Retool increased their email response rate by over 32% using personalized outreach with Hightouch

Retool helps companies build internal tools remarkably fast by offering powerful building blocks that are used to make graphical UIs around any datastore or API. As a Product Led Growth company, Retool enables anyone to sign up for a trial and create tools for free, and then invite coworkers to use those tools. However, Retool's Marketing Ops team found that their marketing tools weren't built to support Product Led Growth out of the box, which led them to Hightouch.

The Challenge: Getting product usage data into HubSpot for personalization

Retool's self-serve sign up process sprung up a key challenge. With all their customer data collected in-product, they couldn't personalize their outreach to users because their product usage data was not in their business systems, HubSpot and Salesforce.

With a Product Led Growth company, users take action directly in your product, not on your website or through HubSpot forms. Data on those actions aren't sent to tools like HubSpot out of the box: we have to bend them to our will.

Jake Levinger

Marketing Ops

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Retool

Retool needed to ensure their outreach to users had context on the specific problems they were trying to solve to make their users feel understood. Product usage data had the strongest signal for Retool (and other Product Led Growth companies) to understand the use cases that drove a user to signup in the first place, but that data was sitting in Retool's data warehouse.

Before Hightouch, to get product usage data on a lead, SDRs would look up a lead in a separate Slack channel of customer product usage updates. But having to switch between multiple tools just to grab data was cumbersome and added friction to sending personalized emails. This greatly reduced the number of leads the SDR team was able to work. They needed the data to be accessible in the tools they were already using everyday: HubSpot and Salesforce.

The Solution: Syncing product usage data to HubSpot for personalized emails

Retool uses Hightouch to sync product usage data, such as which types of databases a user has connected to their Retool app, into HubSpot. With that data in hand, SDRs can send personalized emails to leads with tips that are specific to the features they are using in the product today. For example, if HubSpot shows that a user has connected Google Sheets, SDRs can send the user a link to Retool's documentation of the Google Sheets integration to make sure they understand the full capabilities of the feature.

The Results: Increased reply rate and product adoption

With fresh product usage data synced to HubSpot and Salesforce, the marketing team and SDR team are now able to launch personalized campaigns more quickly and frequently. Below are two examples of campaigns they have run.

Sending a personalized email to trial users with tips related to how they were actually using the product had a 32% increase in reply rate compared to a non-personalized variant.

Result #2: Personalized product announcement led to a 500% increase in click rate and increased feature adoption

In a world where we all are inundated with hundreds of noisy emails a week, it is crucial to focus your message on its relevant audience to avoid unsubscribes. That's why when Retool announced their new Chart component, they wanted to target users who had used the previous version of the feature. With that feature's usage data synced to HubSpot via Hightouch, they targeted users of that feature in an email campaign that had a 100% increase in open rate and 500% increase in click rate compared to the more generic audience and copy.

We have really granular data about our customers in the warehouse, but it generally gathers dust there. Hightouch makes this data more valuable and actionable by allowing us to make it available across our marketing stack and business systems. All without relying on product and eng.