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” featur ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 us ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 re ...Read More

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 drive ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 t ...Read More

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 ...Read More