Welcome to The Flipside, where we follow the adventures of a shiny new marketing team as they navigate the ups and downs of using Uberflip to drive our go-to-market. From triumphs to tribulations, we're sharing the whole story.

Uberflip’s marketing team is using our own platform across our programs to connect with customers, reinforce our understanding of their experience, and even identify opportunities to enhance our product. It’s a win-win opportunity to deepen our strategic approach to customer marketing while also helping our customers achieve success.

With this in mind, I sat down with Andrea Lodigiani, leader of Uberflip’s customer marketing team, to talk about how the platform supports her retention and advocacy initiatives. In particular, Andrea’s team has made tremendous strides in relaunching the ambassador-focused Customer L.U.V. Program, using Uberflip itself as a core component of her strategy. 

She has a wealth of knowledge and experience when it comes to keeping customers engaged, so I was delighted to have the opportunity to sit at her feet (virtually, anyway) and learn.

C: Hi Andrea. I think any readers who are also customers may recognize you, but please tell us a little about yourself and your responsibilities.

A: I’m Andrea Lodigiani, and I run customer marketing here at Uberflip. I’m responsible for enabling and engaging our customer base to improve retention and expansion.

C: What’s your goal in using Uberflip for customer marketing?

A: My team and I use Uberflip on a daily basis. Our mission in customer marketing is to ensure customers are getting the most value out of Uberflip. We do that by enabling them to use it effectively and efficiently based on their company goals. 

Luckily, customer engagement is one of Uberflip’s core use cases, so we have plenty of opportunities to use the platform to accomplish this!

C: The Customer L.U.V. program is one example of you using Uberflip, right?

A: Yes! The Customer L.U.V. Program is essentially our ambassador program. We use an Uberflip marketing stream to keep our ambassadors up to date on current opportunities, such as speaking at events or getting rewarded for completing certain actions. 

Each month I also email our ambassadors a breakdown of what’s new in the program and include a link to the updated stream that acts as our program clubhouse, if you will.

C: The "L.U.V." in Customer L.U.V. refers to one of our values: Listen, Understand, Value. And speaking of understanding, I suppose using the platform helps you better understand the customer’s perspective too?

A: Exactly.

Just like our CSMs, I think of myself as an internal advocate for our customers. By living the customer experience, not only can I better enable customers on how to use the product to achieve their desired outcomes. I can also help create product and documentation improvements our customers would benefit from. 

C: What was in place prior to using Uberflip to relaunch Customer L.U.V.?

A: Streams were always used to serve up content and information to our ambassadors, but what we’ve done to improve the process is really lean on how easy it is to update streams on a regular basis with the most up-to-date info. 

We also used the CTAs across our streams—so when someone opts into something, such as providing a customer testimonial, we can integrate the form submission into Marketo. That then automatically triggers an email to the ambassador focused on how to record and submit the testimonial. 

Integrating Uberflip with Marketo and Salesforce has saved my small team a ton of time on admin work and ensures we’re engaging our ambassadors as soon as they show interest. 

C: Oh, cool. So kind of a self-serve model? 

A: Yeah, exactly. We want there to be sort of like an on-demand resource center for them, and Uberflip was perfect for setting that up quickly.

C: I know it’s early, but how close are you to realizing your ambitions for Customer L.U.V.? 

A: We’ve definitely seen spikes in online reviews. I've been really successful in getting product feedback, and any surveying of our ambassadors has been very easy. We also use it for finding event speakers. 

Uberflip has helped me achieve these goals by making it simple to create a customer-facing portal I can update with a few clicks—without involving any other teams or engineering resources. It also allows me to see engagement metrics, or what’s landing and what’s not, so we can learn and make adjustments.

C: So the ease of getting started was the most obvious advantage Uberflip provides? 

A: Well, this is very specific to what I do… but it's like killing two birds with one stone, right? 
I'm demoing the product while also using it doing my job—which means I'm able to show our customers how to use our product for their own customer marketing programs. 

What I love about my little corner of the product is that I get to showcase how to use Uberflip for customer engagement. It’s not the first use case many people think to implement, but it’s so simple to get up and running. It’s really powerful.

C: Can you walk me through, soup to nuts, on how you use Uberflip for events? 

A: Going into any event, we always make sure to create an event-specific stream. We create sections within each stream for the various types of content we want to make sure our customers see.

So, for example, we'll have a section for the event recording, the deck, and any takeaway content that we created specifically for that event. 

Maybe it's like a checklist or a one-pager on whatever the specific topic was—people don’t always watch recordings, so having something else for them to absorb makes sense. I'll also have a section with other relevant Uberflip content that they can use to expand their understanding of the topic. 

Then we take the link to that stream and that is what we share out. Instead of just linking to a recording, we'll share the link to the stream in our email follow-up. Using Uberflip Analytics, we can see what people are engaging with—which helps us optimize for future events and campaigns—and provide them with added value at the same time.

C: What about for Customer L.U.V. program? I imagine that’s more complicated.

A: It’s very similar, actually. Same principles on a bigger scale. 

We created a stream that has different sections based on the different types of opportunities: either opportunities that are time-sensitive or evergreen ones that they can take advantage of when they get time.

We tend to use Uberflip Link CTAs to take ambassadors to surveys or websites we want them to visit—for example, G2 or TrustRadius to leave a review—and Form CTAs to opt into unique opportunities, like speaking at events or recording a customer story. 

This is all automated, actually, when our Salesforce record is updated to active. It lets us know when a contact enrolls and if they are an active ambassador. Then they’ll receive an email from Marketo that has a link to the homepage where we advertise the latest about the program.

C: Besides Marketo, what other tools are you using with Uberflip?

A: We use a lot of Pendo for in-app messaging. 

Let's say, for example, going back to an event stream, we want to include a CTA to log in and take a tour of this new feature. So for Sales Assist, for example, we would have a webinar and include relevant resources so that they can self-educate, but we might also have a CTA that says, “Take a Tour of Sales Assist” to have them engage with the feature.

They click on it, it takes them into the application, and it launches Pendo, which would then walk them through the feature’s key functions and hopefully drive the desired actions. 

We also use MixMax for email productivity on my team. It makes emailing a group of customers at the same time easy while not sacrificing personalization.

C:  Sounds like you’re firing on all cylinders. What’s the current status of these projects? 

A: All three are alive and well. 

I would say the Customer L.U.V. Program was the only one that really required a lot of planning in advance. It took about a month and a half, but that was to relaunch an entire ambassador program, not necessarily just the Uberflip stream that's associated with it. 

We already had the foundational elements. So we revamped it, did some outreach, made sure we had some CTAs to offer off the bat, and then we launched.

C: How many ambassadors do we have anyway? 

A: I think we have about 120. We get a pretty steady flow. So I'm pretty happy with that engagement level. New ambassadors per month is a good metric for us. 

My next focus is on getting our ambassadors to do more. I wanted to get it up and running first. Now I have to actually start managing it on a monthly basis. [laughs]

C: And beyond Customer L.U.V., what's next? 

A: Creating streams based on the customer life cycle stages.

We’ll create an onboarding stream, a platform utilization, or optimization stream, and then a renewal stream or an upsell stream. The result is that as customers move through the customer life cycle, they have a stream that contains relevant information based on that customer life cycle.

Conversely, we're also talking about how to get the CSMs to create streams for every account so that they can upload call recordings, and they can add relevant information there as well as everything that goes into that. 

So I would say, we’re optimizing how we're using Uberflip for customer engagement and account management based on the customer life cycle and if it's a managed account or not.

C: Wow, I look forward to seeing those streams in action. Thanks for sharing, Andrea. 

A: You’re welcome.