Growing Breezeworks

If you've ever tried to market a tech product to the blue collar SMB world, it's not easy.  Plumbers, handymen, landscapers... They're a tough market for tech.  They generally skew older and thus are a little less tech savvy than the usual B2C startup's early adopters, so on-boarding is tough.  Discoverability is hard, because these business owners are so time-poor they don't really actively seek out new technology solutions, and don't spend as much time online in general.  It's a competitive market with a lot of messaging homogeneity, so making your value prop stand out isn't a walk in the park.  And, monetization is hard - there's extreme price sensitivity, and general business volatility contributing to missed payments or involuntary churn.  At Breezeworks however, we managed to grow our field service automation platform's MRR by 25% monthly during my time there.  Growth like that comes from a whole bunch of activities snowballing, but here I want to share a few select tactics we used successfully at Breezeworks.

Adjusting our acquisition approach

One of the biggest challenges with our product was the complexity of its value prop.  Breezeworks handles "everything from booking to billing" for our customers - CRM, scheduling, routing/dispatching, estimates, invoicing, and payment processing.  Our messaging was very feature-focused when I came onboard, and kind of just laid out everything we did, expecting customers to attribute value to it themselves.  The problem is that with so many features, it's tough to wrap your head around how it truly helps, and makes it sound like an intimidating time commitment to implement.  In an effort to simplify our up-front messaging (and differentiate from competitors), I began an initiative to reposition us from the more widely-accepted "field service management" category to a new "field service automation" category message.  The concept of automation was a much more straightforward and easy-sounding message - automate everything from booking to billing, and we'll help you create happier customers while saving you time.

Content marketing was one growth engine we were working to get off the ground at Breezeworks.  The second half of our strategy involved continued reinforcement of our automation message, and building thought leadership as it related to service professional efficiency and customer satisfaction.  This Yelp study was one of our first "big" pieces of thought leadership work.  The second half of our strategy was aggressively testing into the types of content which drove the most traffic and trial conversions.  For example, through various tests, we found that short vertical-specific "benchmarking" content like this post about plumber salaries was great for driving top-of-funnel traffic, despite lower conversion performance.  

We conducted a lot of testing on both new, and existing paid acquisition channels as well.  Through a battery of targeting, conversion goal, and creative tests, we managed to cut our CAC in half.  A big part of that was enhancing our focus on credibility-building - leveraging review scores, communicating scale through social proof, and testimonial content.  By shifting the bulk of our spend towards creative with real customer stories like this video, we were able to drive down costs a lot.

Improving activation:  email, push, and product

Activation was the biggest challenge at Breezeworks.  Users who reached a certain threshold of product usage generally stuck around forever (and loved us - our NPS was crazy high).  However, getting people through the initial on-boarding was tough considering how much info was needed to make the product work, and surfacing certain less discoverable yet higher-impact features was a challenge.  The way we were on-boarding people, both within the product itself, and through customer communication, just wasn't reinforcing our value proposition enough, nor explaining what users could do with the app and how to use it.  Particularly, migrating users from mobile (our highest-efficiency platform) to web (our best retaining platform) was a huge opportunity. 

Ultimately, we attacked activation with a multi-channel approach.  We re-evaluated our consumer journey and implemented an entire marketing automation structure from the ground-up, making it more personalized, more visual, and more communicative.  We used a mixture of rich HTML emails, plain text emails from "account managers", and push notifications - all triggered by customer usage patterns.   Then, we A/B tested the crap out of them, iterated, rinsed, and repeated.  This gallery shows just a couple sample HTML rich emails we sent.

We also tested a number of new in-product on-boarding flows to find the optimum route to get people active and loving the product.  This initiative was an ever-evolving one, and we tried to test wildly different approaches with each iteration, getting progressively more granular with our iterations as we discovered what worked.  This is just one sample first-app open experience on iOS where the user follows a Q&A style introduction to what they can do with Breezeworks.  If I recall, it didn't perform as well as some others (understandably, considering its length), but I thought it was a pretty fun approach to share anyway.

Monetizing and evergreen growth

Monetizing highly price-sensitive users is hard, but doing it with confusing pricing messages is even harder.  When I came onboard, we had 3 pricing tiers, but it was incredibly hard to tell the difference between them.  So, one of the first things I did was clean up our pricing messaging to make a clear value progression between the tiers by structuring it around solopreneurs vs. teams.  This new pricing page did a significantly better job of clearly explaining our product, helping people find the right plan for them, and reinforcing the value they're getting through social proof.  

Now, not ever user is going to monetize well, but if mobile gaming has taught us anything, it's the importance of monetizing the whole user base by leveraging all your users to help you get new ones.  That's where our referral program came in.  Recognizing how engaged and loyal our customers were, as well as how tight-knit the SMB communities they participated in were, I immediately started pushing to create a two-sided referral program to A) make it easier for users to invite friends, and B) incentivize them to do so.  Thus, we created the referral program you see below, which we triggered based off specific user actions and activity thresholds.  This referral program was an important step towards creating sustainable organic growth.