Nylas is a leading provider of communication APIs, empowering developers to integrate email, calendar, and contact functionality directly into their applications. With a strong focus on serving developers, Nylas had traditionally relied on a sales-led approach to drive revenue, but they recognized the need to evolve their go-to-market strategy to include a self-serve model.

As Nylas sought to expand its reach and scale their business, major challenges emerged, namely how to onboard self-service customers in an efficient way.

Shifting technology and culture to support a product-led motion

First, Nylas recognized the need for aligning free-to-paid conversion, product onboarding, and customer adoption and expansion to milestones – i.e. key moments in the customer lifecycle. Typically marketing is focused on prospect only stages, so marketing had to have a deeper relationship with product, engineering, and data teams to uncover these milestones. This was the culture shift.

Once the team identified these milestones, the task then shifted to aligning marketing to driving conversations against these steps. Nylas was using Marketo for marketing automation and found the infrastructure didn’t support the increasing volume of users and data, especially the product data needed to truly orchestrate a product-led approach against the identified milestones. This was the technology shift and they needed a Marketo alternative.

What Nylas identified as keys to success

To address these challenges, Nylas needed a marketing automation provider that:

Ingests product actions: In order to align marketing to milestones, Nylas needed to know exactly what someone has (or hasn’t) done in the product. This includes hundreds of product actions and all their properties. Stuffing summarized data into fields in legacy marketing automation wasn’t going to solve the product. Inflection.io’s native integrations with CDPs and data warehouses was a perfect fit.

Personalizes email with product activity: Nylas knew that developers have a very high bar for the quality of email they receive. The best emails for developers are highly personalized with what they have done in the product. Inflection.io’s token creator was a perfect fit.

Is able to support a sales-led approach as well: The new stack had to support both self-serve and sales-led motions, ensuring that the two strategies could more than coexist…  the product-led motion had to also drive the enterprise pipeline. Inflection.io’s ability to personalize journeys and communications with Salesforce data was a perfect fit.

Understands PLG and is building for them. Nylas wanted to be on a platform that was building for their use cases, both uses cases they had already identified and even ones they hadn't thought about yet.  Additionally, they needed a customer success and support team that understands product data, product-led campaigns, and would be able to recommend new campaigns that would drive more business. Again, Inflection.io was the perfect fit.

How Inflection.io helped Nylas achieve 80% increase in free-to-paid conversions

The original onboarding campaign from Nylas was a classic time-based drip campaign. Every new user was enrolled into the same sequence of emails, sent at fixed intervals, regardless of how they interacted with the product. This resulted in a one-size-fits-all approach that didn’t account for individual user behavior or needs. For instance, a user who had already completed a key onboarding milestone might still receive an email prompting them to take that very action, leading to a less than ideal user experience and inefficient communication strategy.

Nylas made a strategic shift from a static drip campaign in Marketo to a dynamic, event-based onboarding approach with Inflection.io. in conjunction with better targeting, streamlined processes, higher quality leads, this change helped drive an 80% increase in free-to-paid conversions:

With Inflection, Nylas segmented users based on their behavior and progress through the onboarding journey. Users are guided through a tailored nurture experience that adapted to their specific actions within the product. This flow is more relevant to where the user was in their journey.

Instead of sending a predetermined sequence of emails, the system could now trigger specific messages aligned to the milestones. For example, if a user completed a critical milestone like making their first API call, they would receive an email congratulating them and guiding them to the next step.

Finally, users who demonstrated higher engagement were fast-tracked into advanced nurture content, while those who needed more guidance were provided with additional support.

Nylas streamlined their user onboarding process by consolidating two journeys in Marketo into one nested journey in Inflection. This new journey managed multiple processes, enhancing user experience and reducing friction.

Results beyond free-to-paid conversion

In addition to increases in customer count and revenue, improving free-to-paid conversion has many other downstream benefits to sales and marketing.

With more customers seeing value on self-service plans, Nylas increased the number of accounts available for their product-led sales motion to convert customers into enterprise pipeline.

With more customers seeing value on self-service plans, Nylas increase the number of champions in the market, the number of people in the market with Nylas knowledge, and the number of potential people who can leave positive G2 reviews. All of these impact brand and broader GTM efforts from job changing or social proof for other deals.

TL;DR

Nylas wanted to adopt and scale a hybrid go-to-market strategy but faced challenges with the existing tech stack and lack of visibility into key product usage milestones. Their existing time-based onboarding drip campaigns were ineffective in converting their new sign-ups from free-to-paid customers.

They partnered with Inflection.io to transition from static campaigns to a dynamic, event-based onboarding flow. This shift allowed them to deliver real-time, personalized communications based on individual user actions and progress through the onboarding journey.

The new approach included dynamically segmenting users, triggering specific messages based on user behavior, and consolidating onboarding processes to reduce friction,

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.