Thousands of Autopilot customers use email to engage with leads, prospects, and customers.

Behind the scenes, our system collects data about each email send—email opens, email clicks, and email replies, to a name a few. We then make this data available by what we call the Activity Stream. We introduced Activity Streams earlier this week to give you the visibility necessary to answer questions across multiple data sources and become more data driven in your decision making.

Today, I’m excited to announce Segment Sources as a new built-in Autopilot Activity Stream. You can now stream all email events to Segment by connecting Autopilot as a source. Segment will then forward these events to your destinations (like your analytics software), and load them into your data warehouse.

Adding Autopilot as a Segment Source will empower thousands of customers to take email analysis to the next level. Combining email engagement data with first-party customer data from mobile and web lets marketers understand their customers more deeply and engage them in ways that are much more personal. - Peter Reinhardt, CEO at Segment

Piping your Autopilot email activity into Segment helps you in two important ways:

Connect email activity to customer data living in other tools
Make data-driven marketing decisions

We’ll cover both.

Connect email activity to customer data living in other tools

Segment Sources solves the siloed customer data problem. Think of your own tool stack and the information about your users that lives in each source:

Google AdWords: Total spend, campaign performance, engagement stats
Stripe: Average revenue by plan, lifetime value, upgrade and downgrade trends
Zendesk: Response times, number of support interactions, communication patterns
Your own database: In-product events and user behavior

Before Segment Sources, the customer data living in each tool was only living in each tool. No longer.

Today’s release allows your to push all your Autopilot email activity data as a Segment Source. These are the events that will appear in your warehouse:

Email bounced
Email delivered
Email clicked
Email marked as spam
Email opened
Email unsubscribed
Email replied

Once all your data (Autopilot, Stripe, Zendesk, etc) is centralized into one warehouse (Segment Sources), the next step is to make smart correlations between the connected data in your analytics software of choice (Amplitude, Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, etc).

Make data-driven marketing decisions

Your customer’s journey involves multiple touchpoints across channels, services, and people. Ilya Volodarsky, a Segment co-founder, elaborates:

“Most companies analyze what’s happening on their mobile apps and websites, but that’s only a sliver of the customer experience. Your customers aren’t just using your app—they’re also sending in support tickets, opening emails, talking with your sales team, tapping through your text messages, and more.”

Since your customer’s journey isn’t siloed, the analytics questions you ask shouldn’t be either. Let’s combine your email activity with the tools I’ve already mentioned to discover the kind of questions you can now answer:

Google AdWords + Autopilot

What’s more effective at bringing people back to our website? Ads or emails?
What’s the pattern between AdWords and email that leads to paid conversions?

Stripe + Autopilot

What is the average lifetime value of customers who converted through an email campaign?
Which pricing plan tier has a higher clickthrough rate?
Which email campaign contributed the most MRR?

Zendesk + Autopilot

How much have users who submitted over five support tickets in the past year engaged with marketing emails?
What’s the relationship between response time and email unsubscribes?
How do bounced emails affect the number of support requests?

Your own database + Autopilot

How do customers that regularly open emails behave differently than other users?
Which emails have led to the most in-product engagement?
Did our product education email series increase adoption of our newest feature?

By querying your Segment Sources data with best-of-breed tools like Heap, Amplitude, Mixpanel_, and Kissmetrics, the new integration helps you answer the question: “How effective are my emails throughout the customer journey?” This is data-driven marketing in action.

How Frame.io uses Autopilot as a Segment Source

Frame.io is video post-production collaboration software. Companies like BuzzFeed, Disney, and Spotify rely on the company to streamline their video creation process.

With the new integration, Frame.io streams their email activity from Autopilot into Segment to understand the impact email has on their customer experience. More specifically, they dig into how email helps nudge users to take the next step in their journey, from acquisition to onboarding and retention. Their team pays attention to every detail:

Target audience
Email subject line
Journey name
A/B test results

Using Amplitude, Frame.io Head of Growth Kyle Gesuelli runs reports to see how email affects specific conversion events, like uploading media and inviting team members. The below conversion funnel is grouped by the onboarding email version received, and shows which performed better!

A Frame.io Amplitude report using Autopilot email activity data sent through Segment Sources. This is all made possible because of Autopilot’s availability as a Segment Source.

“I’m going to geek out here a bit, but this new feature is seriously awesome! With the Autopilot source for Segment, we’re able to analyze the impact of our emails alongside all our other Segment data in our main reporting the tool with confidence.” - Kyle Gesuelli, Head of Growth at Frame.io