Overview

A free trial signup is a high-intent activity that demonstrates a user is very interested in your product. 

But can you believe that 80% of new leads never convert into customers? That' a lot of missed marks in your email list when it comes to nurturing potential customers and successfully converting them to users.

Now, however, marketing teams are beginning to learn that an invite to the inbox is a foot in the door and a chance to better sell your product. They're beginning to think outside of the traditional CTA box when it comes to new email marketing initiatives. 

For instance, to truly take advantage of hot leads and convert them to paying subscribers, it's important to provide personalized, real-time engagement with new prospects that start a free trial. Enter: Lead nurturing email campaigns — your evergreen sales flow automation for converting those that have expressed interest in your product to actual users that pay for your product. 

An effective lead nurturing campaign can help you grab an otherwise missed opportunity. In fact, automated email nurturing generates 50% more sales compared to the previous approach (doing nothing). 

And using Census data activation, you can sync 360° customer data and product analytics to your engagement tools, so you can build trust and reach out with the right message at the right time in the buyer's journey.

Use Case

Before you begin, have a clear plan for how you want to nurture your free trial users. If you're struggling, here are some ideas to inspire you:

• Identifying prospects struggling in their trial and offering 1:1 help
• Retargeting lost trial leads and welcoming new customers
• On-site personalization on return visits
• Updating CRM records for intelligent outreach from the sales team

Once you've identified which approach you want to take, here's how you can build a lead nurturing campaign:

1. Identify customer data in the data warehouse

Your data warehouse is the source of truth for business operations. In this case, you'll need event data from the website and your product application, as well as communication tools like Iterable and a CRM like Salesforce. This data is collected in the warehouse by ETL ingestion tools like our partner Fivetran.

2. Build your customer audience segments

The warehouse is an infinitely flexible and scalable way to manage customer data. For marketers, that means that you can leverage all your first-party data to build Customer 360 profiles.

Then, use Census Segments to build dynamic multi-object audiences on top of your data. You can segment across user attributes, company and team relationships, and user events. Build your audiences to include in (or exclude from) campaigns and customer engagement tools.

3. Engage your prospect

Census easily syncs your customer segments and profiles to engagement tools. These can be product analytics and engagement tools like Intercom, Pendo, or Appcues, or marketing tools like Marketo, Iterable, and Customer.io. With the full picture of customer behavior and product analytics, you're able to send the most relevant and personalized campaigns.