Intercom & Humanic
PLG
PLG
Jul 12, 2023

Intercom & Humanic

Overview

To successfully implement a product-led growth (PLG) strategy, companies need strong inbound marketing through platforms such as Google and Facebook. However, many struggle with low sign-up rates, as over 90% of website visitors do not convert to users (https://openviewpartners.com/productbenchmarks/). Therefore, it is crucial to strengthen the user flow pipeline from acquisition through product usage to activate, upgrade, and retain your customers. Understanding where to allocate investments is key to determining success or failure within this space.

PLG flow from Acquisition -- Sign up -- Conversion & Usage

PLG Nudges

An effective growth strategy demands precise triggers to inspire registered users to maximize value from the product, reducing abandonment. To build an automated and efficient system requires a combination of user activity tracking and payment information along with simple multi-channel nudging tools for growth and marketing teams.

Intercom

Intercom, founded in 2011, is a natural tool of choice of because of the richness and robustness of the solution for PLG companies. While analytics tools such as Amplitude and MixPanel allow the creation of segments and tracking behavior over time, integrating payment or other data can be challenging. Segment also enables profiles  creation, but the starting price may be prohibitive along with its long installation & instrumentation time, and profiles are not easily available in other tools like Intercom. Moreover, ingesting payment data into Segment is not straightforward.

Personas vs. Filters


As time marches on, the sheer amount of segmented data from precise event filtering can quickly spiral out of control. There is also the problem of replicating the filters between analytics tools and Growth marketing tools. Lastly, filters are a measurement of where a user might have been in time, versus personas that show the efficacy of your outreach over time as a user progresses from newbie to power user. Data-drive personas that show user journey & product adoption, allow for stronger marketing & revenue campaigns, increase conversion rate, drive profitability, and create better feedback loops through sales, customer success, growth, marketing, and product.To effectively manage this complexity, an ideal solution requires several features listed below.

  1. Ease and Richness of creating personas: Creating useful segments requires significant cognitive load. Filtering is necessary but not great at creating personas that allow you to drive revenue goals. You need to be able to review and verify metrics, create distributions (I don’t know that readers will understand distributions), and create data-driven, but humanized personas with a click of a few buttons.
  2. Trends: Once a persona is created it's important to be able to track it over time and see how it's behaving, to quickly test & validate your growth experiments.
  3. Organization: Its important to be able to easily organize the persona's into Stages such as Trial, Active, Churned and Never Converted to build your PLG User Journey, exactly where you organize the personas that are taking the journey.
  4. Dark Pipeline: In the persona creation exercise its also important to know how many users are not in any persona, to create additional campaigns to interact with this untapped, unengaged group of future users.
  5. Inter-Persona Movement: Its also important to know the change over time across persona's and change per stage
  6. Synchronization: Once created in a tool these personas should be easily available in any other marketing tool automatically in a single click.

Finally, Revenue teams need the ability to connect personas to an outcome that they want to drive. So for example if you want to drive 1% increase in engagement which persona(s) should you be targeting, which tool should be used, when should that outreach occur, and who should do that? This is complex undertaking for a team without several dedicated Machine-Learning personnel & resources waiting to do that complex work. Unless……you use Humanic.ai.

Humanic, is purpose built to solve for all your above challenges faced daily by Growth and Marketing Teams at rapidly growing PLG companies.