What was the problem/opportunity?

At Pickle, our mindset was ‘the first day you sign a customer is the first day you start losing them.’

We paid close attention to our customer’s success. Taking pride in our net dollar retention and customer expansion rates.

The key ingredient to those metrics was improving the value we delivered consistently.

We met with customers weekly, studied product usage, and built as robust a product roadmap as we could.

Our goal: to have customers as excited to learn about our product updates as we were pushing them out.

Enter my attempts at publishing entertaining product updates monthly.

Who were we talking to?

Current Pickle users who already saw the value that we wanted to turn into lifetime fans.

What teams were involved?

I partnered with the product team to stay on top of upcoming feature releases & met with the engineers responsible for each feature to understand how it worked inside & out.

Allowing me to write more engaging & informative copy.

How was success measured?

We tracked open and click rates for our newsletter email & views for in-app notifications.

Intercom, Airtable, and Beamer were the tools we used for distribution and tracking.

What was the outcome?

Our monthly newsletter averaged a 34% open rate, 2% of which clicked through. In-app notifications averaged ~512 views per post.

Playing a key role in our 293% net dollar retention rate, attributed to customer experience & account expansion efforts.

What was the strategy/distribution plan?

Newsletter

The product update newsletter was broken up into three sections:

✨ New

Any brand new releases that month were highlighted here.

Some examples:

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🔋 Improvements

If a current feature received an upgrade, this section is where you found out.

Some examples:

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🛠️ Fixes

Every app has bugs and short circuits. Most companies never mention them, but I believe transparency was a big part of how we built our customer loyalty.

So I poked fun at our mess-ups & addressed the fixes.

Some examples:

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In-App

We repurposed product updates from each newsletter into individual push notifications in the Pickle app. I used Beamer to do this.

Notifications lived here:

The messages were similar to the newsletter updates. But more effective since users were already in the app & could test them out immediately.