diegopoza

System Engineer, geek, foodie, technology lover, speaker.

Sr Manager, Developer Advocacy

Diego Poza

joey devilla headshot 900px

I’m a Senior Developer Advocate at Auth0, and I like to work on various technologies. I’ve developed software for all sorts of platforms, from CD-ROM and the PalmPilot to my current area of focus, mobile phones, IoT devices, and AI. When I’m not looking for strange new platforms to write software for, I’m playing a strange old instrument — the accordion!

Senior Developer Advocate

Joey deVilla

Learn how Profile Enrichment and Progressive Profiling help you target customers more effectively

Good marketing hinges on communicating the usefulness of your product. That means knowing who your customers are and how they'll use your product.

But you can't tell your customers apart if they are all just a name attached to an email address. You have no idea what they need from your product, where they work, or who they are. If your company hosts videos for businesses, HR will use the product differently than developers. So why would you market to them the same way?

Profile enrichment and progressive profiling are two ways you can build a robust view of your customers to differentiate them. This will allow you to boost your marketing and sales techniques by appealing to who your customers are, and how they want to use your product.

![Progressive Profiling Separator 1](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/3LgzjxxOCjpgPxIGVnyPum/c2a45e609bfae5429f85cac07712c4d5/02body)

## Progressive Profiling

[Progressive profiling](https://auth0.com/blog/progressive-profiling/) is a great technique for getting more information from your customers. Instead of asking your users a million questions when they sign up, you ask them a few questions each time they log in.

Think of it as making a little small talk with them every so often when they log on, rather than asking for a three-hour long conversation the first time you meet. So, when you ask questions progressively, you can get needed information without adding a lot of friction to your sign-up process (consider that [86%](http://www.sampleforms.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/How-to-optimize-registration-forms.jpg) of customers say that they will leave a website if the sign-up form is too long!).

For example, the first time someone logs in, you might ask for:

* Their name
* Their email address
* Their password

During their second login, or at purchase, you might ask for:

* Their address
* Their birthday
* Their phone number

On the third login, follow up by asking for:

* Their company
* How many people work for them
* Their industry

You can set up and customize a [progressive profiling strategy with Auth0](https://auth0.com/docs/user-profile/progressive-profiling#implementing-progressive-profiling-with-auth0). You can put in any questions in any order you want.

While progressive profiling is certainly a useful tool, you aren't going to get to ask users every single thing you want to know, no matter how many logins you spread it out over. When you want demographic data, that's when you turn to the raw power of profile enrichment.


![Progressive Profiling Separator 2](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/4QLyxXCCZVqCrkR6sUP4g8/8dc592f919af025c8467cc723809d526/03body)

## Profile Enrichment

There is a lot of information out there about your users that your sales and marketing teams are probably itching to get their hands on. But just as you can't ask someone for all of it, nobody in your company is going to sit down and manually look up pieces of information to add to every profile, either. It's simply not possible.

That's where profile enrichment comes in.

Profile enrichment is when you automatically grab publicly available information and add it to a user's profile. You do this by integrating 3rd-party demographic data APIs into your application using [Auth0 Actions](https://auth0.com/blog/introducing-auth0-actions/). Actions are snippets of code that run at specific events in the identity workflow, such as when the user logs in or signs up for an account.

For enrichment, your Action would trigger an API that grabs the data for you, and then deposit that information into the profile that every user gets when they sign up through Auth0.

![Auth0 Action diagram for Post User Registration flow](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/4pA9D9DqICIoC8dJcyfQX7/8d1850e82032c85c581141cb6ed9690d/post_user_registration_action_flow.png)

Let's say you wanted to enrich the profiles of your users beyond the basic information they provided when they signed up for their accounts. You could use an Action that triggers immediately after a user signs up for an account that connects to business-centered data APIs to gather additional demographic information about them: where they work, their role, how many people are in their company, and their work-related social media accounts. The Action would then add this information to the user’s profile.

Now you know how many employees their company has, where they're located, and what their job title is — all without forcing users to fill out a sign up-form.

![Actions Marketplace](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/7jcBRZSw4P7uwsLHtanUtf/b8051b29d9aa27bce1e057ac651dae56/Actions_Marketplace.png)

There are a number of [pre-built Actions available in Auth0’s Marketplace](https://marketplace.auth0.com/features/actions), and you or your development team can build your own custom actions with Auth0’s built-in development environment and insert them into the appropriate point of the identity flow using our drag-and-drop no-code identity flow management interface.

