MarTech360 Interview with Tanya Littlefield, VP of Growth Marketing at Amplitude

“My passion lies in creating opportunities for collaboration between product and marketing teams, and to be successful, collaboration is key.”

Tanya, can you tell us about your professional background and your current role at Amplitude. Also, tell us how Amplitude differentiates itself from other companies in the same space.

Over my 20-year career as a marketer, I’ve had the opportunity to lead and build growth marketing teams at early-stage SaaS startups to publicly traded e-commerce companies. As Amplitude’s VP of Growth Marketing, I work closely with our sales and product teams to lead our customers’ awareness, monetization, and lifecycle experience.

One of the biggest reasons I joined Amplitude was that I was a customer first. Three times, actually. The value of Amplitude’s product and insights were unmatched compared to other tools. In a marketing environment with endless tools at your disposal, Amplitude solves the problem of siloed data, toggling between tools and fragmented dashboards from various sources by bringing together a marketer’s most relied-on tools into one unified platform. Through product analytics, session replay, A/B testing and campaign tools, Amplitude helps companies understand how their users engage with their products and provides real-time, actionable data-driven insights to improve user experiences across channels. Our platform is built for both technical and non-technical users across marketing, product and data teams. And, unlike legacy tools, our deployable AI Agents take automation to the next level by taking actions on your behalf, using experimentation to make improvements and optimize experiences in real-time 24/7.

Amplitude is known for helping teams build better products through analytics. How does access to real-time product data influence your marketing strategies today?

When it comes to marketing strategies, personalization is now considered the baseline. To create a deeper impact with customers, marketers need to go beyond name, industry, and role to target key audiences with needlepoint precision. The focus for marketers should be on understanding and activating people’s behaviors in real-time across communications channels using these three strategies:

Segment core audiences based on behaviors: With real-time behavioral analytics, marketers can define core audiences based on a user’s action or non-action. Using real-time product data, segments update automatically, always remaining relevant, instead of reactive.

Create a personalized website experience: Personalization has the potential to be more than just emails, ads and SMS. Marketers often ignore the website experience as a channel for personalization. With Amplitude’s Web Experimentation, marketers can deploy website tests with different calls to action (CTAs) and individualized value statements based on past product use, without developer or engineering support.

Deliver a cohesive, connected customer experience: With real-time behavioral segments, marketers can ensure precision targeting across all channels, including ads, emails, in-app, and push, to reach their customers where they are. With a unified system that combines real-time cohort syncing with ad platforms and automation tools with product messaging platforms, marketers can create a cohesive experience across the omnichannel.

As consumer behavior shifts across platforms; how do you personalize the customer journey without compromising scalability or privacy?

As marketers, our job is to build trust with our customers.  This can be done through personalization efforts, but it also extends to data privacy. When it comes to marketing tools, marketers need to have a clear understanding of their data privacy policies to ensure compliance.

According to McKinsey & Company, 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions. If consumer expectations are not met, 76% feel frustrated at the lack of interaction. Sephora is a great example of meeting and exceeding consumer expectations. The consumer brand uses behavioral data to create a hyper-personalized, data-driven customer experience that is tailored to customer needs to create a seamless experience, whether the customer is in-store, online or in the app.

Brands that can deliver a unique customer experience that builds loyalty and trust will be the most successful in scaling personalization to enhance user experiences. However, for years, marketers have faced challenges in balancing the use of consumer data to inform personalization efforts while upholding data residency and privacy requirements. By complying with data regulations and offering user privacy APIs, you put consumers in control of what data and to which companies they share their data.

Also Read: MarTech360 Interview with Mary Gabrielyan, Chief Strategy Officer at AI Digital

In your experience, what’s one growth experiment that significantly shifted your thinking on what drives engagement or conversion?

Early in my career, I worked at an Edtech company that signed up students for their product subscription. We had a large drop-off rate from sign-up to activation and usage, and at the time, the theory was that paid channel traffic was “less than” compared to organic, and we should expect this as standard.

