How MongoDB gave developers timely product information and increased revenue

Last year, Ale Dimitriu, a Senior Marketing Operations Manager at MongoDB, made a surprising and troubling discovery.  Ale saw increasing numbers of developers relying on competitor's tools to solve their application development challenges. For example, developers were using MongoDB’s Database but had not adopted related MongoDB tools like Compass or Shell, instead searching for solutions elsewhere.

Ale’s team identified a knowledge gap among developers — users turned to competitors because they didn't know about MongoDB’s full scope of capabilities. This usually happened when educational materials were not readily available to developers.

Ale and her team are responsible for enabling users to build and scale their digital applications. By educating developers, they can increase product exposure and use cases – and keep developers engaged within the MongoDB platform.

To unlock MongoDB’s product adoption and revenue growth, Ale’s team aimed to increase customer use cases and upsell new features.

So, Ale and her team, guided by MongodDB’s core value, ‘Think big, Go far’, set out to provide developers with a vast, dynamic ecosystem of educational content and product use case guides. By orchestrating precisely targeted, just-in-time customer communications, the team ensures that developers learn about and adopt new features to get the most out of every product on MongoDB’s platform, at the exact moment they are looking for more information. Ale and her team reach developers across email, website and products with unique educational materials.

The result? Increased product adoption, customer satisfaction, revenue and growth.

As a leading developer data platform, MongoDB knows the power of using data to inform all facets of a business, including customer growth, retention and revenue. With Segment, MongoDB streamlines data collection and creates complete customer profiles to drive these initiatives.

Now, MongoDB can combine multiple data sources in real-time (including event data, valuable analytics and offline data) to form profiles. Profiles are used to target developers with 1:1 messages based on unique needs and behaviors. MongoDB communicates with developers using precise messaging and shares educational content to drive product usage and grow its developer platform.

Creating a customer data foundation to power unique product education content and communications

MongoDB offers developers a comprehensive platform of specialized products that build upon the powerful document database tools it is known for. To increase customer lifetime value and revenue by expanding product adoption, The company has created a dynamic ecosystem of educational content and events that inform and empower them to learn more. But to optimize the timing and delivery of that content, MongoDB needed to unlock siloed customer data, bringing data sources together to get a real-time, complete view of each customer—one that allows them to tailor the user experience from end to end.

The company found it challenging to elevate its customer data infrastructure to meet this goal. Data was scattered across CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and web analytics tools, and sales, marketing, and data teams were using their own data sourcing, debugging, and maintenance protocols. “This led to duplication of efforts, discrepancies in data, and difficulties in creating a comprehensive view of customer behavior across multiple channels,” Ale says.

MongoDB turned to Segment Connections to solve this challenge—centralizing and streamlining the collection of event data across product interactions, community, documentation, education, and other key resources, as well as the delivery of that data to downstream tools and analytics teams. Bringing on Segment also enabled MongoDB to respect the privacy of its target audience by only utilizing first-party data when capturing user preferences and behavior.

Beyond its robust libraries and integrations, MongoDB chose Segment as a solution that could help the company evolve its personalization capabilities. Says Ale, “We evaluated other tools but ultimately chose Segment because of its scalability, flexibility, and ease of use. It offered us a centralized platform to collect, manage, and analyze customer data as well as grow and innovate at a very fast pace.” 

Understanding complex customer journeys from end-to-end with holistic, real-time customer profiles

Once MongoDB had a unified understanding of how customers were interacting with its platform in general, it had to tackle the challenge of identifying unique customer needs and behaviors. The company’s data teams were employing disparate logics, from CRM tools, Google Analytics, and others, to determine what defined a customer. “Our customers are developers, and developers by definition are sophisticated users,” explains Ale. “Some have multiple accounts, some use multiple emails to get access to content—there are nuances to how they interact with us.” To recognize and engage every MongoDB developer, it was critical to establish a unified view of customers shared by all teams and tools.

In addition, the company had difficulty getting valuable customer data out of its data lake and into downstream business tools. Data teams had developed some internal pipeline solutions that partially solved activation challenges, but these were dependent on developers to code each new use case, and the setup, monitoring, and maintenance created unwanted costs. 

MongoDB’s dedication to innovation put them first in line to test Profiles Sync, a new Segment Unify feature, and Reverse ETL when they were beta released. Together these features have up-leveled MongoDB’s data unification abilities, enabling the company to combine streaming data from its products with data-at-rest stored in its data lake and then activate that data across its business.