## Marketing with Your Enriched Profiles

Keeping more information on your users turns them from a single datapoint into an actual human that you can connect with as more than just a generic customer. Your marketing and sales teams have plenty of options as to what to do with all the information that transforms users into people.

* **Personalize your emails.** From birthday offers to targeted onboarding, sending something other than another sales-y email will pay off. According to MailChimp, segmented email campaigns see about a [15% higher open rate](http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/effects-of-list-segmentation-on-email-marketing-stats/) across the board when compared to non-segmented email campaigns. So whether you're sending tips specifically to customer success reps or alerting your enterprise liaisons to new features in their plan, using segmented campaigns will help you reach customers.
* **Boost your conversions.** Let's say someone signed up for your free trial. Of course, you grabbed their email, worked your API magic, and came back with information on their company and position there. Now that you know they work for a mid-sized PR company, you can help your marketing and sales people connect with that user to help them realize the value of your product in the PR space. If they connect with questions, you can point them right to the things that matter most to PR people.
* **Customize your marketing campaigns.** When you have demographic data on users, you can translate that into better marketing campaigns. Maybe you find that 25% of users are startups with fewer than 30 people, or that the majority of your enterprise customers generate reports on a weekly basis. Or maybe you find that teen boys in cities use your app more than any other group. Any of these pieces of information can help you shape marketing campaigns that speak directly to the interests of those groups.

## Aside: Power Your Profiles with CIAM

Before you can build more detailed profiles of your customers, you need a way to give them secure access to your services, as well as govern, collect, analyze, and securely store that customer data. That’s what CIAM — Customer Identity and Access Management — is for.

CIAM sits at the intersection of security, customer experience, and analytics. Providing an easy, frictionless way for users to onboard and log in is critical for driving conversions and building customer loyalty. Protecting sensitive data from malicious intrusion and taking steps to prevent data breaches is central to a sound security policy and compliance with data privacy laws. And compiling user data into a single source of truth is essential to understanding your customers.

<iframe width="600" height="338" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/belLEwjr9zQ" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

CIAM has an increasingly central role in how companies create their digital identities and manage their customer relationships. Companies are allocating more resources to their access management solutions, either from day one or as part of a larger digital transformation.

[**Visit our CIAM page to find out more about how it can improve your customers’ experience while ensuring security.**](https://auth0.com/ciam) It’s packed with articles, reports, white papers, and everything you need to know about Customer Identity and Access Management.

## Conclusion

To market effectively, you need to understand both your product and your customers. Understanding your product is the easy part — you spend every day with it. But getting to know your customers is a unique challenge.

Yes, you can do focus groups and send out surveys, but neither of those will reach every single customer. When you institute progressive profiling and profile enrichment, you're guaranteed a window into every customer's identity. From there, it's a matter of putting that information to use so you can knock your marketing out of the park.

How Profile Enrichment and Progressive Profiling Can Boost Your Marketing

How A/B Testing can help you taking decisions that make impact



Even large successful companies like Facebook understand and [utilize the power of A/B testing](https://fbinsights.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/facebookiq_placement-optimization.pdf) to ensure they stay ahead. **A/B testing** is a powerful tool you can use to drive more conversions from your site. 

The main goal of an A/B test is to test two or more variants of a page to determine which option works best. Starting your tests high-level before moving to test smaller details is the best way to maximize these conversions. 

It's important to make sure you choose a page that has [high traffic but low conversions](http://unbounce.com/a-b-testing/data-based-a-b-testing-process/) so that you're maximizing returns. If conversions are high but traffic low, then you need to find a way to drive more traffic which isn't something you can A/B test for. Low conversions and low traffic also won't benefit from an A/B test because without any traffic to gather data from, your A/B test won't have results.

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="Choose a page that has high traffic but low conversions, so that you're maximizing returns."/>

![Conversion-Traffic graphic](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/Qr8MVveoPHIFnyydvD7No/acebffd65d8b957da32d073863a6c4a9/conversion-traffic-graph)

Source: [Unbounce](http://webinar.unbounce.com/analytics-for-conversions/?utm_source=Webinar&utm_medium=Blog-Post&utm_content=conversion-rate-optimization&utm_campaign=Hiten-Shah&_ga=1.218726042.2055948509.1470424864)

A/B testing one change at a time allows you to fully determine the effect of that variation. This way, you can combine the effects of multiple changes over time to optimize for the best page possible. But most people take this to mean they should A/B test minor changes to their site. Here we are going to show you why that thinking is wrong, and how big A/B tests allow you to get great data while making great changes to your site.