I wanted to see what might happen if we focused on articulating the value of our service in emails, on our landing pages and post-sign-up experience. I conducted several experiments across those areas, each one showing slight improvement over the previous one. I kept testing and asking questions, adding personalization along the way. In the course of five months, we moved from 30% of paid signups activating and performing actions in the product to 80%. This is the moment that I got my first touch of growth marketing and learned the value of a customer-centric approach.

How do you strike a balance between creative storytelling and performance metrics when building digital campaigns that scale?

To understand whether or not your marketing campaigns are making a meaningful impact on your consumers, marketers need to look beyond surface-level metrics such as impressions and clicks to a more holistic approach of performance metrics that provide full-funnel insights to inform campaign decisions. This means looking at data around the entire customer journey, such as in-product behavior, engagement, retention and conversion in the funnel. When it comes to looking at funnel performance, marketers should identify and double down on what works, as well as find any gaps that need improvement. I suggest starting backwards and asking questions such as who is successful in the product today? What steps did they take to get there? How can adjustments be made to the overall flow to tell that story and journey to more users?

Marketers should focus on finding the “happy path,” and look for common dropoff points in the journey, and build hypotheses to test and redefine success. By understanding behavioral signals such as time on page and click patterns, marketers can have a line of visibility into the content that resonates with customers and where they can improve. Through continuous experimentation, paired with segmented behavioral analytics, marketers can deliver tailored content to key audiences to drive overall campaign performance.

What role does AI play in your growth marketing stack, and how do you ensure it’s used responsibly and effectively?

Growth marketers focus on learning and understanding the latest in marketing as fast as possible. LLMs are here to stay, and it’s important to be on the cutting edge of the trends rather than behind. At Amplitude, it is important for us to have a well-defined strategy and an AI vision to build something that creates long-term opportunities for our customers, not just short-term solutions. We continue to ask, how customers and prospects might be looking for Amplitude or a similar tool that was different from a year ago? What adjustments can we make to our strategies to take that into account, and serve up the right content and buyer’s journey to match those changes?

We understand the demands of marketing teams, and as one of the most active users of Amplitude, our team has partnered with the product team from day one for AI agents. Based on our user experience, we’ve provided insight, use cases and leveraged agents in our day-to-day to ensure our AI Agents boost marketer productivity, not slow them down. Our approach is to make AI  a great partner and team player, where ultimately, marketers are at the center of everything, leading, monitoring, approving, and controlling autonomy at every touch point.

Amplitude serves a wide range of industries; how do you tailor your growth approach to speak to such a diverse audience while staying brand-consistent?

Amplitude customers serve a variety of industries such as retail, financial services, media, and automotive, to name a few. Despite working across different sectors, the challenges our customers face are very similar. At Amplitude, we have high-level core messaging but at the same time we tailor our communication both in and out of our product to help our audiences get to their business value and build reports and programs as quickly as possible to help them be successful.

What skills or mindsets do you think are critical for today’s digital marketing leaders to stay ahead in an increasingly data-native world?

 Today’s marketing leaders need advanced data literacy skills paired with a growth mindset. It’s not enough to be data literate—you need to be able to ask questions about patterns and users and swiftly take action. For marketers, it’s more than just understanding dashboards; it’s about real-time adjustments paired with curiosity. Successful marketers lean into experimentation and testing to distill greater insights into the user journey and hone in on messaging that resonates with customers to adapt and meet their needs, turning users into loyal customers.

As a growth marketer, my passion lies in creating opportunities for collaboration between product and marketing teams, and to be successful, collaboration is key. The more these teams can work together, align on business success metrics and develop a full-funnel approach, the stronger your marketing and product strategies will be and together reach better business outcomes.

Looking ahead, what do you believe will define successful growth teams over the next five years in terms of structure, strategy, or tech stack?

 Right now, growth is all about behavioral analytics and conversion; in the future, marketers will be able to use actions gleaned from AI insights to create a level of one-to-one personalization to reach customers. Empowered by AI tools, marketers will be able to deliver more personalized customer experiences built on insights from behavioral analytics.

Is there anything that you’re currently reading, or any favorite books, that you would recommend?

I like to read fiction as much as possible to get out of the standard work brain and learn from other parts of my brain. I recently read and loved Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

Thanks Tanya!