Yesware Uses Sigma to Slash Customer Acquisition Costs In Half
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Yesware’s sales productivity platform has enjoyed incredible growth over the past ten years. With massive amounts of traffic hitting their site each month along with thousands of trial sign-ups, the Yesware team has all kinds of valuable data at their fingertips. But isolated data sources combined with complicated BI tools made it nearly impossible to surface impactful data insights.
“It was a disaster before,” explains Ian Adams, Yesware’s VP of Sales and Marketing. “If you have to go into a bunch of different systems to find data, people eventually stop doing it because it’s too complicated and time consuming. Decisions end up being based on gut feelings and not on data.”
This frustration led to lackluster business outcomes. “We spent a lot of money on marketing campaigns that didn’t go anywhere and didn’t produce desired results. That’s expensive.” says Adams.
To ensure Yesware’s continued success, it was obvious that they needed to harness the power of data insights to optimize their funnel and align the efforts of their sales, marketing, and product teams. Yesware’s CEO, Joel Stevenson, set a goal for the organization to be 100% data-driven by 2021.
Luke Bussey, Yesware’s growth consultant held out hope that the cloud could enable them to reach that goal. “We were never able to connect marketing efforts with activity in the product. Engineering had their own data related to the product and marketing had their own data isolated to marketing activities. We put all of that data into Snowflake with the hope that one day in the future, a BI tool could connect marketing and product activity. That’s exactly what we’ve done with Sigma.”
After trying multiple BI tools, the team discovered Sigma. “I’ve used Looker in the past, but LookML was always a roadblock to getting everyone access to the data. Sigma makes it so much quicker and easier to get at the answers,” says Bussey.
I’ve used Looker in the past, but LookML was always a roadblock to getting everyone access to the data. Sigma makes it so much quicker and easier to get at the answers.
—Luke Bussey, Growth Consultant at Yesware
Working backward from four years of page view and trial data collected through Segment and stored in Snowflake, the marketing team at Yesware was able to build data tables for every single page view made to the site along with anonymous IDs and tables for every tracking event. Using Sigma’s spreadsheet UI, joins were easily made without ever typing a single line of SQL. Once an ID was known through a trial signup, they were able to backfill the data and map anonymous IDs with email addresses.
Within just a few days, four years of page views were completely sessionized. This combined with other data from Customer.io, Google Analytics, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Google and Facebook ads, gave the Yesware team a treasure trove of data insights. Yesware now has a complete view of user behavior at each stage of the funnel. They can analyze every touchpoint, past and present, and see the results of every interaction.
“We now make decisions based on data we see in Sigma,” explains Adams. “We can finally tie together the complete buyer journey from the first impression with our brand to the time they buy and then even through customer lifecycle marketing.”
We can finally tie together the complete buyer journey from the first impression with our brand to the time they buy and then even through customer lifecycle marketing
Marrying web data with product data allows the marketing team to go beyond Google Analytics to see how their users continue to interact on the Yesware platform over time and see how trials expand in organizations through existing users.
“Before it was difficult to separate which users were coming from a pure acquisition basis and which were recommended from existing accounts,” says Adams. “It was unclear how many new trials we were getting from our ad spend. We now have visibility into that and can easily track conversions across paid channels.”
One insight uncovered through Sigma was that 50% of Yesware trials start with no interaction with the marketing site. “This prompted our engineering team to introduce some additional tracking so we could get insight into where these users were coming from. We discovered that a significant number of people were starting a trial on a secondary Gmail account, in addition to starting from the Chrome Webstore, and bypassed the marketing site entirely,” explains Bussey. “This was a great insight we would have never been able to uncover without Sigma.”
Using Sigma, Yesware is able to take a surgical approach to optimizing their funnel, which has resulted in incredible cost savings.
“Sigma has enabled us to get deeper insight into the types of roles and departments that convert at a higher rate and have a higher retention rate,” says Bussey. “We’re able to focus more on those quality leads, and we can only do that because we follow the data in Sigma.
Sigma has enabled us to get deeper insight into the types of roles and departments that convert at a higher rate and have a higher retention rate. We’re able to focus more on those quality leads, and we can only do that because we follow the data in Sigma.
—Luke Bussey, Growth consultant at Yesware
“This has dramatically dropped our spend,” Adams reveals. “We’ve cut our customer acquisition costs in half.”
“There’s an old saying that half the money spent on advertising is wasted; the trouble is you don’t know which half,” related Yesware’s CEO Joel Stevenson. “That used to be the case at Yesware, but not anymore. With Sigma, we can pinpoint in real time which marketing channels are working, which are not, and where we should pivot to achieve the best returns on our investment.”
In addition to improving the ROI of marketing spend, Sigma has improved decision making across the organization. Bussey and Adams estimate the speed of decision-making has increased by 50%.
“Joel’s directive was to give in the company access to the data so they can make better decisions on a day to day basis and we’ve achieved that with Sigma,” says Bussey. “Everyone can now focus on things that they know will provide value. We can measure the impact and outcome of everything in real time.”
Adams agrees, “The goal we set out to accomplish, to be 100% data-driven, it feels like we are there.”
