How ChartMogul increased their time to market by 10x by unlocking customer insights with Twilio Segment

ChartMogul is the leading Subscription Analytics Platform for growing SaaS businesses. It helps companies run their subscription business by providing a complete overview of a company’s global subscriber base and key business metrics, presented in a beautiful and easy to use dashboard. 

ChartMogul wanted to complement the metrics from their own product (subscription analytics) with customer insights to drive more subscriptions and provide better, more personalized customer engagement during the trial period. In particular, they wanted to create better attribution on where subscribers were coming from and gain better observability into how their customers were faring during their 14-day trial. However, due to their point-to-point tech stack, they had limited visibility into this as different tools did not ‘talk’ with each other. Segment's Customer Data Platform (CDP) provided the solution, allowing ChartMogul to gain the customer insights they needed.

Before Segment, data primarily came from their CRM system and ChartMogul’s analytics tool, stitched together with back end code and Zapier. This resulted in data spaghetti and a fragile tech stack that didn’t scale. With ChartMogul’s accelerating growth they needed to unlock customer data across their company and create a single source of truth.

With Twilio Segment, ChartMogul can:

• Robustly connect multiple sources and destinations together to fuel customer insights: now setting up a new campaign, lookalike audiences, or viewing metrics for new features is only a few clicks away.

• Get better visibility into a customer’s trial period and personalize customer support

• Build advanced customer segmentation with Audiences making it 2x easier to run ad campaigns and 10x faster to launch marketing initiatives to the market

• Build attribution models and gain visibility into where people are coming from across their website, app, blog, etc. using Identity Resolution

• Have a single source truth across Marketing, Sales, Product, and Customer Support teams: now they have better reporting and waste less time looking in multiple tools or trying to find the “best” source of truth, increasing operational efficiency by 30%

A crude tech stack that didn’t scale

The catalyst for change came from ChartMogul’s Revenue Operations Manager — Thomas Anastaselos. Thomas was tasked with building an attribution model. But he soon realized they simply didn’t have the right tracking in place to do this. Attribution modeling is particularly important to ChartMogul as they have a high volume subscription business and optimizing the marketing funnel is key to generating leads, which they were unable to do effectively with their prior tech stack.

As he dove deeper into this task he realized there was a bigger, underlying issue –– their data was spread across disparate systems and they weren’t tracking the data they needed to move-fast. So, Thomas and team set out to untangle the ‘spaghetti’.

The team evaluated their options. They could either implement a custom in-house solution stitching together multiple tools, spin up a data warehouse, or leverage an out-of-the-box CDP. Since, the engineering team weren’t going to drive the implementation and they wanted a tool that every team could use, they settled on Segment — an all-in-one-solution that can be managed via an easy-to-use UI rather than code, and involves maintaining only one tool.

“To solve some of our problems we decided to implement a data warehouse. But this didn’t solve all our issues. We needed something to better integrate our tools, improve tracking, and enable our marketing teams to do proper segmentation. This is where Segment came in.”

Thomas Anastaselos - Revenue Operations Manager

Unlocking operational efficiency across teams with a single source of truth

The core teams at ChartMogul who use Segment, directly or indirectly, are Marketing, Product, Sales, and Engineering. Prior to Segment each of these teams were being slowed down by not having a single source of truth and limited customer data. And since core data was across different systems it was difficult to reliably act upon data.

In addition, they had very limited attribution data via basic UTM attribution captured through Intercom. And limited insight into product usage during a customer’s 14 day trial — a critical part of a subscription’s business’ customer journey. The latter a challenge for all teams — Product had no insight into which features costumes were bumping up against during their trial and Sales and Marketing had no scalable way to track which customers were at risk of churning or who was likely to convert.

