Eight’s on a mission to make people’s sleep count for more. Their innovative products merge design and technology to help personalize and improve your Zs.

They launched their smart mattress, with its IFTTT integration, in 2016. We spoke to Matteo Franceschetti, Co-founder and CEO, about how they’ve made the most out of the partnership.

Why did Eight decide to integrate with IFTTT?

“We designed the product with the goal of helping people sleep better. While we were designing it, we analyzed every aspect of sleep - from the comfort of the bed to the habits that we have around our bedtime and wake up routines. Among the research we did, we ran a survey asking people what things they did before going to bed as part of their routine, and we saw that an overwhelming majority did the same 4 to 6 things before going to bed, such as locking doors, turning off lights, etc.

We realized that several of these routine activities could be automated. Given that our product would already include a Wi-Fi connection to send sleep data to the cloud, we decided to market the concept of integrating your bed to your smart home to simplify your nights and mornings. And our customers loved it! Instead of building custom integrations with every single product, the IFTTT Platform enabled us to launch this feature simply and quickly. We were immediately able to bring a wider range of possibilities to our customers.”

What was your go-to-market strategy for the partnership?

“The integration was one of the most anticipated features from our customers. When we launched, we did so with an announcement email to our entire user base and highlighted some of the connections we’d already created, to help them realize the possibilities. We also created a dedicated landing page on our website to highlight, explain, and link back to IFTTT and our connections.

Post-launch, we promoted videos on Facebook and Instagram that showcased different use cases, such as automatically starting your coffee machine when you wake up. These videos were really helpful in explaining the value of the integration, and to this day we use them in our customer prospecting efforts.

We also worked closely with the IFTTT team on marketing efforts. We were included in their GIFTTT Guide for 2016, which drove an incremental 15,000 visitors to our service page and connections. More recently, we were included in the February IFTTT newsletter. It brought us a spike in traffic and doubled our sales for a period of 4 days.”

How have customers responded?

“They’re enjoying it, and the data has been fascinating to dig into. Our most used integration is with a voice assistant, Amazon Alexa. That’s not necessarily something we would have predicted going into things.

Our next step is to evolve our service with more triggers, and more connections. The most consistent feedback we hear from customers is that they want more.”

Any best practices you’d like to share for other brands launching with IFTTT?

“Focus on use cases — you need to be descriptive and explain exactly how your users will benefit from this integration. Some may be aware of IFTTT, but many may not be, so it’s an opportunity to educate.

Launch with a dozen or so connections that are easy to understand. To make sure they have a great first experience when connecting things, make sure your setup flow is simplified and provide customer support to help users troubleshoot.”

Our products have attracted 18 million consumers across 140 countries and served over 90 million activated connections. We’ve helped over 700 global enterprises accelerate the digital transformation of their products into integrated services, dramatically reducing their development costs while driving customer acquisition and retention. We believe everything works better together.