🥷 PLG Winning Tactics: The Channel-Based Campaigns

In the blog post last week, I shared that the future of Product-Led Sales (PLS) is moving towards product campaigns as an additional layer to channel-based campaigns.

Intro

Now let's talk about channel-based campaigns, their components, and how to launch one.

Channel-based campaigns leverage specific marketing channels—such as email or in-product popups—to engage and monetize your user base. These campaigns are integral to a Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategy, providing tailored messages to maximize the potential of your self-serve and non-self-serve plans and drive user acquisition, retention, and monetization.

Channel-Based Campaigns: 3 Key Benefits

1. $0 CAC 🪄
   
   There's no limit as to how many emails or in-product notifications you can send (it's free, except for the overhead costs).

   
   However, do it tastefully, personalizing the message to the specific target audience for whom this is relevant (vs. spamming your whole user base).
   

2. Cross-Sell & Upsell Opportunities 💵

   You can use channel-based campaigns to cross-promote additional products or features within your customer base, increasing the potential for upsell and cross-sell revenue.
   
   Example: Rippling has a compound business model (20+ products), so cross-selling is crucial. If the customer bought an HR product, you would want to cross-sell the IT suite (device & inventory management) to them as well.

   

   Rippling’s in-product ad cross-selling IT suite of products to HR customers.

3. Personalization 🤌

   Email and in-app messaging can get highly personalized based on account/user attributes and product behaviors, making them more relevant and effective.
   
   Take Rippling's ad for example (see it above).

   Mariano ([firstname]] variable), an employee of one of Rippling's customers, recently went from on-site to remote. We can use that information to cross-sell devices and inventory management to that account.
   
   A few more personalization opportunities with Rippling’s example:

   • Cross-sell International Payroll product to the accounts that just added their 3rd+ employee in {{country}} in Rippling.

   • Cross-sell Device & Inventory Management products to the accounts with 20%+ remote workers.

   • Cross-sell Leave Management product to the accounts that have 25+ employees and recently paused payroll for one of them.

Campaign Ideation & Prioritization

Often leadership wants things done yesterday, and everything seems to be urgent.

However, that’s an illusion, and prioritization is key here.

All you need to do is identify the lowest-hanging fruit and shiniest object (I can’t stand corporate jargon lol) the biggest opportunities that will help you reach your pipeline goals.

You’ll need to balance your long-term initiatives and quick wins though.

Beware of the roadblocks 🥵:

• other people and teams trying to add things to your list

• other people questioning your campaign

However, if you have a solid baseline and quantitative/qualitative analysis to back up your hypothesis, you'll make it just fine.

Campaign Brief Components

A good campaign brief usually consists of the following components:

1. Campaign Overview

   1. Describe the campaign, its goal, and your hypothesis.

2. Analysis

   1. Provide quantitative and/or qualitative data to back up your campaign. Add the links to your analysis, dashboards, or notebooks to make your case.

3. Targeting

   1. Add your cohorts and their specific targeting criteria.

4. Pipeline Metrics Forecast

   1. Forecast the results from this campaign based on the performance of similar campaigns in the past. In the simplest forecast, you’d have 4 columns: CVR %, number of conversions, New ARR driven (in $), and audience size (in orgs). Add optimistic, realistic, and pessimistic scenarios to account for multiple outcomes (for example, 5%, 10%, and 20% conversion rates).

5. Reporting & Attribution

   1. Add specifics about how and when you’ll report on this campaign, what you’ll measure, and what success looks like.

6. Launch Timeline

   1. Set specific milestones and key dates to launch your campaign.

7. Copy

   1. Write your email sequence and an in-product copy.

Segmentation

The main rule of segmentation: the simpler, the better!

Don’t try to create 14 cohorts just to make your campaign seem sophisticated.

Have a solid reason for needing more than one cohort and how exactly it will help you personalize the copy.

Also, if your audience size is small (~200 users), you wouldn’t want to create multiple cohorts because your results wouldn’t be statistically significant.

You can segment your targeting based on intent, urgency, or behavioral patterns from your analysis.

Basic Targeting Criteria

Some basic targeting criteria may look like this: