Franciska Dethlefsen, Senior Director of Growth Marketing at Amplitude, shares her expertise on user acquisition, PLG, and building successful growth teams.
In the fast-evolving landscape of growth marketing, Franciska Dethlefsen, Senior Director of Growth Marketing at Amplitude, stands out as a dynamic leader. With a career that has spanned pivotal roles, from establishing the marketing function at Snowplow Analytics to spearheading growth initiatives at Amplitude, Dethlefsen has a wealth of experience driving strategic marketing efforts.
In this interview, she shares insights into her journey, the evolution of growth marketing, and the innovative strategies that have positioned Amplitude for success. Join us as we explore her approach to user acquisition, Product-Led Growth, and the future of marketing in a data-driven world.
Excerpt from the interview;
Could you elaborate on your career progression from building the marketing function at Snowplow Analytics to leading growth marketing at Amplitude?
At Snowplow, I set up the initial marketing team, and as we grew, I focused heavily on our demand gen efforts – we started purely Sales-led and, over time, layered in Product-led as we productized more and more of our open-source software. From there, I joined an early-stage company in the data space to lead Growth efforts there. There, I focused on the 0 to 1 build, and the goal was to drive activated signups that we could eventually monetize.
Amplitude acquired us, and I initially joined the product team as a PM. From there, I moved around internally until I got the opportunity to set up our Growth Marketing function—we scaled the team from 3 to 14 people across pods focused on acquisition, retention, and monetization, respectively. We’re responsible for our self-serve business, Plus, launched a year ago. Now, I also lead our product growth teams, and we have a hybrid setup focused on driving revenue and customer count through self-serve.
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Which user acquisition strategies have proven most effective for Amplitude, and how do you measure their ROI?
We aim to keep CPL low and efficient when driving user acquisition for our self-serve business. The team is investing heavily in programmatic and content SEO to drive relevant traffic to our site. We have launched initiatives like our Template Library, where we feature expert users who can drive traffic to us through their networks. We have an affiliate program and leverage Google ads to drive high-intent users cheaply. Given our stage and market awareness, we rely on direct traffic and word of mouth.
We measure ROI by understanding the cost per activated signup (whether they are actually in the product and using it) by channel and how our channels are impacting our self-serve business. We use Amplitude for all our reporting, which makes it easy to connect top-of-funnel channels and campaign activity with downstream conversion events.
How do you approach Product-Led Growth (PLG) at Amplitude, and what are your primary challenges in implementing this strategy?
At Amplitude, we’re big believers in the power of PLG. But it’s not just a “thing you do” or a box you can check. It is a way of operating where the product does the heavy lifting to help you drive more leads and close more business.
Offering a self-serve way for new customers to try your product is an important part of many companies’ PLG strategies. You want to provide an easy, low-barrier way for people to experience the power of your product. In October 2023, we launched Amplitude’s self-service offering, Amplitude Plus. This took years of trial and error and countless hours building the business case and securing internal buy-in from executives. But all that work upfront led to a stronger product offering, an expanded customer base, and a re-investment in growth that has proven consequential.
What criteria do you use to identify and prioritize target audiences for your marketing campaigns?
The growth teams at Amplitude create customized journeys and targeted campaigns based on profiles, behavioral traits, and likelihood to engage. Our Amplitude Audiences tool lets us tailor campaigns to specific user profiles and engagement patterns. For example, if behavioral data on a user indicates they might be churning soon, we can get ahead of it and push an email campaign that encourages them to engage in a new way.
How do you foster a collaborative environment within your marketing team to drive growth initiatives effectively?
A big part of collaboration is trust. You won’t be successful if you can’t trust each other to make hard decisions while keeping the customer at the center. Building trust as a leader often means stepping back and empowering your team to develop new ideas about working more cross-functionally and providing opportunities for them to do so.
We also ensure that our product and marketing teams have shared goals and metrics. Aligning behind the same goals naturally fosters collaboration, as we’re all trying to reach the same destination. We meet weekly in our pod meetings to discuss how our metrics are doing and any tactical changes we need to make to ensure we hit our goals.
Describe your process for aligning growth marketing efforts with other departments, such as product and sales.
Cross-functional buy-in is crucial if you want growth efforts to be effective. Everyone needs to be on the same page about the metrics you’re driving toward, so I like to start by defining a “North Star” metric that each team is accountable for and reports on weekly. For example, to track the success of Amplitude Plus, our North Star is the customer logo count. Teams may pursue other goals depending on their business function, but at the end of the day, everyone focuses most on increasing that logo count.
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Which emerging trends in growth marketing are you most excited about, and why?
When talking to startups, a top challenge is understanding what growth efforts drive downstream impact, product adoption, and revenue growth. I’m excited to see the trend toward total consolidation of analytics, marketing, product, and GTM tools into a singular platform like Amplitude continue. It’s the easiest and most efficient way to get an end-to-end understanding of what’s making an impact.
For example, Amplitude’s recent partnership with HubSpot consolidates Amplitude’s behavioral insights with HubSpot’s enhanced Lead Scoring, meaning marketers can serve up better leads to sales and build more targeted marketing campaigns. Understanding which users are engaging with your product easily – and how – makes personalization so much more effective. I’m excited about the GTM success that will be enabled by further consolidation.
How do you envision the future of marketing, especially in light of advancements in technology and data analytics?
Self-serve and product-led growth approaches will only become more popular as companies see the power of data in building better products and the efficiency it brings with lower marketing and sales costs when the product does more of the heavy lifting. This means product and growth marketing teams will have more responsibility and accountability. It will be a new world of owning business metrics that they didn’t previously own, like revenue and churn. And they’re going to work a whole lot closer together!
What advice would you give aspiring marketers looking to build successful careers in growth marketing?
Don’t wait until you’re in a leadership role to start building connections with product and GTM teams and understanding what matters most to them. Being a successful marketer means acting as the bridge that brings all these stakeholders together. If you start regularly connecting with your product and sales counterparts, you’ll build trust, which is the glue for any growth campaign.
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Can you share a marketing initiative that didn’t meet expectations and discuss the lessons you learned from that experience?
We officially launched Amplitude’s self-service offering, Amplitude Plus, in October 2023. But getting to that launch took over a year of trial and error –starting with the launch of the Amplitude Plus alpha, which saw just 14 purchases. This was not a number that made company leadership very enthusiastic. However, we used what we had learned to overhaul our positioning, pricing, and packaging completely before the official launch more than a year later, which was very successful.
We learned that a full alpha test can be a big investment, and not every product may be ready. In our case, we could’ve tried smaller, lower lift tests, such as featuring the self-serve offering on the pricing page on our website to test a self-serve plan, known as a “painted door test.” We could’ve also tested email on a smaller subset of accounts to understand their reactions.
