How Wedio Uses Customer.io to Capture 26% of Their Total Revenue and Grow Their Marketplace
Wedio is an online marketplace connecting creators, filmmakers, and photographers with other people who want to lend and borrow equipment. Within their marketplace, they enable three types of members: Renters, Lenders, and Subscribers.
Customer.io: No Negatives
When Wedio set out to find a marketing messaging platform to replace Klaviyo, they were headstrong about one piece of criteria: data ownership. From the beginning, they knew how important it was to find a provider that would let them completely own their own data, while also transforming that data to perform any action and campaign they could imagine.
“We know how important data is. Not only that, but to own your own data. That’s why we chose Customer.io.”
–Daniel Sand, CEO
Adjacent to their need for data ownership was their need to be able to segment their data. With thousands of Lenders, Renters, and Subscribers, their need to be able to granularly segment was a top priority.
Transactional message capabilities were also a huge part of their selection process. Since the Lender, Renter, and Wedio has to be notified for every action and change status, the ability to send thousands of transactional messages simultaneously was mission-critical.
Their last checklist item for selecting a new messaging platform was that it’s technical enough to power complex campaigns but simple enough for their content marketer to use.
Seeing the Whole Picture With Lifecycle Marketing
Wedio uses Customer.io for every step of their lifecycle marketing strategy, starting from the second a user becomes an identifiable lead. They capture leads through an extensive ecosystem ranging from gated content, free templates, discount codes, guides, and gamification. All of which stem from organic traffic from their website.
Once leads are captured, they go down one of three intricately designed funnels within Customer.io. Through actions that leads take either by interacting with their messages or through their website (via a Javascript snippet), Wedio uses these clues to determine if they’re interested in being a Renter, Lender, or Subscriber.
For example, Wedio knows when a user has downloaded their pricing calculator to see how much it would cost to own a specific product and how long that would take with a fixed monthly fee. Through this, they’re able to know that this person is considering becoming a Subscriber. They also know which piece of equipment they’re interested in so they can start sending personalized content. 39% of people who download their calculator start a subscription with Wedio, which contributes to 26% of their total revenue!
Once a user enters either the Renter, Lender, or Subscriber journey, Wedio embarks their leads on a 6-month journey encouraging them to continuously take the next step, whatever that might be at the time. For example, when a user is in the Lender journey, Wedio encourages them to create a listing by showing related content, tips on getting started, and the option to book a call with a member who could help them with their first listing.
Through the Lens of Efficiency to Record Higher Conversions
As part of their efforts to keep their marketplace a reliable place for their customers, Wedio goes to great pains to verify both the lender and the renter. Photo and film equipment is valuable so the stakes are high for lenders and renters. They began constructing a process to verify that users are who they say they are, and, based on their digital footprint, whether or not they are likely to have good intentions.
A big challenge was the amount of time it took to verify a user. Before implementing Customer.io, the average time it took to verify a user was 2.5 hours. This became a point of friction as, they discovered, filmmakers often don’t book their equipment until the night before a shoot. This made time of the essence, and when users didn’t get verified fast enough, they’d go to their competitors or find other avenues to secure their equipment.
To fix this, Wedio created a workflow in Customer.io to complete the verification faster. Whenever a verification request came through, Customer.io would fire a text and a Slack message to the team member on call, telling them to drop everything to check the verification. With this real-time notification, they were able to cut down their verification time to 30 minutes! This in turn increased their completion rate from request to rental from 64% pre-Slack integration, to 84% completion rate after this integration. This has proportionally increased their revenue from rentals by 31%.
The Right Focus: The Only Competition is Yourself
Among other emails that Wedio sends to lenders through Customer.io, one is a monthly recap email that acts as their personal dashboard. This seemingly fun and informative newsletter actually has some pretty smart strategies behind it. In this summary email, Lenders see their earnings from the past month, the viewer count on their listings, how many rejections they received, their average response time, and benchmark of their data against themselves and others.
By telling their Lenders, for example, ‘your average response time is 60 minutes, 30 minutes more than average response time of other lenders’, they hope to inspire Lenders to do better and outperform themselves. When Wedio can get their customers and users to be more active, it only increases participation and stickiness across the entire marketplace, a win for Wedio. This retention tactic yields them a 62.9% open rate on emails with a 4.8% click-through rate on content aimed to help the lender improve their profile and lend more.
Final Thoughts
Through Customer.io, Wedio has seen their marketplace explode with activity. By enabling lifecycle journey campaigns for all members of their ecosystem starting from lead generation to retention, Wedio has accelerated their rate of growth to the point that in the first two weeks of May 2022, they gained the same number of new members that it had previously taken them a year and to gain. Well done, Wedio!