This posed another issue beyond slowing teams down — without the right tech stack in place ChartMogul didn’t have the foundation to scale out the Marketing team. As former Sales & Marketing Director (now VP Sales) – Sara Archer, says “we didn't want to build a whole marketing function and pour a bunch of dollars into a funnel where we couldn't identify where things were broken. So, Segment helped lay the groundwork, became the backbone of our marketing tech stack, and as a result we’ve been able to build out a full marketing team that we couldn’t have done before implementing Segment.”

Implementing Segment centralized ChartMogul’s data into a single source of truth, unlocking a multitude of projects for their teams. And with data flowing seamlessly to downstream Destinations teams are now able to reliably act upon customer insights in their preferred tools. Improving operational efficiency by 30%! The product team now has a complete picture of the onboarding experience, what features are being used, and who their most active users are, all in a centralized dashboard in Superset, which they use to inform their product roadmap. With Identity Resolution, they have been able to build an attribution model, connecting the dots across users, based on where they come from (e.g. their website, app, blog, etc.). This has allowed them to run more targeted campaigns and use their campaign budget more efficiently.

Increasing velocity with a better marketing data foundation

Rachel Whitehead, VP Marketing, says “Segment has become the backbone of our marketing tech stack. As a result we have been able to make faster decisions. For example, we have been able to shift our messaging platform from Mailchimp to customer.io. Without Segment it would’ve been trickier to get data in line and a lot slower to make those sorts of decisions.” This is possible because of Replay, which takes an archived copy of Segment data, and re-sends it to new or existing tools, this makes up-leveling or changing tooling quicker and easier.

Segment also provides access to key customer insights, which the Marketing team has used to build their marketing programs. For example, pairing Segment with their backend systems to assign new leads to their respective funnel, using Functions (a feature within Segment to create your own sources and destinations directly within your workspace to bring new types of data into Segment and send data to new tools), allows the team to analyze the buying process, conversions, and eventual dollar impact of new leads. Using this, they have modeled their Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) and personalized messaging depending on the customer profile. The team have also used this exercise to restructure and divide the buying process into self-serve and sales-led. For example, the onboarding sequence for leads classified as self- service are very different from sales-assisted leads.

Whatsmore, the team used Profiles (a powerful way to unify real-time customer data interactions across every platform and channel to understand the customer journey) and Twilio Engage (a native omni channel platform to deliver unified, personalized customer experiences at scale) to build advanced segmentation to set up automated and targeted campaigns. For example, campaigns to announce very specific product features that we would otherwise need lengthy coordination with engineering to retrieve the relevant users and send them the required emails.

Analyzing campaign performance has also become easier and faster. Now, they are able to see other aspects of campaign performance, such as MRR, LTV, and ARPA, on top of metrics provided by ad platforms such as Google Ads. And they can now analyze all campaign performance in one central place. For example, they ran a successful campaign that was very effective in terms of conversion. However, looking deeper into the metrics after conversion i.e. customer usage data, they realized the campaign was not producing good fit leads. Gathering this insight would have taken a lot more time and effort pre-Segment, and it would have been with lower confidence too. Overall, with quicker, easier, and better insights into campaign performance to identify poor performing campaigns and optimize for CPA it is 2x faster to run ad campaign experiments and 10x faster to launch marketing initiatives to the market.

Providing a better customer experience

Utilizing Segment, the sales team has built observability into their funnel. As Thomas Anastaselos, Revenue Operations Manager, says “we have created automated Alerts in Slack from Segment. So Account Managers and New Business Executives can see if a customer has completed certain actions that might indicate the account is at risk or completed a set of high-value actions to indicate a healthy account. The Sales team can then reach out to the customer with personalized help during their trial period, which is imperative for subscription growth.”

What’s next?

ChartMogul has fully implemented Segment and their plan moving forward is to continue optimizing their set up. They plan to integrate a few more tools with Segment, such as their customer success tool and build deeper attribution by testing out different models utilizing the data in Segment. Lastly, ChartMogul plans to add more automated testing and deployment for Functions.