4 Tips For Better Devtools Email Marketing & Lifecycle Marketing

Developer marketing and DevTools marketing requires a special GTM compared to generic SaaS companies. Considerations a traditional SaaS company doesn’t have to make. Here are 4 tips for better DevTools email marketing and lifecycle marketing campaigns.

Product-based Onboarding

Most companies run product onboarding with drip emails from marketing automation. Email #1, said 24 hours, email #2. The problem is this is not dynamic to what the user has done with the product. Maybe they have already done step #2…if so, send them step #3,... or maybe if they haven’t taken a step, send them a reminder.

Inflection.io can be helpful for this. One Inflection.io DevTools customer moved their product onboarding emails from a drip campaign to one based on product activity and saw an 80% increase in free-to-paid conversion from this one simple change.

Remember That Managers Buy

Ensuring individuals are successful with the product is important, but often more senior members of the team actually swipe the credit card. Be sure to run campaigns to managers that open doors to them. “I’d love to show you how your team can better use the product” is not great. Better is “I’d love to show you our manager dashboard and how you as a manager can better have insights into [product] and guide the team.”

Another great customer communications campaign is “in review” emails. Clay does a fantastic job of this. They send out an email to customers highlighting all the success they are having with the product.

What’s great is you can include people on the email distribution that aren’t users. Managers, executives,... your product stays top of mind with more than just users.

Plug Revenue Leaks Using Micro Campaigns

Micro campaigns are low volume campaigns that are triggered to send exactly to the right person at the right time with the right message. The holy grail of marketing. These campaigns need extreme levels of content, so are often triggered and personalized using product data.

Sauce Labs does this extremely well. For example, one email they send is “abandoned cart”. Long used in B2C, this email is sent when a user goes to upgrade, but doesn’t complete the action.

Sending just a few emails like this per month contributes significant amounts to expansion ARR.

Partner Closely With DevRel

DevRel team is an asset. Use them. DevRel can help create lead magnets, curate content, and help make sure your email and lifecycle marketing efforts are seen in a positive light. MotherDuck does this very well. MotherDuck runs a monthly newsletter highlighting all the news, updates, and more of DuckDB.

MotherDuck also runs a Snippets gallery. Developers are notorious for unwillingness to provide their email address for marketing content. A snippet gallery like this – which requires login (aka an email address) to submit or vote on a snippet. Offers like this are almost impossible to produce without partnership with a DevRel team.

Developer marketing and DevTools marketing requires a special GTM compared to generic SaaS companies. Hopefully these 4 tips help you run better developer marketing, better DevTools marketing, and better email and lifecycle marketing campaigns.

Inflection is a marketing automation platform that lets you activate your product data and data warehouse to drive more pipeline, improve product onboarding and adoption, and revenue expansion, all from one platform. Request a marketing automation demo today.