How CraftJack increased new pro-user signups by 31% with SMS and call reminders using Programmable Voice and Twilio Engage

CraftJack, a subsidiary of Angi, is a home services platform that connects homeowners and service professionals. Its two-sided marketplace matches homeowners with local, regional, or national professionals to complete home improvement projects, while also generating leads for service professionals so they can focus on the work they do best. As Jordan Dietch, VP of Product Management at CraftJack, put it, “We help users navigate the ever-changing digital marketplace and connect homeowners with service providers in an easy, cost-effective way.”

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the home improvement industry was booming. Home owners were renovating and remodeling which meant service professionals were in high demand. 

Now, even as home improvement projects have settled down, CraftJack has seen unseasonably high signup rates and homeowners ready to hire. Projects run wide in variety, as homeowners are requesting services from painting to plumbing to landscaping, and everything in between — and contractors are readily available from over 50+ trades to meet those demands. CraftJack needed a platform that could manage the influx in customer data generated from new users and the ability to personalize campaigns based on home service needs. 

To work towards its north star metric, continuing to increase customer signup rates, CraftJack knew it needed a data-driven, customer-centric business strategy. So, they turned to Twilio Segment to manage their ever-increasing data points, achieve a single source of customer truth, and personalize customer experience across channels, including SMS and email, all within one platform. 

CraftJack also turned to Twilio to use its Voice and Messaging solutions to manage communications within its two-sided marketplace, better connecting service professionals and homeowners and achieve a higher project completion rate. 

Using Twilio Engage, which is built on Twilio Segment's customer data platform (CDP), as well as Twilio’s Voice and Messaging solutions, CraftJack is able to: 

• Create a single customer view by combining and cleaning its real-time data

• Consolidate its technology stack to achieve greater efficiencies 

• Build dynamic profiles and audiences based on real-time customer behavior

• Deliver personalized customer experiences across channels while ensuring consistency  

“I don’t even know how we would operate if we didn’t have Twilio under the hood.”

Jordan Dietch, VP of Product Management at CraftJack

Establishing a unified data infrastructure that's built to scale

In 2020, CraftJack saw a 78% year over year increase in homeowner service requests. Two years later, service professionals registrations through CraftJack’s platform have increased 31% year over year. As the supply and demand from homeowners and contractors has grown, CraftJack needed data infrastructure and technology that could empower its internal teams to provide end users with the best possible customer experiences.

Prior to Segment, CraftJack struggled to achieve a customer data single source of truth to send to downstream destinations – without the help of Engineering. Tracking even a single customer attribute required hours of engineering work, making the process manual and inefficient. With Segment Connections, CraftJack can easily collect and unify its data, and deliver it to downstream tools and cross-functional teams. Implementing Segment's CDP has also helped CraftJack make the shift from third-party to first-party data---enabling them to easily collect consenting users’ data from across its site and apps, then seamlessly put that data to use in downstream tools.

“Bringing on Segment made sending customer data to external destinations very easy,” said Jordan. Today, 100% of the data CraftJack sends into its analytics tools and destinations is coming from Segment, combined with data from StichData, allowing its engineering teams to focus on more strategic projects and enabling teams, like Marketing, Analytics, and Product, with more reliable, trusted, real-time data. 

Dynamic audiences powering downstream campaign activation 

CraftJack relies on timely customer event data from Segment CDP to optimize marketing communications across email and SMS in minutes. To build powerful, unified communications on each of these channels, based on homeowners needs and service professionals' businesses, CraftJack relies on real-time customer profiles for audience creation and campaign activation in Twilio Engage. 

Before Twilio Engage, personalizing customer marketing communications was difficult, due to the lack of audience attributes properly built out. Because the audience journey stopped at the point of a Google Ad clicked, CraftJack couldn't easily follow the different audiences thoroughly through their journey or adjust the journey based on the audience they were in. Personalizing customer communications was an uphill battle. 

Now with Segment Audiences, which are user groups or accounts built with event behavior and traits, CraftJack can solve this problem and send audiences to downstream destinations for activation. Using the SQL computed trait feature, appending digital customer interactions and interesting attributes, like customer lifetime value (LTV), to customer profiles, CraftJack creates unique audiences to activate in specific campaigns. 

