Acquiring new customers is just the beginning. Keeping them engaged and turning them into loyal advocates is where real growth happens. In this episode, Ashley Faus, Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Atlassian, shares proven strategies for building and scaling lifecycle marketing systems that drive retention and long-term success. With deep experience in both B2B and B2C, Ashley explains how to create meaningful customer interactions at every stage of their journey.
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Ashley: Life cycle marketers think holistically about the life cycle of a prospect becoming a lead, becoming a customer, and then growing to increase the lifetime value of that customer.
Patrick: Today, we'll be chatting with Ashley Faus about life cycle marketing, how to develop a system, and then scale it as your business grows. Ashley is currently the Head of Life Cycle Marketing at Atlassian, and over the span of her career, she's managed to implement life cycle marketing strategies at small companies and large companies like Atlassian.
Ashley: Once you start stepping back and saying, "We're not just acquiring the customers; we're also helping them get value so that they'll stay. Assuming that we need to retain them beyond just where they are today, we want to grow them"—that's how you would get started.
Patrick: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of plugin.fm, where we extract key lessons from top entrepreneurs to inspire your business growth. My name is Patrick Rauland—I'm an e-commerce expert and educator—and I'm here with my co-host, as always, Goran Mirkovic, a content marketing specialist and the CMO at Freemius.
Today, we're going to be chatting with Ashley Faus about life cycle marketing, how to develop a system, and then scale it as your business grows. Ashley, welcome to the show!
Ashley: Thanks for having me! This is going to be fun.
Patrick: I think a lot of people kind of know what life cycle marketing is, but since you're an expert in it, I'd really like to get into—what exactly is life cycle marketing?
Ashley: The definition that I use for this is that life cycle marketers think holistically about the life cycle of a lead becoming a prospect, becoming—you know, or I guess I should say—a prospect becoming a lead, becoming a customer, and then growing that customer to increase their lifetime value.
The hard part about this is that in larger organizations, those functions are often distributed among different teams, and they might be called something different. For example, the upsell and expansion pieces of that life cycle might actually sit with a team called "Growth." The acquisition portions of that might sit with a team called "Demand" in product marketing.
If you're in a small company, product marketing might actually own a lot of that. There's also a customer success team—if you're working on something that requires a lot of rollout, implementation, and change management to drive adoption in an organization, customer success might actually own a fair portion of that onboarding piece.
So, I hesitate to say that life cycle marketing is the end-all, be-all, because I'm going to get a lot of people—especially those in bigger companies—saying, "Isn't that what Growth, Product Marketing, Demand, and Customer Success do?" And the answer is yes. But overall, the umbrella of life cycle marketing encompasses the full life cycle of a person—from their first purchase or the first indications that they're going to buy (intent) all the way through retention actions like upsell, cross-sell, expansion, etc.
Patrick: I kind of feel like life cycle marketing is just this thing that kind of goes on top of the sales funnel and then beyond—because we're talking about people after they buy stuff. But can you— is life cycle marketing just email technology on top of a sales funnel? Is that a... a right... a good lens to look at it?
Ashley: No. So again, depending on the organization—this is where it gets really hard, right? Because the words matter, the tools matter, and who owns what matters. The rules and responsibilities do matter to make sure that you're not doing duplicative or potentially competitive work, right? The metrics matter as well.
Assuming that life cycle marketing is basically just email marketing on top of a sales funnel reduces the amount of collaboration, metrics, and the scope that a lot of life cycle marketing teams have.
For example, the life cycle marketing team at Atlassian does include acquisition beyond just those email channels. Yes, email is a key channel for this team, but they do content syndication, work very closely with our digital team to run paid ads, and use a mix of gated versus ungated content while amplifying that content. They also collaborate closely with product teams to enable in-product messaging for things like expansion, upgrades, or feature adoption.
So yes, email is often a key channel for them, but they are not just email marketers. There's also a differentiation between something like email ops—or someone who's maybe a Marketo or HubSpot specialist—compared to a life cycle marketer, who has a different set of skills, more channels, and a broader range of metrics and levers to pull at their disposal.
Patrick: So I want to get right into it. If you're a brand-new software company with a product—where do you even start with life cycle marketing? Where’s the right place to begin?
