Improve Retention by Turning Product Data Into Content (w/ Hiba Amin & Hypercontext)
Learn how Hiba Amin helped a B2B SaaS company improve their user retention with contextual newsletter content.
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Meet Hiba Amin – content-focused B2B marketer.
Hiba’s been a solo-marketer at companies like TestBox and Hypercontext (formerly Soapbox), helping lead a full name change to building new GTM efforts. She’s built widely used content resources such as Hypercontext’s extensive Agenda Templates and Goal Examples libraries, as well as launched her own Product Hunt launch playbook.
She’s currently a free agent after resigning from TestBox to take some time off to find hobbies that aren’t marketing.
During her time at Hypercontext, her team’s primary goal was to drive new product signups.
Within 3 years, Hiba 7x’d their weekly signup numbers from about 70 per week to 700. With that scale came a new problem: more people were signing up for the product, but a lot of them weren’t coming back the next day.
The company decided to shift the product team’s focus towards improving daily and monthly active user metrics, but Hiba wanted marketing to play a role in activation, too.
Their main channel for this campaign was email. Hypercontext took in-app and user data from Mixpanel that looked at what questions people were asking most (and least) from their suggested questions library. At the time, Hypercontext had a newsletter list of about 70,000 people, so it was a really great opportunity to drive meaningful results.
After combing through customer feedback to identify things they loved about the product, Hiba decided to spin up their own recurring data-centric email series to help improve DAU/MAU retention by providing unique content that pulled users back into the product. Given the size of their newsletter list, it seemed like a really great opportunity to drive users back into the product.
How Hypercontext Leveraged Broadcast Email
Hypercontext’s product helped managers streamline their relationships with their direct reports. Hiba decided to analyze in-app and user data from Mixpanel to figure out what questions people were asking their direct reports most (and least) from the list of “Suggested Questions” Hypercontext provided their users ask their direct reports during 1-on-1 meetings. This helped her hypothesize what kinds of content Hypercontext’s users would be most interested in reading about.
Testing broadcast email made sense for Hypercontext for two core reasons:
It enabled them to surface one of their most valuable product features—the suggested questions library—to entice new users to come back to the app. This also helped expedite customers experiencing their “a-ha moment”
It allowed them to repurpose and repackage existing content within the context of the questions their users were asking, which helped save her a lot of time and effort. By using first-party data, it also created a content moat that their competitors couldn’t directly copy
Hiba began arranging content around rankings of questions asked in a given time frame with percentage change from previous month. After getting customer feedback, they learned that people cared less about most vs. least, but rather prominence within a specific topic category (growth, motivation, work, communication). Improving content with this feedback improved newsletter stats even further.
Hypercontext’s Broadcast Email Test Results
15-20% email open rate.
Supported newsletter growth from 70,000 to 80,000 within 6 months
Significant increase in biweekly DAU and MAU numbers – especially on the days they sent the emails
How You Can Improve Retention With Broadcast Email
Turn “sawdust” into compelling content. If your product incidentally collects or produces insights your customer might find interesting, use it. Leveraging owned data makes content unique and impossible for competitors to imitate.
Partner with Product to help solve retention problems. While product teams might be responsible for creating a compelling product, churning users need a compelling reason to return to a product they didn’t find value in.
Customer-centricity is a competitive advantage. Prioritize content based on how well it addresses a core concern of your ICP, and do everything you can to keep learning more about your customers to keep your prioritization fresh.
Hiba is currently looking for her next marketing opportunity. Say hi to her on Linkedin.