Custom audiences, based on LTV potential for example, are sent to ad platforms for more efficient retargeting — CraftJack can decide the money they would want to spend on specific audiences based on these attributes. Additionally, audiences can be sent to CRM tools for sales campaigns and to Product and Analytics for customized product experiences. 

CraftJack aims to personalize even further by building out audiences for the different types of service professionals they work with, like handymen or plumbers, based on contractors preferences, budgets, and needs. From there, CraftJack activates journeys to orchestrate personalized communications across channels to build even deeper customer relationships.  

Engaging with customers at the right time, on the right channel

Journeys, a feature within Twilio Engage, enables CraftJack to engage with customers at the right time, with a targeted message on a preferred channel. Powered by tracked events, traits, or audiences, Journeys are designed to create personalized experiences for customers. 

CraftJack built an account activation Journey, including a multi-step process, that helped new users on-board the platform. Actions like “account created,” “account activated,” and “payment method added” were tracked. Based on actions taken, or not taken, customers would receive follow up emails or SMS messages, powered by Twilio Engage native channels. CraftJack utilized SMS as part of its campaign and was immediately impressed. Jordan said, “This is the first time marketing can send SMS on their own instead of having their devs set it up. That’s the breakthrough for us.”

Implementing multiple channels throughout the customer journey yielded promising results within this campaign, including: 

• First touchpoint [800 email sends] with a 1.1% conversion to successful user signup

• Last touchpoint [400 SMS sent] with a 3.2% conversion to successful user signup

And that's just the beginning. “Whatever your marketing team dreams up or hopes to do, you are able to accomplish in Twilio Engage,” said Jordan. CraftJack can build personalized journeys and campaigns, based on each service provider trade’s preferences and business models. Because Segment contains all event tracking and customer attributes, CraftJack has the ability to combine data points into one platform to orchestrate engagement across web, app, SMS, email and more.

The multidimensional, all-in-one solution to deepen customer engagement

As CraftJack relies on Segment to collect data from any touchpoint and power all downstream tools with the same, powerful data, it also has the opportunity to consolidate and optimize its tech stack. With Twilio Engage, CraftJack has started to consolidate its communication channels as well, including email and SMS tools, to drive better efficiency and campaign performance as well as increase its ability to access richer communication channel analytics. 

"With Twilio Engage, we are able to do the work of three or four different tools, all in one centralized platform. We are able to bring transactional conversation and personalized marketing messages all into Twilio Engage for greater efficiency.”

Jordan Dietch, VP of Product Management at Craftjack

Prior to Twilio Engage, CraftJack was limited in its ability to deeply analyze customer communications touch points across channels. With the limited analytics, CraftJack relied on basic metrics like “messaged opened” or “message delivered.” Twilio Engage enabled CraftJack to not only build and activate its communication channels but also measured return on investment (ROI). 

With a stronger data infrastructure, scalable communications channels, and the ability to analyze campaign performance efficiently, CraftJack can build omni channel, tailored communications to homeowners and service providers and better personalize the experience. Incorporating an all-in-one solution, powered by consistent, real-time data and the ability to communicate with other channels is helping CraftJack achieve its north star metric: to increase service new professional sign-ups and successfully match them with homeowner projects. Ultimately, CraftJack, powered by Twilio Engage, aims to provide a platform that scales to help service professional businesses grow and homeowners to complete projects without the hassle. 

What's next? 

As CraftJack extends its capabilities and improves the customer experience even further, they are aiming to more deeply personalize each customer’s experience. By tracking the various customers calling in, using Profiles API to identify unique phone numbers, CraftJack could identify high-value customers or those in a specific industry, and route them to an expert for the best customer experience. “It's really about tailoring the experience across channels so that throughout the various touch points, we are creating a great user experience for the people that use our services,” said Jordan. 

They also are working toward leveraging the customer data captured in Segment to personalize every interaction based on what they know about each customer, and iterate to improve that experience over time. 

With Journeys, CraftJack aims to set up sms call reminders to notify Service Professionals to call back any leads that didn't initially answer. Oftentimes, Service Professionals give up after the first call. But, CraftJack aims to provide the most value to its customers so they intend to continually build these types of instances, to give Service Professionals the best opportunity to engage with leads. Jordan says, “something like this would likely have taken about a month of Engineering time to set up, now we can do pretty easily with Twilio Engage in a matter of a couple days. We have plenty more ideas like this to implement  in the future — it is all just much easier to do through Engage.”