Ashley: I'm going to zoom out just a little bit on that and confirm that this company already has product-market fit. They already understand exactly who their audience is, and they already have their base strategy in place in terms of their go-to-market motion.
Is it product-led growth? Sales-led growth? Ecosystem-led growth or channel partner growth?
I'm going to assume they have those baselines and are now saying, "All right, we've actually got a good motion, we're starting to scale, we're getting more profitable, and we want to think about how to grow our existing customer base, improve the average contract value or lifetime value of our customers, and accelerate time-to-value as we acquire new customers."
So, assuming those are the goals they’re trying to achieve, I'll pause there because I just want to make sure I'm framing my content correctly.
Patrick: Actually, this is a great little pause—I think you're framing it correctly. But just in case someone isn’t quite there yet, let’s take one step back.
If they’re not at that stage—like, if they have a new product, a new service, it's functional, it works, but they don’t even know if they have product-market fit yet—are there step-zero actions they can take?
Ashley: So, there are some Step Zero steps that you can take. I think first, making sure that you're clear on your go-to-market motion.
I actually really love the way that GTM Partners has defined— I think it's eight go-to-market motions. The two that I'm most familiar with are product-led growth and sales-led or enterprise growth—those tend to be the biggest ones. Some folks do event-led growth. There's this new concept of founder-led branding, and I'm like, "All right, that's a whole separate thing. That's not a go-to-market motion; that's a content strategy."
But understanding how your audience is going to buy is key. A perfect example of this: in a product-led growth GTM motion, people mistakenly think that means the product sells itself. That's not what it means. It means that a lot of your channels and the nature of the product help it expand quickly.
So, a perfect example of this: if somebody can throw down a credit card, buy the product today, or start with a free account or a free trial and get value out of that as an individual, that's probably starting to lead them down a product-led growth GTM motion. It's also a good way for you to understand product-market fit, because it has mass appeal, it's very intuitive, easy to use and adopt, and it naturally lends itself to doing better if you bring in additional people.
Examples of this would be something like Canva—that's a really good example. Atlassian also has this: you can manage yourself in Jira or Confluence, and that's very helpful. Same thing with Canva—you can just do your own personal design work in Canva, but it works a lot better if I start managing my work with my team.
So, as a manager, of course, I'm not going to just sit over here in my own little silo managing my work—I'm going to open it up to my team. With Jira and Confluence, I invite my team, and it gets much better as the organization grows. We invite other teams, and we all get on the same system, sharing our work.
Same thing with Canva—once you start to grow, it makes sense for your brand team or creative team to start putting in templates, icons, visual identity, brand, and tone built-in. And now, with their AI tools built directly into that, it adds value both to the individual and to the team.
In contrast, something like Salesforce makes no sense unless literally everyone is putting in their data. You can't have a complete view of your pipeline, your opportunities, your deal cycles, your average contract value, or the life cycle of your deals unless every single person puts in their information.
Same thing with something like Marketo or HubSpot—if a single team over here is just doing their deals or just running their landing pages and email strategy, it doesn't make sense. It has to go across the entire organization. Because of that, you tend to need to go with a sales-led motion, since you'll need top-down implementation, change management, and a full rollout, etc.
That would be the first thing from a GTM standpoint. If you find that for every single person or every single deal you do, you're having to customize everything, make a bunch of exceptions, tweak your pricing, or go through extensive contract redlining, you probably are struggling with product-market fit and/or your go-to-market motion.
That means you haven't actually built something that is solving the problem. This is different, obviously, if you're a creative services firm or you offer a boutique, bespoke product—because that is your motion.
But if you're trying to build something with mass product-market fit and you're constantly having to change your pricing or offering, you probably don't have product-market fit or you've chosen the wrong go-to-market motion.
Patrick: Love that. And you keep saying GTM, which is go-to-market. I always think Google Tag Manager because that's some of the worlds I live in—but go-to-market, yes.
A lot of small software companies are product-led, where it's like they solve a very... it's—"We connect MailChimp to blah blah blah," you know, whatever. It's some small piece of software that moves some data around or gives you a very particular report you need.
Is there one other Step Zero here? Should you dig into life cycle marketing if you only have one product and it sells for $50 a month?
You know what I mean? Like, does it make sense if you're that small, or do you need to have a suite of products that maybe link together before you think about life cycle marketing?
