You may think your product is healthy, but there’s a scary secret hiding in your data that you may not be equipped to defeat.
Why is it that when discussing the health of a product, it’s more common to ask how many active users you have instead of total users? This doesn’t give you a complete view of product health. Peel back the layers of your data and you’ll discover a sinister surprise. You likely have a large segment of your user base who are zombies—inactive accounts that are just waiting for Dr. Frankenstein to bring them back to life. But how can you reactivate these lifeless users if you can’t get them into the product in the first place?
It’s a tricky question—people have abandoned your product, and if you’re using a solution like Pendo, the only tools at your disposal for engaging users are inside your product. In-app messaging and walkthroughs are great, but the problem is in the name: in-app. They’re not very effective for someone who hasn’t logged in for months. Everyone who has seen a scary movie knows that garlic only works on vampires, silver bullets on werewolves, but did you know there’s a secret weapon for zombies? Email.
You need an integrated solution
Email is the most sure-fire way to reach your zombie users at scale. But like raising the dead, there’s more to it than just snapping your fingers. You’re going to need a few things: usage analytics, a segmentation engine, and an integrated email service provider. With Gainsight PX, you get all of those. With other solutions, you don’t.
Products designed to provide usage analytics, but lack the ability to fully act upon that data require you to piece together a Frankenstein-like workaround that’s cumbersome and time-consuming. Take Pendo for example, here’s what a typical process might look like:
- Set up a segment inside of Pendo to identify your zombies
- Export a list of your zombies along with their email addresses
- Cross-reference your zombies against your opt-out list (careful, you might develop a craving for brains after a few hours of this)
- Take that list and load it into a 3rd-party email service provider (hope you have one!)
- Craft your message and schedule your email
- Check back in a day or two and see how many zombies were revived based on your original segment
- Repeat steps 2-6, changing the messaging for zombies you’ve emailed once, and starting new zombies on the original message
- Re-evaluate why you’re spending hours and hours on something that should take a few minutes
With Gainsight PX, a purpose-built product experience platform that goes beyond usage analytics, your process couldn’t be simpler:
- Create your Zombie segment with our easy, but powerful, filters.
- Craft your personalized messages with the native Gainsight PX email builder.
- Schedule the emails on a recurring basis.
Pretty easy, no? This is just one example where you can see the value of a purpose-built product experience platform. No need for spreadsheets and third-party integrations, just 1,2,3.
Native email capabilities provide limitless value
If defeating the zombie plague wasn’t enough, there are even more ways you’ll benefit from built-in email capabilities:
- Own the product experience. The Gainsight PX email builder means you don’t need to rely on other departments to spin up product-related messages. No more waiting days or weeks to get an email sent. You can curate your list, build your email, and send, in just a matter of minutes.
- Collect and analyze email performance data. You love data, right? Who doesn’t?! Gainsight PX tracks and stores all that great email performance data, like deliver rate, opens, clicks, and more. It also provides analytics so you can turn your raw data into insights that will help you create a better product experience. With Pendo and other solutions, that data lives in a different system—so your best bet will be to set up a custom integration or manual exports and imports.
- Send all the emails: We’ve talked mostly about re-engaging zombie users, but there are endless applications for messaging via native email. Complement in-app messages with emailed release notes, personalized notes when feature adoption is low, a cadence of welcome emails when a new user joins, and more.
The choice is yours
If you want to avoid your user base turning into extras from The Walking Dead, take a look at Gainsight PX and see how a product experience platform with native email capabilities can drive growth in your business. But if you’re a huge George Romero fan, or don’t mind leaving money on the table, there’s always Pendo.
