Announcing Excel-Style Token Editor for Easy B2B Marketing Automation Personalization at Scale

The end-users are using and evaluating your product at the top of your funnels and beginning of your flywheels. The free trials and freemium versions gave easy access to products and opened up the floodgates of users. Trying out a new app might not even need an email address. 

Even with the contact influx into your CRMs every month, the one thing marketers (or any GTM team) cannot afford to miss is personalized communication with the customer. We’ve done this with the help of tokens for quite some time now.

Tokens, as you already might know, make your content dynamic. These are variables that can display the value from a mapped data field. For example, using a first-name token in the email shows the receiver's name as saved in our database (or a default value) when delivered to their inbox.

The Dependency 

Using default tokens provided by your CRM is very easy. It gets tough when you need to customize your tokens to make them more relevant to your audience and business. Creating custom tokens has always been a pain for marketers.

Most popular marketing automation, email providers, and CRMs need developers to create personalization tokens beyond simple replacements like <first.name>. Velocity, Jinja, Deluge, and SQL are some scripting languages used for creating those. We heard from many marketing teams at product-led companies that their engineering team is needed to support complex personalization, but they aren’t able to secure the resources well, because they need to work on the product.

Why Inflection.io?

Inflection is the B2B marketing automation platform purpose-built for product-led companies. We built Inflection to help you automate campaigns at scale and have meaningful conversations with your customers. 

Seeing as we’re built for product-led growth companies, we thought to ourselves, there has to be a better way. While we still support scripting-based personalization, we’ve taken a fundamentally different approach, inspired by the coding language almost all marketers know - Excel functions. 

Coming to the why part. These are some product-led marketing campaigns you can run with Inflection’s tokens leveraging people, account, and product data at scale.

1. User orchestration with personalized onboarding, adoption, and engagement campaigns.
2. Drive self-service upsells based on product activity data.
3. Support sales-led motion through custom alerts and populated call scripts based on the account’s product activity.
4. Mitigate churn through proactive engagement based on account health, activity, and more.

All this without the dependency on a developer! Now that you got a glimpse of what you can achieve with Inflection, we’d love to show you how to get there.

Tokens By Inflection

We built the tokens feature on the Inflection app to make the life of a product-led marketer just a bit easier. 

1. Eliminate Dependency on Developers

If you are familiar with using ‘functions’ in an Excel spreadsheet, you already know how our tokens work. See for yourself. 

The ease of using Excel-like functions with the syntax and sample usage for instant guidance makes customizing tokens a cakewalk.  

2. Do More With Tokens

Once we nailed the ease of use, we made sure you can do much more with the tokens than use them as a data field replacement. You can use not only people and account data but also product events to contextualize your communication beyond personalization.

You can write logic, perform calculations, and compare values inside the tokens. You can also use nested functions for complex logic. This is easier to explain with a use case.

Imagine sending an email like this one to increase user engagement. The email uses personalization at many levels. The values you see highlighted are from product, and CRM data.

Calculating the number of sticky notes the users created in the past month would require a token like

countIf('event_name', =, 'sticky_added', and, 'created_date', >=, now() - 30)

The email shown above is a great example of how you can use complex nested logic in Inflection tokens to remind the value your customers get from the product. 

Note that the same token can be written a little differently based on how the fields are configured in your database.

3. Validate Tokens Instantly

In legacy marketing automation platforms we send test emails to preview and make sure everything is right before sending out the campaign. There’s a bit of back and forth when it comes to checking if the custom tokens are coded correctly. You don’t have to do that in Inflection. 

The preview table offers, like the name suggests, a preview of the values your freshly built custom token returns. In this example, the token returns the number of colleagues invited to create an account by a user from the same organization.  

Built By Marketers for Marketers

Personalizing with custom tokens has never been easy for marketing teams even with help from developers, trust me I’ve been there. We have the widest ever seen top-of-the-funnels now. And, this brings on additional challenges in personalized customer communication at scale. 

We built Inflection to solve for the issues faced by marketers in the product-led world with legacy marketing automation. This is why we built our tokens feature that is in a format that you are already familiar with — excel-style functions. 

Validate your tokens without having to send test emails every time you make a change. You can leverage the syntax and sample usage when in doubt. Customize, add operators, and use nested functions to return the right data that is meaningful to your customers and your business as well. 

See Inflection’s token editor in action to believe how simplified personalization at scale can get.