5 Practical Tips for Marketing to Forge Collaboration with Product

Marketing’s role has evolved significantly in the product-led growth (PLG) era. Even if you’re in a traditional sales-led business, understanding and leveraging product data has become essential for creating effective campaigns, improving user engagement, and driving business growth. Here’s why:

Better targeting and engagement

Product data provides insights into user behavior, preferences, and interactions with the product. This allows marketing teams to create highly personalized campaigns that resonate with users on a deeper level.

For instance, if you know that a user checked out a specific feature after signing up, you can skip the email that introduces the feature and send resources on the next best action.

Better Conversion Rates

Leveraging product data helps in identifying and targeting users who are more likely to convert. For example, if you know that a customer’s product activity has been consistently falling, you can run a campaign to engage the users well ahead before they churn. A campaign encouraging them to get into the product more showcasing the value they received. For this, you need an alert when product activity dips beyond the pre-chosen level.

Data-Driven Decision Making

Product data provides actionable insights that inform marketing strategies. For example, if you know the conversion patterns of users who match your ICP, you can offer an attractive discount to a potential customer who ‘abandoned cart’.

Responsive and Relevant Campaigns

Product-led marketing campaigns that are near real-time and are more responsive to user needs. For instance, emails to your best customers can come from their assigned reps instead of a generic support@ or sales@.

Autonomy

Marketing has user conversion goals. To drive these conversations, marketers ideally need to run campaigns that are relevant to the user. The only personalization when marketing to users comes from what they did in the product. Marketing NEEDS product data to do the job effectively.

Sending requests to the product or data teams to get rETL the data into a marketing platform slows down the pace (fast) of execution. Marketing success is reliant on other teams unnecessarily if marketers do not have direct access to the data they need.

📝 Side note: rETL stands for "Reverse Extract, Transform, Load." It is a process used to move data from a data warehouse or other centralized data storage back into operational systems or specific platforms where it can be used for actionable purposes, such as marketing automation tools. Learn more about reverse ETL.

To sum it up, Marketing’s access to product data is important to engage leads, users, and customers effectively, so that they convert, retain, and expand the business.

When I say product data or product activity data, I am talking about any action a user takes in your SaaS product that can be recorded as product activity data. Think about the event of a user logging in, using a specific feature, etc.

How can Marketing get to the product data?

Marketing and Product collaboration. This topic deserves a deep-dive, so we wrote a whole ebook about Marketing and Product alignment.

What Can Marketing Do To Align With Product?

Best Practices for Marketing and Product Alignment

Here are some practical tips and best practices:

1. Align on Goals and Metrics

• Define and agree on key performance indicators that matter to both teams, such as onboarding completion, and conversion rates, that align towards broader common goals like NRR.
• Set shared goals that require collaboration, like launching a new feature or entering a new market.

2. Understand How Product Data is Orchestrated

• Find out how product data is collected and stored in your company. Learn how the data flow and frequency are set up.
• Explore what kind of data makes it to your data warehouse/database/CDP. This will help you identify the gaps between the tracked data events and the ones you need for marketing use cases.
• Invest time in learning the basics of your CDP. This will help you have an informed discussion with your product or data team about Marketing’s product event data needs. Marketing team at Inflection.io learnt the 101 of Segment.
• Develop a handy data dictionary that describes the product events in detail.

3. Audit Product Activity Events Together

• Seek access to granular and raw data of all or chosen product events. We talked about how to get to the right product data under various circumstances in this section.
• Make sure critical data points like the user’s email address are tracked and not hashed. If hashed for privacy reasons, explore options to de-hash it or match it with a customer record.
• Identify critical data points for marketing. Work with the product team to define key product activities that should trigger marketing actions. Make this part of the spec process so it happens automatically every time there’s a new feature.

4. Communicate Business Value

• Show how targeted campaigns based on product data can lead to higher user engagement and better retention rates.

For example, understanding the drop-off points in the product before a customer ‘abandons cart’ or churns allows Marketing to tailor comms to the specific user or account. Combining this information with the customer’s persona (ICP or not) and the ability to trigger a timely email will get more deals closed and reduce churn.

• If the product or data teams object, listen to them about the hurdles in realizing the goal of having complete product data event streams available in marketing systems. You can negotiate a phased approach for a complete Marketing and Product alignment.
  • Suggest starting with a pilot project that requires minimal data access and demonstrates immediate, tangible benefits.

For example, start by tracking a few product events, like feature usage. Use this data to personalize an email sequence aiming for better product engagement.

• After an initial success, expand the scope of data access to include more events and use cases.
• Advocate for complete access of product data (raw and granular) to optimize all marketing efforts and drive continuous improvement.
• Iterating how the resource allocation is optimized and justified to get the right product data at near real-time speeds has a positive impact on NRR.

5. Foster a Culture of Collaboration

• Encourage the product team to share the roadmap with the marketing team early and regularly. This helps marketing to plan their campaigns, announcements, and other communications in parallel with the product release schedule.
• Establish clear communication channels for cross-functional meetings on upcoming product launches, feature updates, and marketing campaigns. This ensures that both teams are aware of each other’s timelines and can plan accordingly.
• Create dedicated communication channels on platforms like Slack where both teams can share updates, ask questions, and collaborate in real-time.
• Push for mandating ‘tell Marketing about …’  as an item in the product/feature launch checklist.
• Find mutually beneficial topics and have ‘lunch and learn’ sessions for continued alignment.

Educate the product or data team about the bottom-line impact of having product activity data in real-time available for marketing. The potential deal closure chances outweigh the costs of bringing in product data more frequently into marketing automation.

To Wrap Up

Get an overview of what your current state of alignment with the product or data team is like. And, work on fostering a culture of collaboration with clear communication.

If you are trying to activate your product data and data warehouse to drive more pipeline, product adoption, and revenue expansion, you should check out Inflection.io. Inflection is a marketing automation platform that enables prospect and customer communications from one platform. Request a demo.

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