Ashley: I would actually say that it's less about the number of products and more about the number of editions.
So, for example, in this case, where you've got somebody who has one product, it's $50, and it's always going to be $50—it solves one very specific thing once you buy it.
In that case, you're not actually behaving in a way... you know, there isn't really a life cycle of a product. It's kind of interesting, right?
Like, if you think about consumer packaged goods or FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods), the behavior of that from a life cycle perspective—they'll constantly send you emails, they want to add you to their list, they'll send you a discount, or they'll send you a Merry Christmas or Happy Birthday message, you know—"Get 10% off" or "Buy one, get one free," whatever.
Yes, they are trying to increase the lifetime value of you as a customer, but it's very transactional.
Life cycle marketing, I would say, relies more on a relationship.
So, if you only have a single product offering, a single price point, and it tends to be a more transactional offering, I would say that life cycle marketing is probably less important than some of the other tactics and other marketing disciplines and levers that you can pull.
Patrick: Life cycle marketing pairs very nicely with collecting solid business data.
Ashley explains how you can create win-win wins in your organization that help customers, marketers, and the business overall—so stick around.
Goran: I, for a fact, know that we have a lot of people who develop teams, let's say, and like—this is a really live product in a sense, because you are constantly taking feedback, adding new stuff, and trying to optimize it.
And obviously, like, if one thing goes well, the other thing will, you know, give you some boost to try and build a spin-off product or something like that.
So, can this be an approach where you basically build a structure on top of it, and just constantly use the information from one critical mass to kind of oversell them, build relationships with them, and just kind of spin out new products?
Ashley: I would say yes. I think one of the big things about life cycle marketing is being able to get in the data about how people are using the products, when they might have a new problem that you can solve, and then obviously if you start to see the same problem crop up and you're like, "Man, we don't currently have a solution for these people," then you can work with product marketing and product management and say, "We're actually seeing signals that there could be an opportunity for a new set of features, capabilities, products, etc. Can you build this for us?" and, you know, bring it back in. I'll give a perfect example.
So, when I was at Duarte, we had in-person workshops. This kind of behaves a little bit more in that B2C realm, even though we were frequently selling to businesses—we were selling to individuals within those businesses. So, sign up for a course. It's an amount that an individual could afford, or that a company would be willing to spend on an individual. It was like, you know, $1,000 or something like that to attend an in-person workshop.
And we found that people constantly were asking: "Can we get follow-up?" "Can we get the slides?" "How do we see this more on demand, etc.?" So, we actually decided to create an e-course from that and then started to sell the e-course at a different price point. And so, we could actually use the e-course both as a follow-up (a value add to the in-person workshop), as a standalone product by itself that provided value, and then also as an upsell tool to say: "Hey, you've consumed these set of modules in the e-course. If you want to upgrade, or if you want to buy more, or you want to bring your whole team to an on-site workshop, call us and we can book that." So, it actually behaved both as a lead generator, a value add, and a standalone product.
Patrick: It seems like data is something that you should be pursuing anyway, right? And if you have good data, then you can really dig into life cycle marketing. But, like—creating a course for your product? Based on what lessons people are taking, you can see what they're interested in. It'll reduce support costs because a fraction of people will solve their own problems before they send in a support email. And of course, then there's, "We have the data. Now we know we can sell people this potential product." It just seems—I like all this from a business-building perspective. Life cycle marketing seems very... it builds upon itself.
Ashley: Some of this stuff—depending... it depends on the size of the company, obviously. If you're a small company, and you've got several generalist marketers—like, let's say you've got a team of marketers that's only two or three people. You might have a VP of Marketing, and then maybe you've got, you know, two people under them. From my perspective, what I've seen is that usually either PMM (product marketing) and/or life cycle marketing tend to be the generalists that you would hire.
Product marketers tend to have more expertise on: competitive intelligence, market intelligence, dealing with product, thinking about audience intelligence for product-market fit, more responsibility for the deeper details of the product.
Meanwhile, life cycle marketers tend to have more expertise in: channels, narratives, asset types, paid vs. owned vs. social vs. earned mix.
So, I actually think that PMM and—in our case, we call them CLM (Customer Life Cycle Marketing) teams—should be partnering very closely together. Both should be bringing that mix of: audience, market, and competitive intelligence, channel, asset, and budget mix expertise.