## The Problems With Starting Small

When deciding how to conduct A/B tests, Facebook knows to start big picture to have the biggest impact before even thinking about the smaller details. 

As we've mentioned, one of the most important [A/B testing rules](https://blog.kissmetrics.com/know-about-ab-testing/) is to test only one thing at a time. This way you'll make sure it's something that counts, rather than trying out multiple little things. 

The other problem with testing multiple small things like colors, small text, or call-to-action is that you can't be entirely sure what is really making a difference if at all. You're likely not making much of an impact. Conversion rates may be changed by a percent of a percent at most, if there is even enough traffic to make a statistically significant comparison.

![A/B Testing small changes](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/5DKY6JTYpdFXnmnifrvPzQ/e8649f3fe04e8c14cc460f79befee649/small-changes)

For example, if we made the above changes — slight color and font resize — to the Auth0 homepage, it likely wouldn't make a difference. In fact, most people probably wouldn't even notice that we made a change. It certainly wouldn't effect the number of conversions.

When looking to A/B test, it's better to make big changes first to have the most significant effect. Small changes are good for optimizing further down the road, but those first need to be guided by larger-scale tests.

## Go Big, Then Go Small

Starting big will ensure that your A/B test will “[create results, not statistics](https://blog.kissmetrics.com/ab-testing-results/)” by focusing on the message you're trying to present, rather than the words you use to do so.

There are countless examples of impressive A/B testing case studies available online, but even in this compilation of “[10 kickass A/B testing case studies](https://vwo.com/blog/10-kickass-ab-testing-case-studies/),” the ones that made the biggest changes saw the biggest improvements. Testing the things that have the [biggest impact](https://blog.kissmetrics.com/ab-testing-introduction/) — such as headlines, graphics related to sales or product description — will present the biggest returns.

![Radical vs Incremental changes](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/274U4RTIBWcC6dBDe6iW1h/2aaff2dce6c932fddb32eeb9adae6a06/radical-vs-incremental-changes)

Companies should also not be afraid to make radical changes to test a completely new idea. As shown in a study done by [conversion optimization platform Experiment Engine](https://www.experimentengine.com/blog/2016/08/02/what-exactly-are-companies-ab-testing/), radical changes are more likely to show impact. With more general idea testing, if the change doesn't work, it is easy to just not launch rather than having to re-do your entire page for a small change that proved unsuccessful. 

### How This Works For Any Industry

In any industry, starting [high-level](https://knowledge.hubspot.com/landing-page-user-guide-v2/how-to-ab-test-landing-pages) and testing the entire landing page can open many doors for things to A/B test further down the line. Making big changes can reveal [surprising and maybe even unintuitive results](http://unbounce.com/a-b-testing/surprising-a-b-test-results/) that you might've never expected. 

For web app automation service [Zapier](https://zapier.com/app/explore), completely changing their landing page gave them the boost they needed. Though they [received criticism](http://www.usertesting.com/blog/2015/06/09/homepage/) for having a simplistic landing page, this choice was actually a result of a surprising A/B test.

![Zapier Comparison](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/45Yb6jXlGr0niIbVK2gg2N/5dc52e011faa3a6a278d2b30f474eb37/zapier-comparison)

They had compared the two above landing pages, thinking that the more informative page would lead to more conversions. Instead, they discovered that the simplistic page ended up leading to statistically significant more converted signups and active users than the other.

![Zapier Homepage Test Statistics](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/6Tuu214p10GtTqUFjuUdJ/9e0028cfd2ff96553c5dd97388af18ab/zapier-homepage-test-stats)

Zapier isn't the only company to make big changes to their web page to find out what appeals most to users.

Health-related eCommerce store [Body Ecology](http://bodyecology.com/) added product categories to their homepage instead of a drop-down menu, [increasing revenue by 56.43%](https://vwo.com/blog/10-kickass-ab-testing-case-studies/).

![Body Ecology A/B testing in the home page](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/3t6R6GvjUDFsA79ySbKCKJ/ce439588667b2a6f4dc49e8f70671d66/body-ecology)

Business training company [Dale Carnegie](http://www.dalecarnegie.com/) redesigned their main lead generation page to more clearly display the benefits of their course in a 2-column design. This change led to a [17.1% increase in downloads](https://blog.optimizely.com/2016/03/02/form-redesign-increase-leads/).

![Dale Carnegie A/B testing](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/1tBodW8DxRQWGzhYrmmZzU/aa3d004ff198a3b81db4797523fafb3b/dale-carnegie)

[Spreadshirt](https://www.spreadshirt.com/), where people sell their T-shirt ideas online, [increased conversions by 606%](http://blog.wishpond.com/post/98235786280/50-a-b-split-test-conversion-optimization-case-studies) by simplifying the “how to” section of their website.

