We talk a lot about how, in order to deliver effective product-led user experiences, companies need to break down silos and give customer-facing teams a voice inside the product. But—as so often happens with thought leadership—we started to feel like we weren’t really practicing what we were preaching. 

Until recently, the Appcues Customer Success team was still relying heavily on calls, emails, and docs to help our customers reach their goals. And while those are important channels, we knew we could do better. So we set out to discover what truly “product-led customer success” could look like for our team. 

The obvious place to start was with better in-app messaging. 

In-app messaging campaigns made with Appcues 

With a little help from the product team, we designed, targeted, and launched a series of in-app campaigns over the course of 2 months. Our goal was to lighten the manual lift that would normally be required of our CSMs, freeing up customer-facing team members to tackle more complex customer challenges. 

It was also important to us that we begin to embody the sort of cross-department collaboration that we encourage our customers to pursue in their own companies. 

We could go on and on about what that process looked like (and we will soon, in another article!) but first, we’d love to share some of the in-app messaging campaigns that our CS team ran using Appcues for Appcues!

Let’s take a look:

1. Renewal reminders

Nobody likes surprises in their bank account, which is why we like to let our customers know when their subscription is about to renew. 

That’s easy enough for our CSMs to do, but we needed a scalable way to notify our low-touch customers (folks not managed by a CSM) about their upcoming plan renewal. We wanted to send these customers a notification inside the product, in addition to sending them an email via our CRM. 

So, we created a renewal reminder slideout to give low-touch customers a heads up, along with an easy way to review their subscription details and reach out to us if they had questions.

2. Webinar announcement and registration prompt

In addition to our regular training webinars, the Appcues CS team holds irregular, feature-specific webinars with different members of the product team. CSMs used to email customers to let them know about upcoming sessions, or mention the webinars on a call—but attendance was consistently low. 

So we decided to start reaching out to people while they were using our product. We created a slideout announcement (that included a CTA to quickly register) to promote upcoming webinars. The result? A massive increase in signups—120 people registered for our last thematic webinar! 

3. Customer referrals

One of a CSM’s many goals is to expand their accounts and grow revenue—without being too pushy or “salesy” about it. 

We knew our best customers could also be our best marketers, if we could figure out a scalable way to leverage their enthusiasm for our product. To help our team identify areas of opportunity, we launched a referral campaign that offered customers an incentive (a $200 gift card plus a free month of Appcues) for referring colleagues and friends to the platform.

 4. Mobile pre-release signups

CSMs are also responsible for garnering interest in new features. As Appcues gears up to launch a mobile product (more on that soon!), our team has been focused on sourcing existing customers to participate in the mobile pre-release program. 

In the past, we would have just email our customers and asked them if they wanted to participate. This time around, we used Appcues to reach out. 

Our signup slideout had a 48% completion rate—which roughly correlates to a 48% clickthrough rate for an email campaign. Needless to say, we were thrilled with the results!

Product-led customer success

All of these campaigns were experimental—we’ve been monitoring the analytics to understand how different touchpoints affect customer engagement and success. So far, we’ve been incredibly happy with the qualitative results. 

But, perhaps more importantly, the customer success team is also just really excited to be making a tangible, immediate impact on the in-app customer experience. This wouldn’t have been possible if we, as a company, weren’t aligned around the same goals. And it certainly wouldn’t have been possible without a code-free solution like Appcues that let us non-technical folks create and publish in-app messages. 

While we can’t align your teams for you (although we can offer a framework that should help), Appcues can enable your own customer success team to run the same kinds of experiments in your own app. 

Give us try for free or reach out to your CSM to find out more about how we’re using Appcues in our own product.