That's how that really works together if you've got a small team.
Goran: Can you take us through, like, step by step how a smaller team or individual can start to implement life cycle marketing? What are the first stages to think about if you're sold on this idea?
Ashley: Yeah, so I think the biggest thing is understanding—basically getting out of the mindset that marketing only owns the acquisition piece. I think this is something that has been a problem for a very long time. The four P's of marketing—product, price, place, and promotion—marketing has gotten pigeonholed into just the promotion piece, and so it's become just advertising or just brand building. We forget that actually, no, we need to make sure we're influencing the product, we need to be influencing where it's sold, and then we need to be thinking about the price. So that's the first thing—making sure that you have that four P's mindset.
The second thing that I would say is looking across the organization and getting very close—if you have a customer success and/or support organization, getting very close to them. Because once you start stepping back and saying, "We're not just acquiring the customers, we're also helping them get value so that they'll stay"—that's the retention piece. And then, throughout the life cycle—that upsell, cross-sell, retention, expansion—assuming that we need to retain them beyond just where they are today, we want to grow them. That's how you would get started.
So, if you start to see—the documentation piece that you mentioned earlier, Patrick, is a perfect example, particularly now. And for PLG companies, a lot of the documentation is available online because the first question everybody asks is, "Well, how hard is it going to be to roll this out and scale this?" So showing the documentation actually comes in earlier in the life cycle of that customer. It might actually come in at the acquisition piece of it.
Being able to feed in those questions that you get and seeing from a support standpoint what are the common hurdles that people have to adopting this product—to get the time to value, to encourage them to stay or upgrade—that then feeds back into your buy-intent content at the beginning from an acquisition standpoint because you're actually now starting to help them with a new set of problems or a new set of capabilities.
So, getting very close to whoever is helping with support, implementation, documentation—if that's a separate team—getting very close to them and thinking holistically about that. Making sure that content is optimized from an SEO standpoint so that the right content is showing up at the right time, for the right audiences, in the right place.
Patrick: Most marketers are familiar with the buyer's journey. It's a helpful way to understand how someone becomes a customer, but Ashley has a different take on this, and she has a different model called The Playground. We'll get into that next.
Ashley: One thing I talk about that's not specifically related to life cycle marketing but is related to audience journeys is this idea of the playground and the idea that we're no longer using this linear funnel or a looping decision journey. That's not how anybody buys. That's not how anybody thinks. They don't wake up and be like, "I shall be in the consideration phase today," right? Like, nobody does that. They're searching around. They're trying to solve a problem. They're trying to learn something. They're trying to use a product or service that they already purchased.
And so this idea that we're going to just do this linear handoff—well, I don't know, they signed up. I don't know what to tell you. I did my job, right? And now you, as a salesperson, are like, "I got you, I got you. I'll take them away," and, you know, close the deal. And then once the deal is closed, they throw them over the wall to a customer success person or support. It's like—the audience doesn't care. They don't see themselves as a prospect, and then a lead, and then a customer, and then a user, right? They're human behind the screen.
And just because we have different expertise or different roles and responsibilities internally, the audience should not be experiencing those handoffs. And so that's the other big piece of this where you realize that, you know, the looping decision journey basically drops you back into the awareness phase, but they've been using the products. And so if they're going to upgrade to a premium edition, it's not that they're unfamiliar—you don't need to go all the way back to the awareness phase. You're educating them or empowering them or whatever it is to use a premium edition set of features.
Or, again, even the decision of—do you do feature gates versus user limits as the trigger for someone to upgrade or expand? That's a decision that you need to be making in tandem with your customer success and your product teams. It can't just sit over there. And it's kind of like—there are a lot of different ways that you can increase the lifetime value of that customer.
So making sure that you understand where there's feature gates, user limits, and how that behaves from a buying standpoint—is that the user limit in one product? Is that the user limit for the overall licenses for the company? So getting them to buy more of one product or net new of a different product that can actually help you get over the user limit to where you're—you know, again, these are the types of things that a life cycle marketer should be thinking about in tandem with their product marketing counterparts to find out: which one is the audience most like? Which one do they need next? Do they need more of this product, or do they need this other product?