![Spreadshirt A/B Testing](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/3Xd2Af2qYb3y8mPc5Td627/4b8bc0ca51c6af4ca53c70c8425a267b/spreadshirt)

By improving their value proposition and emphasizing a free new town, The Sims 3 [increased visitor registration by 128%](https://blog.kissmetrics.com/100-conversion-optimization-case-studies/).

![The Sims 3 A/B Testing](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/3h8MrFLvXcaINrYQTmNdCO/87ee22bafd6b2a98d32021a7dbbb02ae/the-sims)

By making entirely new pages and A/B testing more general ideas, these companies were able to see a more immediate difference that they could then start to iterate and optimize. 

## How To Run An A/B Test 

There is a scientific process you can follow when [running A/B test](https://www.optimizely.com/ab-testing/) experiments:

1. **Conduct background research**: Use data from analytics to provide insight on what to test.
2. **Determine your goal:** Know what you're working towards and never test without a goal in mind.
3. **Construct a hypothesis:** Identify and prioritize reasons on why you think this variation will be more effective.
4. **Prepare your experiment:** Make the changes! Using a software platform can make creating these variations much easier.
5. **Run your experiment:** Run the A/B test. Make sure your visitors are split evenly and interactions with your site are measured accurately.
6. **Analyze your results:** Use the data collected to see if there was a statistically significant difference and determine how to move forward.

This process, similar to the experimental framework from [A/B Testing and Personalization Platform Optimizely](https://www.optimizely.com/), is very general and can be applied to any A/B testing situation.

![The A/B Testing process](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/5hM22tci6A2Vr93fpdJWYx/c5bcd5937da3622aeb6df27450c884f4/ab-testing-process)

Following this process will make sure you are testing with a purpose and will learn something from the results, regardless of success. 

## A/B Test Everything — But Start With The Big Things

Starting your A/B tests high-level will give you the biggest returns quickly. By incorporating each successful change into the next A/B test, you will compound on these benefits to your conversions even more.

And the best part? If the change doesn't give the result you want, you can simply not launch the new page. Even if you get bad results, by testing, at least you know what doesn't work.

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="If the change doesn't give the result you want, you can simply not launch the new page."/>

The main takeaway message is that you are free to test anything on your website, so it's best to start big. You may learn that something you never expected is what appeals most to your customers.


Why You Should Follow Facebook And A/B Test Everything

Doing more with less is timeless. Here's why growth hacking still matters



In the late 1990's, tech startups were expected to spend money on traditional marketing and advertising channels just like everyone else. Then the bubble burst. 

The startups founded in the cash-poor aftermath of the dot-com bubble didn't have the resources to buy ads or hire traditional marketers, so they decided to treat user acquisition like it was a programming problem.

If growth is an algorithm, with effort going in and users coming out, it should be possible to optimize it. The basic strategy consisted of three tactics:

* **Experimentation: **They couldn't rely on traditional (and expensive) acquisition channels because their resources were limited. There was no method for acquiring customers that was off the table—as long as it worked.
* **Cleverness: **To unlock the virality that was hard-wired into their products, it was necessary for teams to think laterally and do things others hadn't considered or weren't capable of doing.    
* **Iteration: **There were no magic bullets. When teams found acquisition channels that worked, they doubled down and tested different inputs in order to maximize their results. Only once it stopped working was it set aside. 

As companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Dropbox and Instagram found massive success using these methods, it became clear that tech startups were different when it came to growth.

To succeed, marketers needed to understand how distribution was different on the internet and how it worked at scale. Most of all, they needed to have a “hacker” mentality—they needed to be the kind of people that worked a problem from all angles, who relentlessly pursued the “secret sauce” of growth.

## Finding The Secret Sauce  

Most if not all “growth hacking” strategies on the web are well-known acquisition strategies framed as revolutionary insights. True growth hacking emerges organically from your product, it can't be externally imposed, and as long it still works, you're not going to tell anyone about it.

It's like your secret sauce.

![Your secret sauce](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/3FIuELJXpC0J2oXVw7Eux2/74265e4a740c952a4d15df8fe866fa00/secret-sauce)

Sometimes, of course, you won't need to tell people. Sometimes the hack is hiding in plain sight, and all that sets you apart is the fact that you saw the opportunity before others did and had the skills to seize it. 

