Thoughts from my journey

Today I’ve interviewed Steve Bartel, Head of Analytics Team at Dropbox.

Dropbox no-touch sales model is a very good example to emphasize how important it is to increase customer value using different types of user approach activities (nurturing campaigns, application, etc.)

Those activities, if done correctly, would naturally increase customer engagement rate and are easy to perform when thinking of the customer’s life-cycle stage at any given time.

The most efficient way to conduct those activities is by performing them based on the customer life-cycle stage, rather than time based (as many companies still do) as the first approach refers directly to the user’s life-cycle stage in the application while the later assumes where they’d be at this time statistically.

If we refer to our users knowing their current stage in our application (instead of assuming that), we increase the chance users will be mature enough and be able to address our call and implement our suggestions.

See the complete interview with Steve to find out which other activities Dropbox is using to increase their customer engagement:

To read the full transcription of the video, click here

Video Transcription:
My name is Steven Bartel. I am responsible for the analytics team at Dropbox. And Dropbox is just a way to have your files wherever you you are, it also makes it really easy to share them. So dropbox does a lot of different things to increase user engagement. We use some of the more standard techniques.

For example, we’ll have tip e-mails, so early on in your Dropbox life, you’ll get an e-mail, saying “Hey, you haven’t tried out this feature. It might be useful for you.” We also do things around promoting our different features on our website. For example, in the top left corner when you’re browsing your files online you might see something that prompts you to share a folder with a friend, and maybe your photos.

Lastly some of our features our viral and they help help our users promote user engagement across each other. For example, we have shared folders, so when I put something into a shared folder, I’ll invite my friend to it. And, you know, they’ll start using DropBox again. We have a sales team. And what they’re looking into is how to sell DropBox for businesses.

The consumer product is entirely driven word of mouth and automated through our website. But we find that it’s, you know, very useful to have people to help explain the use case of DropBox for businesses. It might be, you know, if that’s a thing that will put more into this product, and we have a bunch of tools around, sourcing those leads, and figuring out who exactly might be the best fit for our sales team.

Paul Stamatiou is doing a great job describing the concept of “User Retention as a Service” and from the long thread of comments we can certainly learn that this is a true pain point folks have.

The basic idea as described in the post is to run drip marketing campaigns based on user life-cycle and as opposed to mass marketing email or time based marketing systems.

I absolutely agree! And in fact this was one of the first features we’ve put into Totango. And yes, we provide this feature as a service (you can start a free trial here)

The importance of doing communication with users based on their life-cycle is clear. Instead of bombarding all users with the same message regardless to their status and progress of using or evaluating a service, way more effective way is simply ‘talk’ to users in a way which is specific, personalized and timely.

I had several discussion with Steve Bartel from Dropbox to learn about how they communicate so effectively with their users. And indeed, Dropbox have developed an internal system which does exactly that – it communicates with users based on their usage (or lack of) within Dropbox.

I like that – it is a great concept!