And then, you know, that'll influence your messaging and the levers that you pull in terms of what content you show them to convince them to increase their spend with the company.
Patrick: I definitely want to say I love the idea of the playground. There's—because there are times where I'm so close to buying, and then I see maybe, like, not a flaw, but I see a negative review or something, and it's like—I almost bought this product, and then there's a negative review. And then, actually, I go all the way back to, like, "Oh, actually, I need to look up a whole bunch of competitors."
You know, it was, again, a $50 product. I almost made an impulse purchase and just bought it. I see one little thing, I go all the way back, and then—"Oh, well, this thing works for this competitor, but then let me look at the docs for this. Maybe I can get over this." Like, there's something that is not accurate about it, and a playground where kids are just running from one station to the next definitely is probably more accurate to how buyers actually work in the real world—where they're a little bit frenetic and unpredictable. So I really, I really like that.
Goran: Yeah, you can't really—you can't really kind of like map how many touches someone will have with the brand before buying. So, for instance, I can have like 45, you can have two. It's—there's no, like, you can't really cut it in the middle and say, "Hey, this is the norm, and this will happen." Like, statistically, I think people tend to kind of over-rely on numbers in that case. But also, they kind of neglect the whole situation that this is like a live organism that needs feeding, nurturing, and analyzing. And one thing that I thought that you said really interesting that was really, to me, like listening to your answer is you kept mentioning content.
So, like, how big of a role does content play in life cycle marketing as a whole?
Ashley: It's huge. So, in order for you to run campaigns or share messages, you have to have something behind that. You have to drive to a place. So, that could be the ad creative. That could be a landing page. That could be, you know, ebooks, white papers, webinars, blog posts, videos, etc. So, content is huge. And that, again, depending on the size of the organization, and I've sat on both sides. I have been kind of the pure content person, I've been a product marketer who incorporates content, and now I sit on the life cycle marketing side and incorporate the content as well. So, content, if it's in a larger organization, sometimes it sits in its own centralized function. Other times, it's distributed among product marketing or life cycle marketing. So, there's different ways to set up. But yeah, in order to deliver the right message in the right place to the right person at the right time, part of that place element is not just the channel, but also the format. So, certain narratives or certain styles of conversation don't lend themselves to certain formats, and then certain formats don't lend themselves to certain channels. Right? So, you have to match narrative, format, and channel for the audience.
Goran: Yeah, so this is awesome, but to kind of avoid the whole, you know, Spider-Man meme where like three same guys are pointing fingers at each other because you mentioned like life cycle marketer, content marketer, and like a product marketer. How do you kind of split responsibilities there? What part of the content creation process does a life cycle marketer own? And can you give me some insight into that again?
Ashley: I'm going to say it depends, and I know I keep saying that, but it's largely because I'm bridging across the different sizes and types of organizations that I've worked at. So, in a larger organization like Atlassian, the bulk of the content creation happens with the content marketers. Very product-focused, use intent content tends to happen with either the product marketing team or we do have, you know, a content design and a support team that writes a lot of the very detailed technical documentation. So, I would actually split it up by intent. By intent, content should be sitting with either content marketing, if you've got that as a separate org, or within life cycle marketing. Use intent content should be sitting primarily with a mix of product marketing and customer support. So, it does get a little twitchy, right? Something like a product tour, it's very product-focused, and it is a buy intent space, but it's showing you those core value props of the product by showing you how you would use the product, right? So, there's some interesting things. I would basically say, if it requires deep, substantial product knowledge, it should probably sit with product marketing. If it's more focused on understanding the story, the channels, and the asset types, that should sit with life cycle marketing and/or content marketing, depending on how big your team is. If it's something that is very tailored to the channel, like dealing with the content's indication, contracts, thinking about the budget mix and the media mix, that should all sit within the life cycle team. But again, like, I can't make my—I don't think I can make my fingers do like three things right. I don't actually think it's the Spider-Man meme of everyone pointing at everyone else. I think it's like you have to all hold hands or do this crisscross where you're holding hands. Like, the product marketers have to know the audience and the market and the competitive landscape. That is the huge input that they put in. The life cycle marketers have to understand basically the media mix and the channel landscape, and then I would say content marketing, their unique value add would be things like matching the narratives and the asset types. You literally can't correctly match narratives and asset types with audiences if you don't have strong messaging and audience insights from the product marketers. On the flip side of that, you can't prioritize the narratives and the asset types and the channels if you don't know the media mix, where the audience spends time, and what content is actually working in those channels. Vice versa, you can't know where the audience spends time if you're the life cycle marketer without fully understanding who that audience is from your product marketers, and then obviously, there's nothing to put in the channels if you don't have content. So, this idea that like one of them takes the lead, it's like they got to get in a room, they got to share their insights. They might create different deliverables, but those deliverables have to all be cross-linked, holding hands, hugging, whatever metaphor you want to use. Or if you're in a very small company, they basically sit inside the same marketer, and you hire a generalist who's got skills in these different areas.
