GetResponse’s Recipe for Success: Turning Customer Insights Into A Great Product

Customer-centricity has been a buzzword for a while. Everyone’s talking about listening to the voice of the customer and how to make the most of it. 

If you ever wondered how a customer-centric approach works in practice, this story is for you. GetResponse’s Product and Product Marketing teams built a well-oiled machine upon the customer feedback they gathered with Survicate. It’s all about actionable insights, effortless setups, and tangible results. No fluff!

About GetResponse

GetResponse is an email marketing software and marketing automation platform designed to help businesses and marketers create, send, and manage email campaigns and automate various marketing processes. 

This comprehensive marketing solution caters to businesses looking to improve their email marketing efforts, automate marketing processes, and engage with their audience effectively.

Why GetResponse needed Survicate

GetResponse has been using Survicate since 2015, and since the beginning, they’ve aimed to capture actionable insights throughout the customer journey— from new product research to customer retention. 

“We use Survicate broadly—from learning insights on acquiring new customers based on who our happy customers are to how we keep those customers happy.”

 Abby Hehemann, Director of Product Marketing at GetResponse

Using Survicate for actionable insights

GetResponse uses Survicate in many different ways depending on the goal and context. They interweave email surveys and automated in-product ones across their customer journey map to precisely capture customer feedback.

Ad hoc email surveys

For one-time campaigns that aim to validate ideas or do user research, they usually employ email surveys using the GetResponse integration with Survicate or website surveys that pop up on particular pages. After the Product Marketing team picks out an applicable segment of customers, they embed the survey into an email that targets the customers to get their insights.

Automated in-product surveys

For continuous feedback collection, the Product Team automatically triggers in-product surveys that pop up after a certain time from the signup. It differs for free and paid customers.

Free users get the survey after 25 days of signing in to the platform. At that point, they’re asked about their overall experience with the app and how they’d rate GetResponse. 

Customers who purchase subscriptions receive an NPS survey in quarterly intervals. This way, the Product Marketing team can see how they’re doing, if they’re happy with the tool, and what their general sentiment toward GetResponse is. 

Product-specific surveys

Each Product Marketer in the team has their area of expertise, and that’s a space where they also regularly check up with the customers using automated surveys. They usually set up automated in-product Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys to see if everything works. 

The surveys pop up when the user completes a particular action or adopts a new feature. It instantly shows potential improvement areas and helps keep a finger on the pulse. 

Analyzing both quantitative and qualitative feedback

To get a full picture of the collected customer insights, GetResponse closely looks at both quantitative and qualitative feedback. 

Taking the quarterly NPS as an example, the Product Marketing team prepares an extensive summary encompassing the core quantitative metrics along with the comparison to previous periods, divided into paid and free customers. 

The results are later correlated with the company milestones and what could potentially impact the results—”then, we definitely pull out quotes,” Abby explains. 

She also shares that her teams often use Wordcloud as it helps narrow down different sentiments they get in a qualitative scan. 

“We also use Wordcloud in combination with filtering by people who rated us high and left a quote. We can later reach out to them directly to learn more about their experience and see if we can publish that quote.” 

Abby Hehemann, Director of Product Marketing at GetResponse

Closing the feedback loop

After Abby’s teams gather and analyze customer feedback, it’s time to share it with relevant stakeholders and act upon it. They know the NPS analysis needs to be clear to other teams such as Product, Customer Support, and the rest of Marketing. That’s why they usually filter quotes relevant to specific areas, so it’s easier to digest and take action. 

With regard to the Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys, each Product Manager decides how the feedback they get will impact their roadmaps.

The team develops new features, makes updates, and responds to customers through in-app messaging and emails where they can precisely target the group who requested it and say, “We heard you. We appreciate your feedback. We resolved this problem, and this is a new update.”

“We do quite a lot of human intervention to take it from just being in front of the Survicate panel to actually get in front of people,”

says Abby. 

Another Survicate feature that helps in sparking cross-functional discussions is the Slack integration. “We get real-time updates for new responses, and we often see the threads building up under particular responses, commenting on the feedback we receive. It’s great to have it in real-time.” 

Case studies

Launching an AI email generator with Survicate's help to validate customer demand

With the growing popularity of implementing AI-based features, the GetResponse Product team had a handful of ideas on how language models could enhance the platform. However, before going all-in, they launched a minor feature and tested their hypothesis on its value for GetResponse customers. 

“We relied heavily on Survicate to understand the validity of our hypothesis.”

The Product team wanted to get on the AI bandwagon but started with a relatively low-lift development—an email subject line generator. It was the perfect balance between leveraging the big AI trend and not overdeveloping a feature that could potentially not stick. 

So, before getting down to the rest of the AI email generator, the team launched a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey to see their experience. 

The survey results validated the investment and gave the green light for further development. 

Personas research with Survicate and Amplitude integration

One of the most useful product-oriented integrations for GetResponse is the Survicate-Amplitude integration. 

“It helps us understand people’s behavior in context for whatever we researched or asked in a survey. It’s been extremely helpful to us to make further insights and analyses based on how those people actually answer the survey and then how they actually use (or don’t) our product.”

Abby Hehemann, Director of Product Marketing at GetResponse

It came in handy when the UX team updated GetResponse’s personas. They knew there were two to three primary personas, but as the research progressed, a fourth persona emerged. 

Using the Survicate-Amplitude integration, the UX team filtered all of the survey answers that fell into the second group into Amplitude to see their commonalities in using the product. They checked, for example:

- How long do they stay with GetResponse?
- Where do they come from?
- What features do they use?
- What are they marketing?
- How often do they log in?

“It helped us better understand how we can create value messaging, how we can put what particular features and functionalities will give them the most value from our product.”

Using NPS surveys to gather feedback and improve product features

Now, this one’s an interesting take on how to use Survicate, and even Abby admits, “We maybe hacked it a little bit.”

The GetResponse Product Marketing team also runs NPS for the free customer base. They send it via email, but their priority is always bringing those free customers back to the product. So, they send an image of what looks like the NPS survey, and upon clicking, it redirects the customers to their dashboard, where an automated in-product NPS survey pops up. 

“This way, we’ve been able to get more engagement with our free users and to understand more about what’s keeping them with us and what would help them become a monetized customer.”

Effortless insights to better shape the product

Survicate has been a part of GetResponse’s tool stack since 2015. During this time, it helped collect customer feedback for countless research initiatives and sentiment analyses. As a reliable partner in discovering the “why” behind customers’ decisions, Survicate is widely used across the Product and Marketing teams.

GetResponse can truly fuel its customer-centric decisions regarding product development, positioning, and messaging with over 320 ongoing surveys running across their free, paying, and enterprise business units across 7 key market languages, gathering on average more than 3,000 responses per month. 

The actions employed to close the feedback loop led to a striking +53% NPS growth among paying customers compared to 2020. 

There’s even a Survicate-GetResponse integration, commonly used by Abby’s teams whenever their goal is to have as many responses as possible. It also helps to reduce friction for the customers “that can more easily get straight to the survey and start responding.” 

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