### How Airbnb drove traffic with a craigslist integration

Back before their $112 million Series B round in 2011, Airbnb was like many other startups. They had a platform and they needed users. 

They knew there was a big online market for short-term rentals—Craigslist had proved it. But Craigslist also *owned* it. Airbnb's founders, rather than trying to beat Craigslist at its own game, [decided to integrate with the service](https://www.quora.com/How-does-Airbnb-automatically-post-on-Craigslist). 

When users listed a room on Airbnb, they were given the option to cross-post their listing on Craigslist:

![Airbnb post to Craiglist](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/uNgJ6qhGYQ86bYUMtIXDZ/d90ea87f002884d556effd91543952d9/post-to-craiglist)
![Airbnb Craiglist integration](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/5CCve4Bn4hOLaASHn0ajLh/e13ced3dd6de6158bb6b09f4d4c578f1/craiglist-integration)
![Airbnb listing](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/71WRVZjRSD1YO1k4P1rI14/08a2c7a1faa2da60c00c9c86d7d40ee3/airbnb-listing)
*Source: [Andrew Chen](http://andrewchen.co/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an-airbnbcraigslist-case-study/)*

To demonstrate the value of Airbnb, they needed to get in front of the people using Craigslist. By allowing users to cross-post, they helped both those looking to rent and those looking to rent out:

* **Those looking to rent** got well-formatted and detailed descriptions of the places they were renting. The upfront pricing, pictures, and inviting contact form offered a far better user experience than the classic anonymous Craigslist email address—and hinted at Airbnb's features.
* **Those renting** got to offer more appealing listings while also tapping into the massive user base on Craigslist.

It was a brilliant marketing move. Rather than drum up support around the product in the form of press and PR, they built a mechanism for growth *into *the product itself. The more people that browsed Craigslist rentals, the more that saw and interacted with Airbnb's platform and the more they were able to grow.

This integration gave their product an organic lever for growth. Not long after, with 70,000 nights booked on the platform, Airbnb raised a $7+ million series A. A few years later came their gargantuan Series B, and the rest is history.

![Airbnb New Users By Month](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/1vntVFlTa57PWGC4N62RTz/585ef2832c1ab704821aee70274624a8/airbnb-new-users-by-month)

Airbnb's Craigslist growth hack was one of the first massively successful examples of integration-based marketing. Today, no one would even think of using Craigslist to find a vacation rental. 

In the years since, many have tried to replicate Airbnb's approach, but these things rarely work twice. Craigslist has tightened its API and most of its sections have far more competition today. That doesn't mean the integration approach is dead. It just means that today, it's less likely to be Craigslist on the receiving end of such a hack—and more likely to be a giant like Airbnb.

## Growth Hacking Is About Foundations

Clever tricks can accelerate your growth, but what gets lost in many conversations about growth hacking is sustainability. 

A good growth hacker uses network advantages to bring users to a product at an extraordinary rate. A *great* growth hacker brings in users that stick around.

### How Facebook Got To A Billion Users With Repetition 

Growth hacking isn't about tactics. Tactics are interchangeable and temporary. Growth hacking is something that, when done right, exposes your product's core value to a massive audience. The key to understanding how Facebook did this is the phrase “seven friends in ten days.”

![Facebook User Growth](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/32gz080vSsH50oVPk1UQrr/fd65e182ab2f16ca85ed9ead30829658/facebook-user-growth)

As Facebook was just leaving college campuses and becoming popular around the world, their Growth team identified that users who had **seven friends** within their first **ten days** on Facebook consistently stuck around on the platform. Those who fell short of that were churn threats. With this information, the Growth team established a new paradigm inside Facebook.

[From that point on](http://genius.com/Chamath-palihapitiya-how-we-put-facebook-on-the-path-to-1-billion-users-annotated), the one metric that mattered for the Facebook team was getting more users to seven friends within ten days.

![Facebook Design Team](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/1B3TdQDJIOkzSIftqej2qX/11eb8c9469efa12c72284beb24aaf630/facebook-design-team)
*Source: [Fast Company](http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665049/a-visit-with-facebooks-vp-of-product-and-his-redesign-team)*

Chamath Palihapitiya, the leader of the Growth team that took Facebook to a billion users, always goes back to the user experience when he talks about this “growth hack.” 

“My biggest fear was that we spam our users and we trick them and it will alienate these people,” [he said,](http://genius.com/Chamath-palihapitiya-how-we-put-facebook-on-the-path-to-1-billion-users-annotated) “You won't see it today but you'll see in three years from now or four years from now, and it accelerates when you compound that with a competitor who actually builds a better product that doesn't alienate people.”

