While Winnie’s free website allows parents to search and compare nearby daycares, preschools and caregivers, on one hand, providers can advertise programs and related services on the other. Although they were already engaging with parents through the content marketing strategy, the company knew that to build a strong relationship with the supplier's side, they needed to create a top-notch email program. However, the email marketing tool Winnie was previously using consumed more resources than it produced results.
Anne K. Halsall, co-founder & CPO says “it required too much support from design and engineering to create funnels and run experiments, which in turn took resources away from the core platform and product experience. We weren’t iterating and learning as fast as we could have because it just took too much time and effort to try new things. We needed a solution that empowered us to both test new ideas and deploy sophisticated, personalized email marketing programs without having to build everything in-house.”
Winnie was seeking a single platform that provided a variety of solutions to help them achieve their growth goals. As a startup with a small team, it was critical to have a centralized place for sales, marketing, and support. They found HubSpot to be the easiest and most appealing choice to help them not only engage with a large number of suppliers through a combination of outreach, customer education and nurturing but also to increase platform engagement.
From the moment they upgraded to Marketing Hub Professional, the company began building a stronger email marketing program, “The first thing we did was to start testing our hypotheses around email outreach. We knew our current emails were underperforming but didn’t have a good way to iterate on them efficiently. With HubSpot, it was incredibly easy to test everything from personalization to lifecycle triggers to layout and design. The pace of learning was incredible.”
HubSpot’s email marketing easy-to-use and robust tool allowed Winnie’s marketing department to efficiently test complex ideas without any technical help. The new insights the tool provided allowed the team to drive outstanding results along the entire funnel. Initially, Winnie was expecting to increase their active suppliers between 5% and 10% but with the optimization of the email program, the result was stunning with a 32% increase just during the first month. A 5X lift in the conversion rate and an increase from an average click-through rate of 22% to 48% in reactivating emails were also big wins for the company.
“We are constantly surprised at the level of sophistication that’s possible in HubSpot, from workflow management to automation. The email tools are my MVP. They’ve driven a ton of meaningful impact for us already and we expect to rely on them even more in the future.”
Winnie not only uses the email marketing tool, but the company is also using HubSpot’s CRM and Analytics tools to get a better picture of the customer lifecycle to drive growth thus integrating other departments and centralizing all the company efforts into one, cohesive process.
Always thinking ahead when it comes to growth, Winnie’s team maintains a rapid pace of learning and continues to improve their ability to engage, nurture and activate users on both sides of our marketplace.
“The entire team at Winnie — from content to platform to marketing — is intently focused on fixing what’s broken in childcare by making it easier for parents and quality caregivers to connect. We see HubSpot as a crucial part of that story because of the better our tools, the more value we can deliver to our users and more lives we can change.” – Anne K. Halsall, co-founder & CPO