This is a guest post by Ben Southworth, founder of Unicorn Hunt.
GoSquared is our world. It’s our high level overview of traffic, activity, sources and content. But it’s also our microscope and our microphone.
– Ben Southworth, founder of Unicorn Hunt
When you’ve been around startups as long as I have, you tend to spend a huge amount of your time evaluating the tools that help you understand, monitor and record various aspects of your business.
Be it financials, customer happiness, traffic analysis, social media, automated marketing there now seems to be a myriad of tools, and it can be hard to pick the right tool at the right price point.
However, if you’ve been around as long as I have, you’ve always got a “recipe” that you always use. Something powerful, something familiar, something useful.
So, for 2017, I’m going to share my secret recipe of success, one I urge all of you to deploy, use and tinker with.
GoSquared + Segment + Clearbit = WIN
Let’s break this equation down.
GoSquared is our world, it’s our high level overview of traffic, activity, sources and content, but it’s also our microscope and our microphone.
We shifted away from another tool, Intercom, in Q4 last year. With the introduction of GoSquared’s Live Chat product, the decision was simple. It was more cost effective, it was within a tool we already have open 24/7, and it met our customer needs perfectly.
Tracking our data like a pro with Segment
Segment was a new flavour to me – I learnt it via Bruno Vaz Moco – and whilst initially baffled and bamboozled by how it worked and what its purpose was, I’ve grown to love and understand it; it’s simple but beautiful power has been enlightening.
In essence, it’s the harbour for your analytics, you place some JavaScript in your application, and from then on almost everything else you’d need is handled by Segment. This includes our analytics and tracking integrations (such as GoSquared, Clearbit, Zapier, Slack et al) as well as data warehousing so you can run various queries and send your raw data to a business intelligence tool. Smart, simple and powerful.
Enriching our user data with Clearbit
Finally, Clearbit is a data-enrichment provider; this basically augments our existing GoSquared People data to include incredibly valuable information – for example, if the user has a company email address, Clearbit can tell me their tech stack, the amount they raised in funding, employee count, job title, company social profiles, and more.
Messaging the right users at the right time
With GoSquared People’s Smart Groups, you can sort, order, and message users easily.
We use Broadcasts – distinct target audiences with customised messages via Live Chat. You’re like a mind reader, or DeepBlue, you can message leads, customers, and investors all from GoSquared and personalise the outreach with incredibly rich data about their current situation, position, industry, and social reach.
And if you can’t see how that’s beyond valuable, we probably shouldn’t be friends anymore.
Automating actions in Zapier
If you want to, you can then pipe all this to Zapier or tray.io and get Slack notifications on set parameters – “DM me when company has raised > 5m” or “pipe social influencers to Google Sheets”.
The options are endless, just think of the ways you can delight, inspire and target your customers, your potential customers and even those who are “just curious”.
Now, I won’t tell you exactly how we use this recipe at Unicorn Hunt, because some things are better left to the imagination, but I hope you can see how this recipe can provide your business with deep, meaningful, actionable customer data, that can transform the way you think about your business.
Are you a unicorn? Do you need a unicorn?
If you have ideas, suggestions or other recipes for communicating with users better, hit me up on @inthecompanyof.
Oh, and if you’re looking for the perfect job, go get hired over at Unicorn Hunt.