That's why the seven friends in ten days metric was so crucial. It wasn't a growth hack in the sense that people use the phrase today. It wasn't some quick or convenient path to growth. Having friends on the platform simply made it *fun to use. *Facebook grew because the team was highly focused on making Facebook as fun as possible for as many people as possible.

Once they had that goal in mind, Facebook's growth was dependent on their ability to execute on it over and over again. All of the thousands of experiments they ran over the years that followed revolved around driving the “seven friends in ten days” metric. 

“When you understand core product value,” Palihapitiya says, “You can basically pivot around it and create these loops that expose it over and over again. This becomes the most important and obvious thing to do.” The companies that do it right, he says, are consistently and systematically successful.

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="When you understand core product value, you can pivot around it and expose it over and over again."/>

## Analyze And Act

In the end, both those who make a point of defending “growth hacking” and those who attack it are usually referring to very specific marketing trends. And from crappy email spam to malicious SEO, there are plenty of things to dislike about the idea of engineering virality.

At its core, however, growth hacking isn't complex. It's another name for the most fundamental task of any startup—achieving incredible growth with limited resources. 


Growth Hacking Is Dead, Long Live Growth Hacking

Customer Support is crucial - Delight your users more than you think you need to and it will pay off big



Paul Graham, co-founder of prestigious startup fund Y Combinator, [believes](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html) that early founders don't try hard enough to delight their customers.

This is a bit counter-intuitive, especially since Y Combinator also expects its companies to grow at the tremendous rate of [5-7% a week](http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html). When we think about that kind of growth, we often think in terms of massive land-grabs and clever hacks, trying to find huge, underutilized acquisition channels and milking them for all they're worth.

Customer service, on the other hand, seems like something you work on down the line when you want to bump your retention numbers and build a referral program—not something you do for growth right now. But this is a misconception. Growth, whether now or in the future, [is all about retention](http://avc.com/2015/07/growth-vs-retention/). You can't grow unless you retain the users you acquire.

For Graham, taking “extraordinary measures” to make your customers happy is one of the most powerful tools a startup has both for acquiring new users and retaining the ones it has. Do things to make every customer “feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made,” he says, and you'll have them for life. Plus, you’ll get their friends, and their friends, and their friends, and so on.

Customer support is actually an incredible kind of growth hack—put a little more effort into it than everyone else, and you'll bend your retention curve up while bringing in new people and establishing a foundation for awesome growth.

Here are four ways to get started.

## 1. Create A Personalized, Educational Email Campaign

When you get a customer's email address, you are getting access to something very powerful: their “direct line.” Email is still the most personal way you can reach out to your customers, short of a handwritten note or a phone call, and that potential for intimacy offers you an incredible opportunity to do some customer service as marketing. And unlike with a note or a phone call, you can send great emails at scale.

They can't, however, be one-size-fits-all. If the value your emails offer isn't tied into a customer's specific needs at that time, they'll end up archived or marked as spam.

That's why, to make customer support work as a growth factor at scale,  it's essential that your email campaigns are both behavioral—responsive to what people are actually doing—and automated. Add a specific goal that you can track and iterate on, and you're ready to go.

### Triggered campaigns

Good behavioral email campaigns rely on triggers, or specific user actions that *trigger *emails to be sent. Let's say you want to email those users who haven't logged in for a couple days with a list of reasons why coming back and subscribing would help them:  

![Customer.io automated emails](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/6f5XVnbz8x7egJjn2dI333/e52b163b6d16ac0b72ad8e28911a63ba/Customer-io-sample)

With an email marketing manager like [Customer.io](http://customer.io/), you can set up even more specific triggers to automate your campaigns. For instance, you could have an email sent to everyone who used your product a half-dozen times or less, spent 3-5 minutes in your Help documentation, and then logged off.

