The New Dawn

We are excited to talk about a new direction for Glance. Beginning with SaaS email marketing, Glance will now focus on providing AI recommendations for email campaigns. We are focused on increasing email conversions and ROI of SaaS businesses through AI-graph based micro-segmentation and sequencing. Glance will help marketers deliver the right email campaign to the right audience at the right time.

The SaaS Email Cycle is Broken

In spite of its long history, email campaign effectiveness is still a challenge for most marketers. SaaS email marketing primarily relies on a set of goals placed in a funnel fashion. Typically, SaaS companies offer a variation of freemium/free trial or book-a-demo use cases. Either way, SaaS businesses provide a “try-before-you-buy” mechanism. The hope is that customers end up believing the trial/freemium or limited free options product provides enough value that they are willing to pay for the full version of the product. In this customer engagement lifecycle, the key is to ensure the customer uses the product and sufficient motivation to convert. If a trial user hasn’t converted, the goal is to win the sale back, and if the customer is a paid user, the company wants to upsell or retain them as a customer.

A marketer who has to make all of this a reality has a challenging time organizing this life cycle. They spend enormous amounts of time just understanding the segment/audience to target. They use a mix of intuition and past experiences to develop the content, sequence, and pace of communication. At best, the outcome is based on conjectures which may or may not work, often making email marketing a numbers game rather than a precision target sport.

Furthermore, what diminishes the power of automation today is that despite sparse AI infusion, there is a lack of cross-channel signals. The email automation itself is based on a manual flow design and filtering, which puts the performance at the mercy of marketers’ intuition and previous experience alone. Eventually, this results in low ROI and a broken model!

The Power of Micro-segmentation & Cross-channel Data

All emails or subscribers are not equal. Everyone who has signed for a “free trial” has a different engagement, and they each have unique behaviors. They have different propensities to act, even though marketers segment “free trial users” as a single group. Some users visit your site more, some ignore your emails, may have conversations with your chatbots or salespeople, etc. How is it then the marketer subjects them to the same email experience?

When we at Glance understood that. We realized that audience micro-segmentation, and collating all cross channel data is a massive opportunity. Bringing the funnel aspect to these micro-segments was crucial. Additionally, enrichments to subscriber info help us micro-segments in a more meaningful way. As a result of this insight, we adapted our “Marketing Graph” AI technology to deliver this micro-segmentation and propensity labeling. An example of that is shown below:

Interested: users with passive awareness interest in the brand
Engaged: prospects with active awareness
Ready to Act: those with motivation to act on the message in the email

Content Sequencing and Auto-configuration

After an audience micro-segment was identified for a campaign, the challenge was uncovering how to pace the email interactions and customizing content types for these micro-segments. Again, we leveraged our Marketing Graph technology to craft out the frequency of customer outreach and content type, order of content, and pacing.

Now Glance provides one-click automation that configures a more targeted campaign funnel directly into the email platform without a need for the marketer to create it. Glance reduces the friction of adopting a recommendation and saves the manual work needed to configure it.

Today a few advanced email marketing products like Klaviyo and Constant Contact offer AI-driven contact segmentation, but they are focused on e-commerce, restricted to their platform, and lack the multi-dimensional email campaign recommendations that Glance offers. To start with, Glance is integrating with the top email platforms, starting with Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Hubspot, and Mailgun, and several other marketing channels, bringing the power of flexibility of using AI on any email platform.

Market Opportunity

B2B email marketing, especially SaaS emails, is a growing category of business. Email alone is growing at the rate of 14% CAGR with a market value of US$7.5 billion. Email is becoming even more relevant than any other channel to develop relationships with potential customers. At Glance, we think this opportunity has massive untapped potential.

Our early customers have seen significantly increased email performance metrics and ROI based on Glance’s recommendations. These results have encouraged us to add integrations into 3rd-party data enrichment tools, conversational marketing such as Intercom, and CRM’s like Salesforce into our Marketing Graph. We are super excited to chart this new path for SaaS email marketers and deliver superlative performance for their campaigns.

Keep an eye out for more exciting announcements. Until then, happy emailing!