When you’re building digital-led journeys for customers, Email Programs are a fundamental part of the puzzle. We got nearly 100 digital-led CS leaders and strategists together in breakout rooms to talk through their successes, stumbling blocks, and ideas. Below, find their takeaways that they found most valuable from those conversations, in their own words. (The next meet-up about The CS Ops of Digital-Led Customer Success is in September 2021 -- register here to attend or receive the takeaway bullets.)

Scope of digital-led CS and email programs

• We have a lot of similar opportunities to develop more automated/targeted touch points
• Challenges are similar: Selling 1:many approach to leadership is difficult when high touch has been the typical approach
• Division of Marketing vs CS emails
• Promoting 1:many engagements - what does that include and how do you do that at scale

Designing the journey/campaign

• The desire to be “Personal” and send messages from a person (the CSM) can backfire and shift their work-load from Gainsight or other tools to their Inbox.
• Difference between digital “led” and “complementary”
• Orchestrating programs to have segmented programs running from the levels of customer segmentations (90 day renewal program - one copy for tech touch, one for mid tier, and one for white glove)
• Learned that it’s pretty difficult to built smart customer journeys that react to future customer behaviors
• Short and sweet emails with context and targeted audience helps get success rate in responses to surveys and readership for automated emails

Building target audiences

• Tracking new admins in the environment and getting proactive tips and tricks out to them was a great takeaway.
• Having data to tell you who your customers are and how they are doing is key
• It's okay to ask customers how often they want to hear from us :)
• It was great to hear how others overcome challenges related to filtering and sending the right information to the right users
• Lots of talk around sending educational/adoption related outreach and circumventing the need for opt outs

Working with data & systems

• All of us had our own issues around contact and data integrity.
• Struggles, but opportunities to gather more insights when it comes to analyzing success of email programs outside of the provided stats and analyzers.
• How do people combat inaccurate customer contact info? Especially at scale/high volume
• Scale - but response rates and poor customer data
• New ways to put together programs, functionality I wasn't aware was available around contact management for campaigns
• Formatting of messages in Gainsight Journey Orchestrator can be very frustrating, especially when trying to copy and paste from another source.
• Sending out webinar invites and logging attendees back to timeline / customer health.

We’re all in this together

• Lots of people starting to dip their toe into this
• Our group all seemed to be working through common challenges. It's always refreshing to hear others perspectives and how they persevered.