Measuring the Impact of Email
As a SaaS company, AirDNA designs their email campaigns to influence how users interact with their product. But the self-proclaimed “Zillow for Airbnbs” was having a hard time measuring the impact of those campaigns. They could easily see email metrics in HubSpot, but they couldn’t connect those actions to in-app metrics like feature usage, onboarding, or retention.
“It was hard to go deeper into our email marketing results. We could send an email campaign and see that it had a great open rate and clickthrough rate, but we couldn’t see what happened after that,” explains Allyson Marks, AirDNA’s product analyst and former email marketer.
Unlike other marketing channels, emails were one of the few ways that AirDNA could communicate with users after they’d created a free account in their app. The lack of connection was hindering their communication with users.
Different Teams, Different Tech
AirDNA also suffered from the problem many businesses face as they grow: different teams had built different tech stacks, and the tools weren’t connected.
“We lacked visibility into our metrics,” Allyson says. “On the marketing side, we could see how people interacted with the email campaign, but not what they were doing after they clicked through. And on the product side, the product team might notice a spike in traffic or purchases one day, but they can’t trace it back to its source. We were missing that communication.”
AirDNA needed to get their teams and systems aligned so they could improve collaboration across departments and work towards shared engagement and revenue goals.
The Solution: Amplitude App for HubSpot
By connecting Amplitude and HubSpot with the Amplitude App for HubSpot, AirDNA's team leverages product usage data to become much more targeted in their email marketing efforts.
"Because Amplitude has such a depth of user and product data, we're able to get a lot more targeted and a lot more focused," Allyson explains.
Allyson creates targeted marketing lists for email, paid social, or paid search. Then, she uses those lists in HubSpot so the entire marketing team can use them to create their campaigns, from email marketing all the way up to paid ads. "We wouldn't be able to be that targeted without the depth of data that we have in Amplitude," Allyson says. “It’s made it possible to better understand our users and dig deeper into the impact that various influences have on app performance.”
With the Amplitude App for HubSpot, teams across AirDNA work in sync to improve the user experience and achieve AirDNA's goals. “Our marketing and product teams collaborate and speak the same language. It’s enabled our email campaigns to grow and become a lot more sophisticated.”
The marketing and product teams recently engaged in a shared test campaign, where the data science team fed information from the AirDNA app back into the email campaigns as a dynamic weekly update intended to bring users back to the app. Because the product and marketing teams are more aligned, email marketing has become less transactional and is intentionally built into the product experience.
“Email has become critical to help users onboard and use features better, which in turn helps retain them,” Allyson says. “It’s helped change the conversation about the effectiveness of our email marketing campaigns.”
Connecting the Complete User Journey
The combination of HubSpot and Amplitude has given the AirDNA team visibility into the entire user journey, unlocking full-funnel insights that have allowed them to synchronize their marketing activities and product development tasks.
Now, they can track user activity from when they open an email to which page they visit and what features they use in the app. They can also measure how different campaigns impact key performance metrics like feature usage and retention rate. They can compare conversion rates with those who didn’t receive the email and tie those outcomes to purchases, helping AirDNA marketing and product teams understand the full picture.
“We were really limited before,” Allyson says. “We only had part of the picture. Now we have a much more cohesive understanding. We aren’t looking at things from different points of view.”
45% Drop in Cancellations
Creating connected campaigns has paid off: the joint dynamic campaign between marketing and product teams resulted in a 45% drop in cancellations and a 38% increase in users who completed AirDNA’s onboarding and activation flow. They also had an 11% lift in app visits and a 9% increase in overall app engagement over time.
“It’s really exciting to see this measurable lift from email campaigns that translated to actions in our app,” Allyson says. “It has changed how we think about the user journey and what we can do to improve it in the future.”
Improved metrics are always a win, and there’s an added bonus: users now get more value from their emails. “Our users have started to reach out to our company and ask for content similar to what we’re delivering in these emails,” Allyson says. “People often don’t love receiving marketing emails, and we always worry that we are emailing them too often. So it’s really exciting and unusual when people ask for marketing—we’ve been able to work together to deliver emails that users enjoy receiving and want more of.”
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