Profiles Sync allows MongoDB to port its real-time identity-resolved profiles, created with Segment, to its data lake, where data teams use them to transform, process, and analyze customer data. Segment’s profiles are built using identity resolution algorithms that have been trained on trillions of data points to create a source of customer truth that MongoDB’s teams can rely on to power analytics dashboards that provide a nuanced understanding of users’ preferences and behaviors, as well as the sales funnel. They’re already doing 181 joins on master user IDs and expect that number to increase exponentially when they fully productionize their Profiles Sync connection.

Data teams can also enrich Segment’s Profiles with valuable data from non-streaming sources like their CRM. Unifying online and offline data allows MongoDB to form real-time “golden” profiles of its customers—essential to delivering customized experiences that take every aspect of a user’s journey into account. “It lets you make a connection to the human being,” Ale says. 

Using Reverse ETL, MongoDB can then seamlessly connect the work done by analytics teams in their data lake with downstream marketing and sales tools like Iterable, Intercom, Eloqua, and Salesforce, immediately activating user intelligence to deliver just-in-time communications that increase customer satisfaction and engagement.

Together Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL empower a more comprehensive and integrated approach to marketing and analytics: “With Profiles Sync, we now understand the full picture of a user's journey and can create more comprehensive customer profiles by merging together offline and online and sales data that was previously locked inside different systems,” she says. “Meanwhile, Reverse ETL is enabling us to intelligently trigger email campaigns and live chat with bespoke content that’s based on the users’ journey stage and preferences, preventing churn.” 

Driving developer engagement at every stage with live chat, in-product messaging, email, and more 

With a more comprehensive, real-time view of the user that’s easily distributed, MongoDB now uses Twilio Engage to deploy a sophisticated mix of communication methods to meet developers exactly where they are with exactly the right message. Using live chat, just-in-time emails, focused nurture campaigns, and even in-product and website UI changes, MongoDB delivers highly personalized information that optimizes each user’s individual experience. 

For example, they can now reliably identify a unique user interacting with their website and, based on that user’s real-time behavior, predict educational content the user may find helpful. Using Segment’s Profile API they query the user’s profile in real time to trigger live-chat prompts, pop-up tips, or customized page links to serve specific educational content. Similarly, they can identify an existing customer who might benefit from an additional feature and modify the UI inside the product the customer is already using to surface relevant information about the additional feature.

They can also deliver more timely, targeted emails to customers flagged as being at risk of churn and route prospects to sales when they meet a certain threshold. And now that they have a more nuanced understanding of their ideal customer, they can create marketing campaigns that bring in more qualified leads.

With Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL, MongoDB is uniting previously siloed customer intelligence and speeding up activation of that intelligence, which, Ale says, “ultimately leads to increased customer satisfaction, engagement, and revenue.”

Delivering elevated customer experiences that improve ROAS, decrease CAC, and maximize LTV

Segment’s functionality has been essential to MongoDB’s ability to implement its pioneering customer personalization program: “We’ve made Segment the core of our customer data architecture. Everything that the analytics team does in relation to revenue and marketing efforts starts from Segment profile data,” says Ale.

MongoDB has seen a measurable improvement in overall customer satisfaction since adopting Segment and beta testing Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL, experiencing increased open and click-through rates on their marketing campaigns and driving higher conversion rates. They also attribute optimized targeting and relevance to a significant improvement in their return on ad spend (ROAS)  and a marked decrease in their cost to acquire new customers (CAC).  

Inherent in MongoDB’s drive to Think big, Go far is a willingness to experiment, so the company is always testing new ways to engage and retain customers. Using Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL in tandem with the Profile API, MongoDB has seen a big leap in its experimentation success rates. In one example, Ale used the Profile API to experiment with blind form registration for an event and boosted registration rates by 100X—powerful proof of the value of creating a complete understanding of your customers. 

“In a digital world, it’s essential that we keep a real-time pulse on what our customers need, when they need it. Having the ability to consolidate and integrate customer data from multiple sources has allowed us to gain a holistic view of our customers, which was not possible before Segment,” Ale concludes. MongoDB plans to continue expanding its use of Reverse ETL and Profiles Sync to further automate and streamline its data management processes and, combined with Twilio Segment Connections and Engage, to continue pushing the possibilities of personalized customer communications.