Streamlining The Onboarding Funnel for a Two - Sided Marketplace Startup
How We Efficiently Qualified Workers for a Marketplace Client in a Challenging Geographic Market, Developing a New Best Practice for Start-ups to Leverage Across Clients and Geographies
Key Definitions:
On-Demand Marketplace: A marketplace that matches workers to jobs in as little as 12 hours.
Fill Rate: The percentage of jobs posted and filled. The company only receives revenue when a job is filled.
Demand Side: Client demand in the form of jobs that need to be filled.
Supply Side: Workers looking for jobs on demand. In this case in a shift specific capacity.
About the Client:
Zeal Advisory was commissioned to work for Wonolo, a two-sided tech-enabled marketplace focused on providing on-demand workers to their clients. For illustrative purposes, the structure is similar to Uber, providing on-demand drivers (supply) to on-demand clients requesting rides (demand). On the supply side, the start-up is concerned with ensuring an ample supply of qualified workers that fulfill clients’ needs. On the demand side, clients may not have any skill qualification but often require some form of qualification exam, and in this case, off-site drug testing. The client at hand was responsible for 90% of the revenue in a given market and around 15% of the annual revenue for the start-up. The client is a large logistics client with $4B in annual revenue.
Goal:
The start-up’s client had as little as a 10% fill rate of its jobs posted on the platform. The goal of this project was to qualify more workers to increase the talent pool available to the client, ultimately increasing client satisfaction and revenue for Wonolo.
Major Pain Point:
Supply-side Conditions: The market was exceptionally difficult to break into. Due to market demographics and a high CAC, growth marketing was not an option for this engagement.
Demand Side Client Requirements: The client had strict requirements for potential workers to complete an exam AND to complete an off-site drug test. In cases like these, the qualification process takes up to 10 business days, and the client has demands immediately. The workers attracted to Wonolo are working paycheck to paycheck and are often limited by transportation and time.
The Solution:
Zeal Advisory used a multi-pronged approach to increase both top-of-funnel and within-funnel engagement to expand the client’s eligible supply pool. Incentives were also used to increase the number of workers who opted in and completed jobs with the client. This project was profitable.
Resurrection Campaign:
The client existed in a market that had become saturated. CAC was one of the highest across the United States, resulting in relatively ineffective growth marketing campaigns. Resurrection communications were used with the following segmentation:
Previous Experience with the client: Regardless of churn that had passed the client’s qualifications.
Minimal monetary incentive to complete one job on the platform.
Hard Churn no previous experience client: Had not engaged with the app in over a year.
Monetary incentive to complete one job on the platform AND
Monetary incentive to complete the qualification steps for the client.
Churned no previous experience with the client: Had not engaged with the app in 1 month but less than a year.
Monetary incentive to complete three jobs on the platform AND
Monetary incentive to complete the qualification steps for the client.
In-Person Partnership:
A separate program was set up with an in-person team at Wonolo to support in-person qualification steps at the client site. This program allowed workers to quickly and easily complete the qualification steps. Workers were notified of this offering via the resurrection campaign, and job sign-up and completion were encouraged at the in-person location.
The Outcome:
36% increase in realised revenue
25% increase in fill rate
Disproved previous perception that hard churned workers were lost
Best practices from this project were translated to subsequent clients nationally, leading to a 12% increase in total revenue across Wonolo.
This engagement was completed during a full-time position at Wonolo