How Zety Uses Email to Drive Customer Engagement and Increase Revenue

Zety helps job seekers create a professional resume in minutes. Founded in 2013, Kuba Koziej, Piotr Sosnowski, and Kacper Brzozowski created the online resume builder with a mission to help people find their dream jobs.

The first iteration, InterviewMe, was explicitly designed for the Polish market. Focusing on one audience allowed the founders to identify scalable channels to promote Zety and acquire customers, before launching their product to a bigger audience.

After initial success in the Polish market, the founders launched Uptowork (now Zety) in July 2016, online resume software for companies, and job seekers around the world.

“Our mission is to build a platform that will simplify the recruitment process for both job seekers and companies, globally” – Kacper

More than 4.5 million resumes have been created using Zety’s software. And, with 800+ reviews and a 5-star rating on Trustpilot, Zety is one of the most trusted brands in the industry.

Zety also provides a massive HR knowledge base offering ‘how-to’ guides, professional career advise and example resume templates to inspire customers and help them get started with the software. Over 50 million people read Zety’s blog and rely on the advice provided by their career experts.

One of Zety’s goals is to help job seekers answer those tough interview questions and land their dream job. To help them achieve this, the team launched weekly newsletters and event-based email campaigns, providing their customers with helpful, relevant and actionable content.

I was delighted to hear how Zety’s Technical Founder, Kacper Brzozowski, and Automation Manager, Ania Litwinska, took their messaging strategy to the next level and increased customer engagement.

Taking our messaging strategy to the next level

Our first resume builder, InterviewMe, was a bootstrapped, so in the beginning, we were focused on product development. We used a simple email tool with basic list segmentation and automation features to communicate with subscribers.

As the product, team and customer numbers continued to grow, we realized it was time to take our customer messaging strategy to the next level.

“To drive more engagement we needed a data-first solution to handle personalized email campaigns and advanced email delivery schedules” – Kacper

Launching Zety, the international career website and resume builder app was an important breakthrough for us. It expanded the priorities of the whole team. Everything started to move quickly and the team was soon juggling multiple projects.

This was a significant time in terms of determining the right messaging platform. We wanted to send personalized communications at scale to engage, convert, and retain customers, without compromising the customer experience.

Choosing a data-first solution

In the early days, our CEO, Kuba, led the marketing team. In his never-ending hunt for great marketing content, he stumbled across Vero’s guides, which led him to learn more about event-driven email marketing and share the insights with the team.

The team later identified three key requirements for their messaging platform, that would help them move forward.

• Firstly, we required a reliable solution that would collect and organize our customer data in a way that’s readable and manageable for the entire team.
• Secondly, we wanted to establish a more helpful and friendly relationship with our customers. Our team needed a solution that would enable them to design and implement personalized, event-driven customer journeys.
• Thirdly, we needed a flexible solution that would easily integrate with external webhooks and plugins, to collect versatile behavioral data from the blog, website, and application in one place.

We’re happy to say that Vero successfully delivered on all three requirements.

Managing our customer data and events

We gather customer data from many sources so we need to ensure that this data is synced accurately in all our systems. Prior to using Vero, we experienced issues with customers receiving the same content more than once. In Vero, customer profiles are automatically merged by email address if the unique ID number isn’t found, so we no longer have to worry about customers receiving duplicate content.

Vero also makes it easy for everyone on our team to see real-time events triggered by our customers and use this data to build and optimize campaigns.

Creating personalized email experiences

We now have 60 people in the team and almost all of us use Vero: from the writers who develop the email content; analysts who extract important data, metrics, and insights, to the marketing team responsible for the designing and sending email campaigns. Vero is also used by our developers and testers who are responsible for the flow of customer data and software integrations throughout the business.

Behavioral email campaigns are designed and managed by the marketing team. We use Liquid to display dynamic content in emails and deliver customers relevant and personalized messages. It’s a very useful feature as we can have one template for a specific purpose, instead of multiple campaigns that differ only by a few details. Vero’s data inspector is intuitive and easy to use.

“Our campaigns are a living organism, and we send out emails to millions of customers, so issues can often arise – we can always count on Vero’s support team to respond quickly and work together with us to find a good solution” – Ania

Driving customer engagement and increasing revenue

A series of automated emails take customers step-by-step through a specific journey. With Vero’s A/B testing, we focus on increasing email opens, clicks, and conversions rates. We frequently run A/B tests on subject lines, body copy, layouts, and CTAs. This is an iterative process that allows us to optimize email performance and increase engagement with our app.

Using Vero’s AB testing, we observed that our customers showed consistently higher engagement with our plain-text emails than HTML emails. We’ve since rolled out all our campaigns with plain-text emails and continue to see positive results.

Our best performing AB test was a follow-up newsletter campaign, where we kept the same content as the initial email, sent two days prior, and AB tested the subject lines. The follow-up campaign was sent only to the people who didn’t open the first email.

Interestingly, subject line A: ‘The one thing almost everyone does wrong’ which didn’t reveal what the content was about, observed a significantly higher open rate than subject line B: ‘Top career experts explain how to make your elevator pitch work’, which explained the topic.

“We observed a 73.96% increase in email open rates”- Ania

Our ‘Abandoned cart’ email campaign delivers one of our highest conversion rates. We trigger an event in Vero when customers drop out at the last step of the purchasing process and send them a timely message to prompt action.

“Vero lets us easily target users with personalized, timely messages and successfully drive them back to Zety. These campaigns have a big impact on our bottom line”- Ania

Vero’s segmentation allows us to target specific user groups and maintain a good domain reputation to ensure high deliverability rates. We use Vero’s segmentation to ensure we only send emails to engaged contacts, and Vero’s support for Liquid enables us to add dynamic content to ensure our messages are relevant and personalized for all our customers.

We also use Vero for our transactional email campaigns, such as purchase confirmations or password resets. These are the most important emails we need to send to our users, and Vero delivers these emails immediately after an event is triggered. Sending both our transactional and behavioral emails from one platform gives us full visibility over email performance and customer engagement, and provides us with further segmentation options.

“Vero has proved invaluable in engaging customers and increasing revenue. It enables us to help customers through every step of their journey in a personalized manner, that’s scalable” – Ania

Want to build a better email experience and increase your user engagement? Learn about Vero.