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SUCCESS STORY

How to reactivate former customers through programmatic CRM?

Upwork reengages nonreactive customers through a programmatic CRM campaign

The Challenge

Upwork, formerly Elance-oDesk, is the largest global freelancing platform where businesses and independent professionals connect and collaborate remotely. In 2015, Elance-oDesk was rebranded as Upwork.

The company faced the challenge of brand migration, and given the cost of finding or acquiring new users, a win-back strategy was a valuable way for Upwork to leverage its Elance CRM database.

The goal for Upwork was to reactivate their former users in 25 countries (US, CA, UK, AU, etc.) and encourage them to migrate and post jobs on Upwork. Beyond mere migration, another goal is to encourage newly migrated members to post job offers on Upwork.

The Solution

Numberly teams launched a CRM programmatic campaign to help Upwork meet their goals. CRM Programmatic allows advertisers to reactivate former or inactive customers when they are non-addressable via email by reaching them through other channels.

The first step is matching inactive or unreachable CRM contacts with other identifiers via the data onboarding process. These contacts are then activated through programmatic platforms, following these two principles:

  1. An omnichannel and multi-format scenario, to maximize reach & impact through the multiplication, diversification and personalization of touchpoints.
  2. Incrementality, to measure the real impact of the campaign by creating two random and equal groups and comparing the behavior of the test group (ad exposure) to a control group (no ad exposure).

Strengths of the CRM Programmatic Upwork campaign

Upwork and Numberly teams capitalized on strong strategies to boost performance and drive people to post and hire on Upwork:

  • An omnichannel campaign on 6 platforms (email, AppNexus, Facebook, LinkedIn, DV360 and Amazon) in order to maximize reach
  • 4 media formats for the 4 main countries (email, display, video and social ads), while the 21 others were only targeted by emails
  • Innovative formats, such as Trueview video on YouTube, video ads on Facebook
  • Email personalization based on the user’s preferred freelancer categories & previous experience
  • A precise segmentation of the database into three groups based on the quality of the prospects and their likelihood of migrating
  • A direct call-to-action since each individual from the target population could get a $100 coupon by signing up and hiring on Upwork
  • Sequential messaging for display, video and social ads based on the stage of the funnel.

Incrementality at the core of Numberly’s vision

Incremental results were computed by country, segment and trading treatment on a daily basis, which allowed the teams to monitor the campaign very precisely and to optimize the spending by increasing the investments on the most promising segments.

The Results

Numberly’s strategic approach brought significant uplifts to the campaign.

The incremental analysis and granularity of the segments also allowed the teams to identify best practices for future campaigns:

  • Leveraging Linkedin and YouTube :
    Adding LinkedIn to the media mix brought an uplift of 8% on account creations.The significant results on this first test allowed to broaden the activation of LinkedIn to maximize impact on the rest of the campaign.
    Activating Youtube video ads in addition to the existing programmatic platforms (Appnexus, Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn) brought a 10% uplift on Account Creation.
  • Building a smart segmentation :
    This allowed the teams to identify the most responsive audiences and focus our efforts on them, some specific segments registering an impact of up to +118% on Account Creations, +84% on Job Posts, and +82% on Hires.
Campaign uplift on conversion rate

Key Figures

+34 %

cumulative uplift on Account Creations

16 %

cumulative uplift on First Job Posts

+10 %

cumulative uplift on Hires