You can use Auth0 to get those metrics into your marketing tool easily, first use [rules](https://auth0.com/docs/rules) to [send your data](https://github.com/auth0/rules/blob/master/src/rules/send-events-segmentio.js) into Segment, then enable [Segment](http://segment.io/)'s integration with Customer.io. Once you do that, every action your users take will send an “event” to Segment with a timestamp, and you'll be free to use it in targeting your messaging with Customer.io. Here's the rule for sending a “Loggin in” or “Signed up” event:

```js
function (user, context, callback) {
  if (context.protocol === 'delegation') {
    return callback(null, user, context);
  }

  const request = require('request');

  if (context.stats.loginsCount > 1) {
    sendEvent('Logged in');
  } else {
    sendEvent('Signed up');
  }

  function sendEvent(e) {
    const sioTrack = {
      userId: user.user_id,
      event: e,
      properties: {
        application: context.clientName
      },
      context: {
        ip: context.request.ip,
        userAgent: context.request.userAgent
      }
    };

    // Segment API returns 200 OK for all its request. For possible errors
    // you must use Segment's Debugger (https://segment.com/docs/libraries/http/#errors)
    request({
      method: 'POST',
      url: 'https://api.segment.io/v1/track',
      headers: {
        'Content-type' : 'application/json',
        'Authorization': 'Basic ' + Buffer.from(configuration.SEGMENTIO_WRITE_KEY + ':').toString('base64')
      },
      body: JSON.stringify(sioTrack),
    });
  }

  callback(null, user, context);
}
```

You'll want to be fairly precise with the triggers you choose to collect and use, but you don't need to nitpick too much: if you're providing value with your emails, it'll pay off at some point.

Shopify knows the value of pre-emptive customer support: after you sign up, after you finish some set up, but before you officially launch your store, someone from customer service reaches out to you directly.

![Shoppify Customer Support Onboarding Email](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/4dUali7IoJzNgsbDjwLGKt/2f333a6b0e35b1ad05a910b2570e3d1b/shoppify-onboarding-email)

Even if you know exactly what you're doing with Shopify, this email works. It demonstrates that this company really cares about what you're trying to accomplish. It also implies that you will, in the future, have extremely easy access to help when you need it. That's the kind of messaging that's going to keep you from going to a competitor in the long run.

And that's not just intuition talking. Relevant, automated emails have been demonstrated to drive [18x more revenue](http://myemma.com/blog/article/21-must-know-email-automation-stats) than one-size-fits-all broadcast emails. They get more clicks, they lift conversions, and even those who don't buy are more likely to make larger purchases in the future.

From building the beginnings of trust to upselling, email is one of the most powerful ways to turn the delight of your customers into revenue and growth.

## 2. Create A Customized Onboarding Flow

Onboarding is another process that needs to be structured around how individual users interact with your product.

If you can't get your customers to their “aha! moments” fast enough, then you stand a good chance of losing them. After all, there's no momentum carrying them forward. They took a chance on your product, they're trying to see if it can do the job for them, and you need to show them that it can.

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="If you can't get your customers to their “aha! moments” fast enough, then you might lose them."/>

Signposts that point out essential parts of your product's UI can be invaluable for getting a new user to see its core value quickly. If you want to know where people are having trouble finding it, you can either go quantitative and look at your analytics or go qualitative and try a [user test](https://www.usertesting.com/). That will let you watch people navigate your product in real time so you can track their experiences, warts and all.

Once they're ramped up, you can use in-app announcements and indicators to show that new features or other enhancements are available. The easiest way to keep your service at the front of a customer's mind is to be compulsively informative about changes you're making.   

[Appcues](http://appcues.com/) makes a tool strictly for designing onboarding flows that lets you do all this. There's no coding involved so your marketing or customer support teams can do all the work of designing onboarding themselves. They can add hotspots, for example, little triggered buttons that give users information depending on what they're trying to do, or flows, which add overlays that guide users through entire sequences of pages:

![Appcues Onboarding helpers](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/4uRfLW85nTUKI94ygEOOWE/f29c8584beefc21e0f18d1c518db5acc/appcues-onboarding)

Each step that you design into your onboarding flow can be modified and segmented based on the same kinds of user metrics used for marketing. This is essential because while the core value of your product may be basically the same for whoever uses it, different buyer personas are going to require different approaches.

Sending the right message, at the right time, to the right person—that's what an amazing onboarding experience is all about. When you're brought into a service gracefully, and with what feels like a full support team behind you, then you're much more likely to stick around not just in the short-term, but for a long time.

If a good onboarding process brings you to an “aha! moment” quickly, then it's likely to have an outsized influence on the [entire customer lifecycle](http://blog.profitwell.com/why-churn-is-the-silent-killer-of-your-saas-company). It cascades. So when you're looking for places to help your customers understand your product and what it's really about, look to the first few minutes and seconds of your onboarding process. Hard work there will pay off down the road.

## 3. Use Video Support To Build A Human Connection

Dropbox, way back in 2009, was a wild idea. It's a good thing, for instance, that Drew Houston didn't listen to most of the comments he got after submitting it for consideration to [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863). But there was one that [must have](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8869) caught his eye: “If you are looking for a wider audience... make a video where you lay out the case for use using simple examples from user point of view.”

