How Inflection.io’s Marketing Team Embraced Segment.io And Used It To Their Advantage

Utilizing product data in marketing gives a distinct advantage to understanding the customer better and empowers you to tailor communications that speak to your customers' needs. We, the marketing team at Inflection.io decided to take the logical first step to understand product data.

The Inflection marketing team needed to learn Segment. Like many of our customers, Segment is tracking product actions (logics, features customers are using, etc). We needed to use this data in campaigns - onboarding, adoption, free trial flows, retention. Leaning in and doing it well is a marketing priority, because it’s a company priority. So how did marketing learn and help own something that has traditionally stayed isolated in product and engineering?

We learned the 101 of Segment

We can’t be successful if marketing doesn’t have a basic understanding of Segment.

First, we spent some time in the Segment academy and watched a generic overview/demo. We learned the basics of how Segment works, track and identify calls, sources vs destinations, etc.

We learned the 101 of our setup

Next, we met with Product for a lunch and learn to understand our existing setup. We got logins to our Segment instance and met with Product for an overview. What is being tracked, how it’s tracked, where it’s going, etc.

We worked to fill the gaps

Leaning in and understanding our Segment implementation was critical as we identified some gaps.

First, there wasn’t 100% understanding of what the events are. It sounds simple, but there’s a lot of nuance in events. One of our events is campaign_published, which is when someone publishes an email campaign in Inflection.io. But what exactly is campaign_published? Does publishing at inactive count? What about editing an existing campaign? Many events have these questions, so we worked with Product to create a data dictionary of our events and a simple one sentence on what it is, exactly.

Second, there was no analytics destination. This is important as we need a BI to understand what’s happening, so we worked to setup Amplitude to make it easy to visualize our Segment events.

Lastly, not all new features were getting Segment events. This was an issue because it limited our ability to use Amplitude to understand adoption, but also because we needed these events in Inflection so we could create great adoption campaigns. So, we partnered with product/engineering to make adding appropriate events just part of the release process.

We created email campaigns with Segment events

Do you know what’s better than measuring product adoption and PQAs? Creating more of them! Marketing set out to create campaigns based on our Segment events (complimented with Salesforce data) to do just that.

Of course we used Inflection.io. Since it has native integrations to both Salesforce and Segment, it was easy to bring in both data sets to not only build the audiences, but have product activity based personalization. We started with product onboarding, then rolled out aha/adoption campaigns, then launched an ‘automated QBR’ campaign.

I hope you enjoyed an overview of how our marketing team leaned into Segment to help drive our business forward. If you’re in marketing and using Segment, be sure to check out Inflection!