Driving interest to Clearbit's integrations: Using technology tags in email segmentation

One of the best ways to drive adoption with your API product is to show it being used directly within your customer's existing tools. If they can immediately use your tool within something they know and love, you'll have a far easier time proving value.

This is one reason why companies, including Clearbit, build integrations. Having Clearbit data piped directly into Slack, Salesforce, Segment, Marketo or Zapier allows new customers to start seeing value instantly, without a complicated setup process.

Building integrations has two main benefits:

• It can increase growth. Having integrations into popular products means you can be discovered more easily. If you have a Salesforce integration, customers looking for products that interface with Salesforce will find you. If you have this integration and your competitors don't, you win the customer.

• It can decrease churn. Zapier showed customers that used the Zapier + Typeform integration were less likely to churn than Typeform customers that didn't integrate. Tools that integrate with data sharing platforms such as Zapier or Segment are effectively integrating with hundreds of other tools. More use-cases for your product can present themselves, increasing usage and decreasing churn.

Use technology tags to promote your integrations

Though integrations are always valuable, they have particular importance early in a customer's lifecycle because they show the value of your product very quickly. This means you want to promote them as soon as possible. We do this through targeted nurture emails to new customers highlighting our integrations.

Instead of sending a blanket email about all our integrations to new customers, we use enriched data to only send emails to users we know use a tool that we integrate with. For example, there is little point in telling a new signup you integrate with Salesforce if they don't use Salesforce.

Tech tags are a data point in our Enrichment API that allow us to see what tech companies are running under the hood. For instance, the tech tags for eventbrite.com are:

From this list, we can identify the three best Clearbit integrations: Salesforce, Marketo, and Google Apps. If someone signed up from Eventbrite, we would send them an email highlighting the Salesforce and Marketo integration so they can discover the value of Clearbit within their existing workflow.

Within our marketing automation system (Customer.io), there are two ways we could segment an email list for different integrations. First way; we could define independent segments for each integration and send specific emails. So for the Marketo integration email, the segment may look like this:

Then they would get a specific email all about the Marketo integration:

But there is an easier way to do this, requiring just a single segment to track within one campaign, and just a single email.

We can then take advantage of Liquid templating to show different email text to different customers based on their matched tags.

This uses Liquid's if/else logic to only show the relevant content based on the data in each customer's clearbit_company_tech trait. The output is the same email but with different integration information depending the customer's tech stack:

Using this technique, we've seen open rates of 50% and a strong increase in click-through rates. Customier.io even wrote a blog post about it. If you have integrations, you can do this too.

Either pipe data from Clearbit → Segment → Customer.io, or integrate Clearbit and Customer.io directly if you have the technical proficiency. This allows you to set up your own campaign containing a segment of supported tech users. Then just write a single email using the tools you integrate with as the conditions within your if/else statements.

Set this up to fire for every new visitor in the segment and they will get emailed about your integrations. You are showing your value instantly to the exact people that need it, allowing them to get started with your product immediately and ingraining yourself into their workflow.