How Adroll Super-Targets Its Customer Communications

Adroll encourages its userbase to engage with its product by sending personalized emails and in-app messages — powered by the Clearbit Segment integration. Adroll is a popular ad re-targeting and prospecting platform that helps over 30,000 companies in 100 countries advertise to consumers. Adroll’s clients come from every major industry and countless niche industries, such as travel, retail, education, finance, entertainment, and more.

Each of its customers can build a perfect advertising system for its unique business needs, using Adroll’s robust set of products, features, and integrations with top marketing apps. For example, a men’s shoe retailer that uses Shopify to run their online store can enable Adroll’s Shopify integration and remarket to window shoppers. A hotel chain might turn on Adroll’s MailChimp integration to coordinate its ads and email marketing outreach throughout a family’s vacation planning process.

Adroll wanted to increase product engagement by making sure that customers were taking full advantage of the customizations available to them. But with 4 product groups and over 10 features and integrations, Adroll couldn’t send the same recommendations, reminders, and instructions to all 30,000 diverse customers. They needed a way to send relevant, targeted messages to sub-segments of customers about just the right tools for them.

Here’s how Adroll used the Clearbit Segment integration to orchestrate this type of personalized outreach to its customer base.

The Challenge

Adroll uses a sophisticated “marketing stack” of over 50 coordinated tools for communication, advertising, and analytics. This stack already had the capacity to support personalized customer communications, through tools such as Customer.io for behavioral emails and Appcues for in-app notifications. But to enable fine targeting they needed rich customer data to feed these tools.

For two years, Adroll had used Clearbit to pull enriched data on their customers, with 100+ unique data points about the person and their company, such as title, company industry, company size, social media handles, and even whether the company uses other tech tools in addition to Adroll (such as Shopify, Google Analytics, or Optimizely).

The problem was that the data wasn’t reaching all the apps needed for personalized communication, because each one required a custom integration to Clearbit. These integrations required time-consuming engineering work to set up and maintain. At the time, Clearbit was only integrated with Marketo and Google sheets, which the marketing team manually processed and transferred to Customer.io.

That’s when the team found the new Clearbit Segment integration, an easier way to route Clearbit data into any marketing tool in Adroll’s arsenal.\

The Solution

Adroll used the Clearbit Segment integration , enabling Segment just once to access connections to 200+ popular marketing tools, which turned on as easily as flipping switch.

Segment then became the “train depot” and railway system that transported Clearbit-enriched data through multiple apps in their marketing stack. For example, they piped the data into analytics apps, such as:

• Amplitude, to enhance their behaviourly analytics for more insight on who did what in their app (read the full story)
• Google Analytics, to learn which Adroll site pages attracted which types of users
• Amazon Redshift, to store the data for later offline analysis and insights

On the personalized messaging side, Segment sent Clearbit data to:

• Appcues, for targeted in-app messaging; and
• Customer.io, for personalized behavioral emails (turning the old manual data transfer process into an automatic one).

The new connected system also kept customer accounts fresh and consistent in every app. Every time a customer took an action — such as signing up, logging in, or interacting with a marketing tool — Clearbit updated the customer’s data and Segment automatically passed it to all connected marketing tools in Adroll’s system.

The Result

Once Adroll integrated Segment with Clearbit, it could send super-personalized customer communications to increase awareness about specific features in the Adroll product.

For example, Adroll wanted to raise awareness about its Shopify integration. Customers who separately used Shopify could connect the two, which helped them win back people who abandoned their carts or remarket to window shoppers.

Rather than sending a blanket message about the Shopify integration to all of Adroll’s retail customers, they identified only those who used Shopify, then sent personalized emails and in-app notifications through Customer.io and Appcues.

Adroll also ran a clever promotional campaign by identifying the subset of customers that had a Twitter account with more than 500 followers. The product showed in-app notifications that asked these customers to tweet about the Adroll-Shopify integration.

Adroll could have many concurrent and direct conversations with businesses in its customer base, helping boost awareness for the right features and increasing engagement with the product.