MarTech Edge Interview with Jason Lyman, Chief Marketing Officer, Customer.io

Can you describe your journey so far, and what key takeaways would you like to share?

While I work in Marketing now, I did not start my career there. For my first job after graduating college, I worked as a strategy consultant in the entertainment industry, advising companies on the best ways to navigate a constantly evolving technological landscape. This role helped me realize I wanted to get my hands dirty and work with emerging and innovative products! That insight pushed me to transition to marketing, and I haven't looked back since.

Since joining Customer.io, I have focused on getting to know our ideal customer profile, assessing the competitive landscape, and understanding current market trends. These insights have allowed me to revamp marketing's objectives and set clear goals for the year. I'm looking forward to leveraging what I've learned in past roles to mature the marketing function at Customer.io, better support our customers, and help the team deliver tangible business impact.

It's been just four months since you were onboarded as the CMO at Customer.io. What are you most looking forward to in your new role here?

While it has been a sprint these first few months, I've enjoyed diving into some critical business initiatives. For example, we launched our second product, Customer Data Pipelines (CDP), in April. It's been fun to be a part of a company leading the charge in customer engagement and communication. I've been impressed by the dedication and passion of the team, and I'm excited to continue working with them to develop innovative strategies that will drive accelerated growth and increased customer satisfaction with our expanding suite of solutions.

One of the things I'm most looking forward to is optimizing the messaging and position of our customer engagement platform. Customer.io has a unique offering that can transform how brands segment their customer base and customize their communications. With the right approach, we can reach new audiences and better educate them about the power of our solutions. I'm excited to be part of a company that is driving real change in the industry, and I'm looking forward to helping contribute to its continued success.

What's your approach to driving growth, profits, and resilience in the current economic downturn?

To succeed in challenging times, I try to drive the team toward customer-centricity, data-driven decision-making, and agility.

Customer-centricity is foundational for success because it helps us focus on what matters most with our core audience. By really understanding our customers' needs and challenges, we can develop innovative solutions that help them address their "hair on fire" issues and exceed their expectations around what our product can do for them. In an ever-evolving economic environment, it can be difficult to discern how the market is changing. By taking a data-driven approach to decision-making, you can identify trends and build conviction for your decisions more quickly, maximizing the impact of any marketing investments. Finally, marketers need to be able to adapt rapidly to stay ahead of the competition. The ability to pivot strategies and tactics in response to new trends and market conditions is crucial for success.

Last year, Customer.io launched its Essentials plan enabling startups and small teams to engage customers on mobile and web apps. What are the plans for this fiscal year?

The response from the market to our Essentials plan has been very positive, and we have seen strong growth since it launched. As we look to the future, we are exploring new ways to drive more awareness of this offering and reach a wider audience of teams who could benefit from a robust set of tools at an affordable cost. Also, we want to continue building this plan's value proposition and have a rich set of new features that will be available in Essentials in the second half of the year. At Customer.io, we believe every team should have access to a customer engagement platform to support their business, so we will continue investing in our Essentials plan to support this belief.

How do you stay up-to-date on the developments in marketing automation, and how do you integrate them into your platform?

Staying up-to-date on the latest developments in marketing automation requires a proactive approach. First, I constantly monitor the latest news and trends by following popular thought leaders on social media and reading industry-specific publications/blogs. Additionally, I participate in a few professional associations and community groups to connect with other peers in the field, participate in discussions, and learn what they are seeing & hearing. Finally, I try to speak with our customers on a regular basis. This first-hand feedback is very insightful and helps me understand what is signal vs. what is noise.

At Customer.io, we take a very customer-centric approach to product development. Therefore, a strong, collaborative relationship already exists between myself and the product team. When I develop key insights, I communicate with the appropriate product leaders to integrate those takeaways into product development efforts. Given my role and understanding of our ideal customer profile, I want to ensure that the company stays competitive and meets the evolving needs of its customers.

You introduced Customer.io Data Pipelines (CDP) very recently. Can you shed some light on how it helps companies connect customer data to their tech stack?

Although data management can be a headache, we believe having access to good data is essential for modern marketers to deliver personalization, multi-channel targeting, and product integration. Therefore, we launched Customer.io Data Pipelines (CDP) to help companies connect their customer data to every product in their tech stack. With CDP, teams can easily unify their customer data without writing a line of code. Additionally, our solution keeps your data up-to-date with "out of the box" support for the most common destinations (i.e., Mixpanel, Amplitude, Google Analytics, Salesforce, and HubSpot), so you have consistent data across the tools you rely on most. Finally, by seamlessly integrating with our current messaging product, Customer.io Journeys, our CDP allows companies to build a unified view of each customer and create memorable interactions across mobile and web using push, email, in-app, and SMS channels.

How do you measure the ROI of your marketing strategies?

Our focus is always on delivering value to our customers. To ensure that we align our resources on the most important initiatives, the marketing team at Customer.io uses the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework. This process helps clarify how we will measure success and who will own the delivery of the results. When we define the measurements for those Key Results, we use a mix of qualitative and quantitative metrics to determine the effectiveness of our marketing efforts. Finally, we set up dashboards based on our OKR metrics to monitor real-time performance across our various team meetings/syncs and complete a formal review of performance at the end of each quarter. By tracking key performance indicators in this way, we can identify areas of improvement more quickly and optimize our marketing strategies to serve our customers better. 

What do you think about the future of customer-engaging marketing automation platforms?

The future vision for customer-engaging marketing automation platforms is inspiring! As a marketer, you are always looking for ways to customize the customer experience because you know that this will drive more engagement. With the proliferation of customer data, the advancement of existing tooling, and the rapid evolution of new AI technology, marketing teams will be able to deliver more personalized and relevant interactions to our customers than ever before! Therefore, companies should focus on investing in platforms that share this future vision and streamline their ability to deliver increased personalization across the entire customer journey via powerful automation.