That's just what they did. Realizing that most people couldn't even wrap their heads around the idea of a cloud-based storage system yet, Dropbox hired a studio to make them an “explainer video,” which they then embedded on their homepage:

![Dropbox introduction video](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/TNwjX8UtfFpL6G8YVuXc9/8fb287af3008466bcff655a578a9ab60/dropbox-video)

The move paid off with an immediate [10% jump in conversions](http://wistia.com/blog/explainify-five-benefits). But this kind of power is just scratching the surface of what video can do.

As Wistia founder Chris Savage [points out](http://wistia.com/blog/evolution-of-video-goals), making videos that increase conversion rates is the first step—after that, you can use your videos to teach people about the problems your product solves and bring in *new *kinds of customers.

Using your subject matter expertise and experience to make videos about the *problems* expands your company's reach and builds legitimacy, like in this Wistia guide to [shooting video](http://wistia.com/library/shooting-video-with-an-iphone) with your iPhone:

![Wistia shooting video](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/1scgrLGtZqmY3wxz0KeeTo/706cf961958528f4d6d1ddddcfdb89d0/wistia-tutorial)

It's not about getting customers. It's not about conversions. It's about teaching people some valuable skill, and that's an incredibly powerful tool.

“In the long term, teaching videos can save you time, automate conversions, and better educate your audience,” [Savage says](http://wistia.com/blog/evolution-of-video-goals), “It can mean the difference between working with your customers to help them achieve their goals, and being stuck helping them understand what the heck your product does in the first place.”

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="In the long term, teaching videos can save you time, automate conversions, and better educate your audience."/>

Making videos like this will save your support staff time and energy responding to the kinds of questions that are better answered with videos, but it's also a great way to market your company.

People see a video like that and they think, “Wow, this company spent money making a video just to help me solve a problem”—now that's customer support as marketing.

## 4. Let Customers Know When Features They Want Have Been Built

You always think you know what's best for your product, but you're probably wrong. The truth is, you don't even really know what your product is *for *until people start using it and telling you. And they will—as soon as you launch, you'll start hearing customers request new features.  

But these requests can be difficult to deal with. At some point, they can come to sound like a Greek chorus of various interpretations of your product: “x” user wants “y” while “z” user wants “b” and “a” doesn't want anything to change, etc.

What's important is to maintain perspective. Don't drop everything because one customer said so, but don't let that prevent you from paying attention when you have a critical mass of requests for something.

[StatusPage.io](http://statuspage.io/), a website status as-a-service provider, has figured out a way to efficiently track feature requests, implement the most important ones first, and delight their customers in the process. To do it, they created an Excel chart where they write down, for each feature:

1. The customer who made the request
2. How much they expect to gain from fulfilling it

![Statuspage.io sample](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/5VI8Ng8vJBIXIlUPlfNvfH/0c7108f44da836365e64e586481ec8b5/statuspage)

This way, they can actually track whether or not the features customers want are beneficial to StatusPage's mission of [increasing ARPU](http://blog.statuspage.io/3-steps-to-increasing-our-average-revenue-per-user-by-2-4x). Then, when they build one, they can pull a list of customers who requested it and send out personalized emails to let them know what's going on:

![Email for New feature added](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/7GZb03AfCfWD0TPVYcoE2L/9d59e6e436ec13b9865999b2b92894e2/new-feature-added-statuspage)

Not only is this a great way to show your customers that you take their input seriously, it can be a great opportunity to upsell. After all, no one's going to your pricing page over and over to see what new features you're offering.  If a customer is flexible on price, but won't upgrade unless a certain feature becomes available on the next tier, an email like this is the only way to *ensure *yourself a chance at that revenue boost.

When a technique lets you systematically add revenue and make your customers really happy at the same time, it's a no-brainer.

## Make Customer Support Your Competitive Advantage

If you stop thinking about customer support as fundamentally reactive—user has problem, we solve problem—then you can start using it to open up whole new avenues for growth.   

It can sometimes take a bit of work to overcome that mental hurdle. We're not used to great customer service. We're used to waiting on hold and terrible menus and reps who speak in programmatic sentences. But as Paul Graham says, it's doable.

“Once you realize that existing conventions are not the upper bound on user experience,” [he says](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html), “it's interesting in a very pleasant way to think about how far you could go to delight your users.”

It's interesting, yes. It can also be a driving factor in your company's revenues and growth, so pick one of these strategies, get started today, and let us know how it goes.


"growth-hacking"