Goran: So, in a sense, marketing is a big blob?
Ashley: It's funny because I, you know, at Atlassian, given how large we are, we do have a number of specialist teams, and they do have distinct skills, distinct expertise, and distinct roles and responsibilities. But I am hard-pressed to separate those because they have to go hand in hand. Like, you just can't—you can't hire one without the other. You can't deliver integrated marketing campaigns that go across the entire life cycle of the customer without having the skills and the mindset. So, again, if you're in a small company, I get it, you know, you might have to pick and choose, or you might go with a specialist or a generalist marketer. I'm a marketing generalist myself, that's how I've managed to sit in all three of these teams and have all three of these specialist roles. But it's hard. I know this conversation is about life cycle marketing, but I'm like, I gotta bring in the product marketer and the content marketer, like they gotta go together.
Goran: So, the conversation took basically a turn into a marketing blob from, like, life cycle marketing. I love it.
Patrick: To me, it's—I love this. I think it's—life cycle marketing is comprehensive, and because it's comprehensive, you need to understand, do people first find us by clicking on a Google ad, and what does that Google ad say? What's the initial promise in that first Google ad? And what messages are they hearing from customer support? Are they hearing, "Hey, go set it up yourselves"? Okay, that's not very helpful, we should improve that. Like, that's why it's so blobby, but I feel like life cycle marketing, having one person who understands that life cycle, who can recommend products, really adds to the bottom line. Like, you will be recommending new products. Like, is—I guess...
Let me ask you this: what is the right time to add a life cycle marketer to your team?
Ashley: This is a hard question because, again, we got to go back to the overall GTM motion. We got to go back to what other skills are in there. I would say if there's an immediate obvious way to increase the lifetime value of that customer, that's when you need a life cycle marketer because, again, if we go back to, you've got the one product, you've got one addition, if you just need to keep the person from churning, you can probably actually get away with, you know, a product marketer who's looking at the onboarding in tandem with customer support documentation. Potentially, if you're that small, a product marketer could write, you know, some of the tutorials and that kind of thing to keep the person just, yep, they're going to keep their monthly account, etc. A perfect example of something like this would be like Shield, for example. So, Shield does LinkedIn analytics. You basically hook up your LinkedIn profile, and it will do analytics. They, I think, have three tiers. I'm on the lowest tier. I'm on the Creator tier. Every so often, they'll, you know, if I try to do something, and they're like, "Oh, you'll have to upgrade to the next addition to be able to do this," like pops up in product when I try to click a button that I can't click. That's enough to me. They don't really need a life cycle marketer. Like, I'm either gonna upgrade or I'm not, and it's pretty obvious. It's a feature gate, so it's very easy. But like, there's just not that much they don't need to be sending me stuff all the time. They're not releasing a ton of new features all the time because there's just not that much that needs to be done, right? And they can only do so much. They're limited by their integration partner, LinkedIn obviously limits a certain amount of it. Right, so that would be an example of a company that could probably get away with primarily product marketing, and that's kind of it from a specialist standpoint. So, I would say it's when you have an opportunity to significantly increase the lifetime value of that customer, and it's going to take you some time to do that. It's not just, "Do you want this feature? You have to upgrade." Like, that's very straightforward. You don't have to build extra trust. You don't have to tell me a whole other story. You don't have to get me to invite other people, right? Like, it's kind of behaving more as a transactional sale. That would be my recommendation of when you really need someone who thinks holistically about all the places someone is going, the different types of problems that they might encounter, and the different ways, if you've got multiple ways, to increase that lifetime value.
