Dear Data,
I remember when we first met. It was waaaaay back in university when I signed up for a stats course thinking it would be easy. Turned out it was, but I didn’t really get you back then. All those social study examples and I cared about making money. So, I thanked you for helping improve my GPA and we both moved on.
The next time I really noticed you was when I started my first software company. It was indeed a long time ago – back when SaaS was not really a thing, when Salesforce was still small and touting “No Software,” when we used Outlook to send marketing emails to our customers (yes, that was painful). My software was one of the very first email marketing SaaS offerings, and once we launched, I immediately wanted to know what was happening on the platform. Was anyone signing up? Were they actually delivering email campaigns? Were they growing over time (read: spending more money with me?). I could go on and on but suffice to say that I drove my developers crazy with my need for data.
Because I could, I invested a lot in capturing and tracking everything in our system and we spent hours poring over the data and acting on it to improve the business.
Thanks to you, we were able to identify when people were getting stuck testing us out and gently nudge them along to finish seeing the value of the software. We grew our trial-to-paid-customer conversion rate significantly thanks to you.
Thanks to you, we were able to realize that the packages we thought met every possible need were actually too small. You told us that people were pushing past the biggest package, so we created and added bigger ones. We grew our revenue per customer significantly thanks to you.
Thanks to you, we were able to see when people slowed down their use of our software and automatically send them offers of help, new features, special discounts, etc. We reduced our churn thanks to you.
So many things you helped me with. I was totally and completely in love. It’s a relationship that hasn’t weakened, and now some years later I work for a company that helps businesses realize these and similar values from using their data. I get to work with you every single day and our relationship just keeps getting stronger.
Data, we’ve been a great team for decades. I couldn’t ask for a better partner. I truly #LoveMyData.
Love,
Lynda