should also send this group a survey as well to better understand the lack of engagement. Your questions could focus on how users found out about your product, what incentivized them to sign up, how often they plan on using it and if there is anything you could improve for this group.

The ideal scenario is that product and product marketing have shared adoption KPIs because this creates greater investment and accountability from both groups. If that’s not the case, product will tend to focus on post-login KPIs such as MAUs and DAUs. Marketing will focus on pre-login KPIs such as site visits, email engagement rates etc. Overall, it’s best if both teams focus on the NPS as that’s a clear indicator of how satisfied customers are with the product and if they will recommend it to others.

I actually answered a few questions on having a seat in the product development process in a previous Sharebird AMA on Influencing the Product Roadmap. Visit this link to check it out: https://sharebird.com/h/product-marketing/ama/manychat-sr-director-product-marketing-and-content-anna-wiggins-on-influencing-the-product-roadmap

This will depend on why you are collecting the feedback and what you hope to get out of it. NPS is certainly a powerful tool to get a quick and consistent read on whether your customers are satisfied with your product. However, NPS surveys are generally only a few questions. You’ll find out what’s not working, but you may not get enough detail on how you should fix it. In this case, I recommend following up on your NPS findings with an in-depth quantitative survey and qualitative interviews to really figure out how to optimize your product.

There are product-led companies that also have sales and marketing funnels. I would say marketing and sales funnels are key to the success of many product-led companies. To answer your question, the biggest difference is that in a self-serve company you will be focused on product marketing at scale. Much like in a sales org, you’ll still be focused on funnel optimization. However, instead of driving leads to the sales team, you’ll be driving sign-up and activation rate growth. And instead of using lead gen forms, you’ll be using your site, retargeting ads, and product experience to ensure prospects decide to sign up and actually make it through the sign-up process.

Whether you work on a self-serve or a sales-driven product will, in a way, define the type of product marketing you'll do. In a sales-driven organization, most of your product marketing activities will enable sales or account management teams. Your metrics will be focused on the sales team's success such as driving leads and ensuring wins over losses. This model benefits from a 1-1 customer-to-sales relationship since the sales team can convince hesitant customers to buy or explain tricky parts of the product. Self-serve is a volume-based business and product marketing looks different here. Your website and product UI have to do a lot more heavy lifting to make sure customers can successfully sign up and use your product, so you'll be spending time on developing and optimizing those channels. You'll be doing more funnel analysis, working with UX teams to ensure a frictionless experience that makes sense, and partnering with customer success teams on at-scale education resources. You'll be working much closer with the customers and your metrics will be focused on behaviors such as sign-up and activation rates and driving specific activities in the product.

There are a few ways to collect customer insights. First, you can look at your own data to understand how your customers are using the product and what they are doing on your site. Tools like Google Analytics, MixPanel, Crazy Egg, and Segment are great for journey mapping customer behavior at scale. Next, you can do qualitative and quantitative studies to understand why your customers are using your product and who they are - this is important for segmentation. You can run surveys in-house using tools like SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics or you can outsource studies to an agency. I recommend getting a few quotes if you are going that route. You can also quickly collect feedback via an in-product survey using Intercom or a short poll embedded in your email using something like Movable Ink. Your customer support team is a treasure trove of insights. Be sure to connect with them often and set up an easy automated system for phone/chat agents to log common issues, questions, and feature requests. Finally, nothing beats just getting a customer on the phone - send a quick email invite and ask for a 15-min call for customers to share their experience with you. These conversations are usually very enlightening.

Similar to my earlier answer, product marketers who work on self-serve products are mainly focused on communicating with customers at scale - since this model relies on broad-based channels to interest, educate, and retain customers. Your website, product UI, and resource center will be doing a lot of heavy lifting to accomplish these goals and you’ll be investing in contextual product education, demos, walkthroughs, resource guides, and email journeys. Also, in a sales/account management driven org, product feedback, and feature requests come via informal conversations between customers and their account management teams. In a self-service org, you’ll be spending a lot more time talking directly with your customers and prospects to understand their pain points and how your product meets or does not meet those needs.