Emails & Nurture Programs

An overview of emails and nurture programs at GitLab.

Overview

This page focuses on emails and nurture programs, owned and managed by Lifecycle Marketing, Marketing Campaigns, and Marketing Operations. We are focused on progressing leads throughout their funnel and have programs encompassing prospects (aimed at progressing Unknown > Inquiry > MQL > SAO) and product user journeys (free > trial >paid campaigns). We leverage “always on”, logic-based, trigger-based, and persona-driven nurture engines.

Please visit our other pages for more information on email best practices, email processes and requests, and general team information.

The Intelligent Email Nurture (launched originally 2021-12-17, re-launched 2023-11-06) aims at progressing leads from INQ > SAO, and leverages segment/region data to provide the right offer to the right person at the right time - based on their region and persona.

Related Handbook: Email Management

Key foundational elements to achieve this:

Email Nurture Programs

Intelligent Email Nurture

Labels for Intelligent Nurture Progress

We created several GitLab labels for a better organization of each asset that we are adding to the intelligent nurture.

Below we explain the labels created and what each one is for:

  • intel-nurture: This label is global and will help us identify that the issue we are working on is directly for the intelligent nurture. All “add to intelligent nurture” issues must have this label, and it is included in the issue template.
  • intel-nurture::write-copy: This label helps us know that the issue is in the process of email copy development. We cannot move on to the next step (email-build) until the copy is final.
  • intel-nurture::email-build: This label helps us to know that the email is in production. Verticurl is responsible for building the emails.
  • intel-nurture::email-test: This label tells us that the email has already been built and that the Verticurl team has sent tests to both the requesters AND the lifecycle marketing team for review. In this step we check that the links work correctly, that the content of the email is correct and that the correct utm values are used for appropriate tracking of the links. Once the email is approved, we proceed to the last step.
  • intel-nurture::add-to-streams: This label helps us to identify that the issue is in its final stage where we proceed to add the email to the relevant nurture streams.
    • PLEASE NOTE: the requester indicates the desired streams in the description of the issue, but the Lifecycle Marketing team makes the final decision on which streams are relevant. Please reference the stream alignment rules for what content type is relevant for each stream.

Intelligent Email Nurture Stream Schedule

The following shows the day of the week and cadence of the different streams in the Intelligent Nurture:

  • AMER: Thursday, 8:30 AM PT
  • EMEA: Thursday, 1:00 AM PT
  • APAC: Wednesday (Thursday APAC time), 6:30 PM PT
  • LATAM: Thursday, 8:30 AM PT.
  • Localized
    • Spanish: Inactive - leads rerouted to English nurtures
    • French: Thursday, 1:00AM PT
    • German: Inactive - relaunching end of Jan 2024
    • Japanese: Wednesday (Thursday JP time), 5:00PM PT
    • Korean: Wednesday (Thursday JP time), 5:00PM PT
    • Portuguese: Inactive - leads rerouted to English nurtures
  • PubSec
    • PubSec Default: Thursday, 7:00AM PT
    • Civilian (CIV): Thursday, 7:00AM PT
    • Department of Defense (DoD): Thursday, 7:00 AM PT
    • Federal Systems Integrators (FSI): Thursday, 7:00AM PT
    • National Security Group (NSG): Thursday, 7:00AM PT
    • SLED: Thursday, 7:00AM PT
  • Non-Demand Generation Nurture
    • All Remote: Thursday, 6:00AM PDT (not actively being maintained)

Intelligent Nurture Processes

Our Intelligent Nurture processes have moved to our email processes handbook page.

Reading for those unfamiliar with Marketo

{: #marketo-nurutre-reading}

Marketo Email Journey

What happens to Marketo when a contact is a member of a program equal to True. Marketo within the engagement programs will try to send the number 1 email of the stream. If the contact does not comply with the requirements, Marketo will try to send the mail number 2 and so on until only 2 things happen: 1 – that the mail is sent or 2 – that no mail is sent from the stream and the contact becomes exhausted. In the image below there is an explicit way on how Marketo “plays” with the send controller of 2 different emails on the same day. Marketo-Journey The ONLY way for a contact to advance from one stream to another is when it generates enough interaction and its scoring increases enough to move it from RAW to INQ from INQ to MQL or from MQL to SAO.   Also the only way for a contact who already has exhausted status to change status is to continue adding new content in the streams.   Which would lead us to the next solution. Once the contacts fall into exhausted status they should be moved to a list of “Non-Responders” and then moved to a specific Nurture to increase interaction with the company.

Intelligent Nurture Reporting Process

Intelligent Nurture Reporting Process

All Nurtures within intelligent nurture have their link directly to their specific report.

Which are formed as follows:

REGIONAL NURTURES

AMER APAC EMEA LATAM

PUBSEC NURTURE:

PubSec general nurture Civilian (CIV) Department of Defense (DoD) Federal Systems Integrators (FSI) National Security Group (NSG) State, local, and education (SLED)

ALL-REMOTE NURTURE

All Remote

LOCALIZED NURTURE:

LOC-FRENCH

LOC-GERMAN

LOC-JAPAN

LOC-KOREA

LOC-PORTUGUESE

LOC-SPANISH

To be able to extract a complete report of email metrics, you just must click on the link corresponding to the Nurture where your email is.

Also, in case of not having access to Marketo to download the report you can go to the following folder where the reports of each nurture are uploaded on a monthly basis. Intelligent Nurture KPI

Trial nurture

Setup for Trial Nurture

Self Managed owners go through the Marketo Program

UTMs: ?utm_medium=email&utm_source=marketo&utm_campaign=trial-nurture&utm_content=(custom per email)

SaaS owners are now going through the program in Iterable.

UTMs: ?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=trial-nurture

Free User Onboarding Email Campaigns

Sent through Iterable
We recenlty moved what was formerly known as “In-product emails” from Mailgun to our newer Iterable system. This will allow greater flexibility and iteration.

These are also known as:

  • User onboarding emails
  • Free user nurture
  • User nurture
  • User emails
  • Any sort of combination of the above

We launched these for:

  • Free SaaS users - Beginning of Feb, 2021, moved to Iterable in August 2023
  • Free Self-managed users - Launched mid-late May, 2021, moved to Iterable in August 2023

Iterations:
We relaunched these emails in Iterable and turned off Mailgun. Send time is now based on when the user joins GitLab and implemented skipping weekend send dates. In August 2023, we launched a welcome email and simplified some of the content. We will be iterating more on this program going forward.

Who’s part of this project?

  • Allie Klatzkin - email marketing DRI, Iterable analytics, & assist technical setup
  • Paige Cordero (Growth)
  • Sam Awezec (Growth)
  • Gayle Doud (Growth)

So what’s the deal?
Basically, we have a series of emails that deploy to net new namespaces. The goal is to get free users to use features of the product. There are 4 tracks - adopt Create, adopt Verify, invite Team, try a Trial. Each track has emails that try to nudge users to take action. If a user takes the action referenced in the email, they will not get the next email in the series and will move to the next series.

From email and reply-to email
info@mg.gitlab.com - which is a group inbox. Amy is also a member of this group inbox. HTML files
All of the HTML email files are in Iterable.

For a more in-depth look at how these emails work, please review the Figma journey.

Last modified January 4, 2024: Update 2 files (1ec840aa)
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