This simple marketing hack increased activity on our platform by 300%!
What Is WorkIndia?
WorkIndia is a deep technology powered blue and grey collar recruitment portal in India. Our mission is to provide meaningful livelihoods to the 237 million blue-grey collar workforce in India and subsequently the 1.2 billion blue-grey collar workforce on this planet.
People looking to hire can post a job on our platform, and relevant jobseekers can find this job on our app.
Introduction To Funnel And Top Of The Funnel Metrics (DAU and Activity)
When a B2C tech startup is in growth phase, DAU(Daily Active Users) is the most important metric. DAU is the total number of unique users visiting your platform daily. But just getting DAU is not enough, the incoming users should perform some desirable activity on your platform which leads to the usage of the core functionality of the product and then maybe generates some revenue for you.
For example, we at WorkIndia consider any activity done on a job-post by a user as a ‘desirable activity’. Because this kind of activity is directly linked to our core functionality and can potentially lead to a payment, tracking DAU to Activity step in our product funnel becomes very essential.
I was tasked with improving DAU to Activity conversion for WorkIndia.
The Problem Statement
Our target audience majorly consists of SMEs. Most SMEs do not have dedicated HRs hiring for them. It is often some person from other business vertical (think owner of some café) taking the responsibility of hiring the staff. Hence, it goes without saying that our users will be having a lot of work on their plate apart from hiring. The easier/quicker we make it to post a job requirement, the happier our user will be.
Therefore, we asked ourselves — Is there any way we can make it easier for our user to post their job requirements onto our platform?
The Ideology And The Hack
One of the most effective ways to improve a product is to reduce the number of steps it takes to achieve a certain result. You are essentially reducing the user’s effort to achieve that task.
You can also think of it in this way. Every step in a funnel has some drop-off. Getting rid of one step also means getting rid of the associated drop-off.
At that time, the marketing emails that we sent to our dormant users contained links which brought the user to the user dashboard. After that, it was an additional step for an employer to re-activate an older job or to post another job (or in other words, do an ‘activity’).
We felt that this flow could be optimized. Our data showed that most of the users have recurring requirements for the same job profiles. Instead of bringing the user to the dashboard and then expecting him to figure out what next action to take, we could directly show the user his past hiring history with WorkIndia in the email. We could also enable him to re-activate those jobs, again from the email itself.
We built a custom link for every user to be used in these emails. Based on the type of user and the job profile, the link would behave differently. For instance, if the user is re-activating a job profile which requires him to make a payment (some job profiles are free whereas some are paid on WorkIndia), it would redirect him to the payment’s page with clear communication regarding why he is being asked to make a payment and the next steps. Communicating next steps is very essential in any product flow to eliminate any chance of the user getting confused and dropping off at anytime during the product journey.
Benefits Of Implementing This Hack
This hack helped us achieve three objectives-
1. Instant connect with the user
HRs use multiple job portals for hiring multiple roles. If you think from an HR’s perspective, it is very difficult for an HR to remember what job portals they had used to hire for which profiles (especially true for dormant users). Attaching the job profiles helped us to show HRs the profile for which they had hired before, and if they have any open requirement for those profiles, at the click of a button they can start hiring again.
2. Enhance user’s ability to take action
You are more likely to take an action if you can perceive beforehand the value you are going to get by performing that action. Showing the job-posts in the email helped us achieve this. It just became very simple for the user to visualize the value he would get by clicking on the re-activate CTA.
3. Reducing the numbers of required steps
As already pointed above, one of the most effective ways to improve a product is to reduce the number of steps it takes to achieve a certain result. Nir Eyal has explained this concept in his book Hooked, which is essentially a 4-step process -
- Find a problem to solve
- Build a naive solution for the problem
- Iterate on the solution and remove all the unnecessary steps that you can via automation, optimization, etc.
- At last, you are left with the most optimized solution.
The Result
We changed the email communication for our dormant users. Doing this, we were able to improve our DAU numbers from email by 128%, and the activity numbers by a whopping 330%. This gave us a very impressive improvement of 88% in the DAU to Activity step.
Conclusion
If there is one thing I have learnt in my 10-month stint(till now) at Product Management, it is — more often than not, sexy results come from unsexy solutions.
Instead of looking to find and solve innovative problems always, it is better to just look for seemingly trivial but actual user issues and build simple solutions to solve them.
You can reach out to me at aditya.malani@workindia.in. I would love to hear your thoughts about the same.
