The “Netflix” experience for Customer.io subscribers

Building a personalized nurture campaign that feels as personalized as your Netflix recommendations

Background

Individuals were coming to Customer.io to learn—downloading guides, reports, and playbooks; joining webinars, and events. Yet afterwards, we weren’t following up with them in a thoughtful way. Sometimes the marketing team would blast everyone with an invite for the next event; sometimes they’d accidentally send multiple emails in one day. It was a bad experience that was leading to even worse subscriber to lead conversion rates.

The Solution

Create an always-on “Netiflix-like” experience for subscribers that delivered an ultra-personalized series of content recommendations straight to their inbox–without actually building a complex recommendation engine.

The Strategy

Whenever someone downloads a piece of content, that’s a signal. It tells me something about their interests. And I already knew a ton about our own content—its topic, why it was created, who it’s for, and where it fits in the customer journey. The question then becomes: Can I take what we know about our content and use it to enrich what we know about our leads? By executing a content audit, gathering zero-party data via a survey, and creating anyway from 2-7 versions of different emails, I built the Netflix-experience for our subscribers by writing, building, testing, and launching every single message in this campaign. The results have been nothing short of phenomenal.

The Results

To date, the campaign has driven over 200+ scored MQLs, driven over $400,000 in pipeline, and open rates sit around 65%.

A survey to vet topic interests

Content downloads only told part of the story. Next, I needed to validate the interests of our subscribers by gathering zero-party data. In the first email, subscribers could select which topics they were actually interested in. They could pick multiple categories. But if they don’t fill out the survey, that’s okay, we still have all the data from the original asset they downloaded that we could pull from.

The MVP of this campaign? Our content audit

Before I could personalize anything, I had to take stock of what we had. So I conducted a full content audit—categorizing every single Customer.io asset by:

Topic / category
Format
Persona
Industry
Product feature

This step was critical because it gave me an organized library to pull from. Instead of just randomly picking content to send, I now had a structured way to match content with interests.

Time to deliver the goods

Once I had a clear idea of what our leads were interested in, I had to decide what to send them—and this is where content strategy really comes into play. But I didn’t want this to feel like just another marketing blast. Instead, the goal is to create the Netflix-experience: where everything feels curated.

I created 2-7 versions of every email type. Whether it was a case study chosen aligned to the topic interest assigned to the subscriber, or a guide sent based on their persona type, every email was crafted with one goal in mind: show up in their inbox in a way that feels ultra-personal, and ultra-helpful.