How to track customer actions using custom activities

There are many interactions leads or customers can have with your company. Activities allow you to track these interactions and use them to create more personalized, behavior-driven automated marketing campaigns.

In Ortto, system and data source activities will be populated out of the box, but it's likely you will have some other business critical events or behaviors you need to track — like subscribing to an app or applying for a loan. These activities can be tracked and operationalized by using custom activities.

In the video below, we introduce you to custom activities and share how they are set up in Ortto.

What are custom activities?

Activities describe a user’s behavior with your company. For example clicking on an email, making a purchase or logging in to your application. Custom activities allow you to build and track your own custom, event-based activities that represent behaviors important to your business across the customer lifecycle. These activities are logged within your customer data platform. To put it simply, custom activities are for any action that is not predefined in your account.

By building and tracking these actions that are unique to your business, you will be able to create truly personalized journeys, with messages sent when a user has actually taken an action, rather than when you assume they have taken an action (for example, based on time as a customer). 

We’ve provided a few custom activity examples below:

SaaS company:

• Product actions

• Signed up

• Logged in

• Activated a free trial

• Added a team member

Finance company:

• Applied for loan

• Saving account opened

• Bonus interest unlocked

Let’s look at a real-world example. Say you’re a SaaS company and, based on your data, you know that during a free trial phase, if a user completes two specific actions - create a task and assign task to another user - they are more likely to convert as a customer.

Setting up custom activities to track these actions will help you be aware of what stage your potential subscriber is at on their journey. If they complete their task you can assume they reached their ‘aha moment’, or if they are yet to complete you can prompt them to take the next action (more on this in the next section).

We have 10 more use cases on how custom activities can work for you.

Benefits of custom activities

Think of custom activities as an immediate trigger to interact with your customer - an opportunity to have a relevant, meaningful conversation. They can also be used to analyze customer behavior and uncover ways to improve your customer experience.

Here are just some of the benefits of setting up custom activities: 

1. Behavior-based segmentation 

Talk to the right audience by using your custom activities to create more powerful, behavior-based audience segments. For example, with the custom activity ‘webinar attendance’ you can create an audience segment of top attendees, and will have a list of people more likely to attend a future webinar. This gives you a great starting point to drive attendance for any new events or webinars coming up. 

Ortto ensures that your created audience segments are dynamic, so they will always remain up to date and you can feel confident you are always having the right conversation.

2. Personalize customer journeys

Custom activities can be used across the platform to enter people into journeys, split campaigns, or populate merge tags. This helps you personalize the customer journey with more precision, and connect with your customers in a timely manner to drive results.

Automated activity-based journeys outperform the standard time-triggered customer journeys. This is based on a few key things - the ability to personalize the journey for your customer and to deliver relevant messaging and journey in a timely manner. 

3. Fast-track the journey from ‘huh’ to ‘aha’ 

Custom activities allow you to send customers how-to or next-step messages based on the actions they’ve taken. Fast-track them to see the product value sooner by using an automated customer journey including emails, text messages, pop-ups, forms, in-product messages, and more. By guiding users towards their ‘aha’ moment you’ll increase customer satisfaction and conversions.

4. Score leads 

Custom activities can be used in our lead scoring tool to help you identify leads who are more likely to convert, or to spot hyper-engaged customers who may be ripe for expansion. This behavioral data is often more accurate and useful than demographic or firmographic information — plus leads tend to feel more comfortable with and get more use out of behavioral-type personalization.

5. View activities with full context 

Custom activities will help you find deep insights into your business via reporting. Track how many customers are taking actions important to your business, then set more meaningful goals around for your marketing and support teams.

By using custom activities with Ortto’s cohort analysis or funnel reporting features, you can uncover the activities that drive value for your business plus ensure every department of your business can make data-based decisions.

Final word

Custom activities are a powerful tool for campaign personalization, reporting, and to help you better understand the customer journey.