Patrick: As a customer, you often want less email, and as an email marketer, you often want to send more email because some fraction always convert. Ashley gives insight into when or if you should send more mail. Stay tuned.
Goran: If you, for instance, have access to a critical mass, let's say, you know you have 4,000 customers and you're a capable tech-lead founder, obviously I think this is something that you can, uh, leverage to just kind of like sell to the same people and make their lives better and make your life better, and just by enabling two-way communication and growing. So, do you advise that people should think beyond just like, hey, this is retention and I need to do X, Y, and Z to keep the same customer or payroll, or do you think, hey, I can collect this information, test out different messages, and explore if I can build on top of it to grow? And, like, you know, obviously, sky's the limit when you have trust?
Ashley: I would say the latter. I do think that it's a tricky balance to make sure that you're not constantly selling to the same audience and fatiguing them with those sales messages, particularly when there is no unique value add for them to spend more. Does that make sense? Like, uh, if I think about one thing that's interesting, um, in the US I hear this a lot, that the portion sizes at restaurants are like ridiculous portion sizes. So, if you're coming from Europe or Australia, um, my Australian colleagues are like, "This is so much food, like I don't need all of this food," right? And we have this idea of kids' menus in the US, but the kids' menu is like chicken nuggets, and so there's no way to get a smaller portion of food. And the idea, like, "Oh, you could just take it home with you," and it's like, well, I'm staying at a hotel for two days, I don't actually have a microwave, like what am I going to do with this food, right? So, this is a perfect example of a situation where restaurants might just keep increasing the portion sizes by a little bit so that they can increase the price, but like I don't need more food. I don't actually need 50% more pasta. I don't actually need a 50% bigger hamburger. Like I just want the portion of food that I want, and I want to pay a reasonable price for that. And so, if the only offering you give me is a 40-ounce steak, I don't freaking need 40 ounces of steak, right? And yes, sure, you might increase your average check size, but if I don't need it, I don't need it, right? So, there's an element of it where continuing to try to sell the same thing to your base or continuing to try to stuff more in so that you can increase that lifetime value when they haven't asked for it, that starts to get really annoying to those existing customers, and they might churn because they're like, "I just need this one thing, stop, leave me alone. I haven't asked you for something new. I'm not going to use something new, and now I'm angry. Like, now I feel mistrustful that the only reason you're contacting me is to try to trick me into buying something that I don't need so you can get more money out of me." So, it is a very tricky balance.
Patrick: I love that. I appreciate we talked about this because, Goran, that was one of my questions. I feel like I just want to touch on this one more time, and we're just about out of time, but it does feel like from an email marketer standpoint, I want to send more emails. From a customer standpoint, sometimes I'm like, "Please just stop sending me emails." Part of me really wants there to be a way, and maybe a good life cycle marketer could do this, where you, depending on the links you click or the date or the docs that I look up, I actually only want to hear about this 30% of the product. The other 70% is not useful to me, and I feel like if a business can figure that out, then I will be so much happier receiving 70% less email, and I will probably be a customer for a lot longer. I think that's probably pie in the sky, probably too challenging to do, but I feel like a good life cycle marketer could do that.
Ashley: It's possible. The segmentation is really hard, and the other thing that's hard is there's other signals besides just the email piece of it. And so, when you start feeding in the other signals, the other thing I'll say is humans are really finicky. Like, it's annoying to deal with the human. So, I'll come in and be like, "I never want to see this, I don't want to see that, I don't want to see this," and then, sure enough, someone else will tell me, "I'm doing this thing," and I'm like, "How do I get that?" And then, so they'll send me, let's say, a direct link or a video or something, I'll click on that, and then now I'm like, "Oh, this is super cool. Why did I know this?" And the marketer's like, "I mean, I tried to tell you, and you ignored me." Right? So, some of it might just be that the title of the video didn't resonate with me or my problem space has changed in the last six months. And so, it's really hard to triangulate all of those signals, and this is particularly true outside of just email, but, you know, there's the website, there's social media, there's what you do in the product, etc. So, I will say that it is not just the fault of the marketer; it is we human audience members are quite, quite fickle.
Patrick: Definitely agreed. Ashley, thank you so much for coming on, joining us, and sharing your wisdom. And I feel like I learned a lot in this episode, so thank you.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
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