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A Bit of Context for this Case Study
I’ve become more convinced every year that context is everything. Technology solutions, like facts and details, mean nothing without the necessary context towards why they should matter to you.
How many of the tools used on a daily basis have entire sections that you’ve never even touched or explored? Run into unknown territory and immediately leave, to never return. If you’re missing the context, you have no reason to learn how they can help you.
Gridwise had a clear problem: Their in-house analytics setup was extremely manual, taking them hours to launch every campaign to their first-party audience. Every time they refreshed these campaigns, they had to start over from scratch and it had quickly become excruciating.
They solved this by switching to Everflow, of course, but solving a single problem is easy. More important than that is how they keep solving challenges as they pop up and how they discover features that lead to new opportunities. Both of the latter require context to know exactly when and where features actually matter.
Context needs to support your goals to be useful. Our features are expansive, but our approach to supporting clients is what opens up new doors for Gridwise.
Performance Advertising the Right Way
Gridwise is a companion app for rideshare drivers and food deliverers that increases their bottom line by helping them track their mileage and performance across any service they work for, find hotspots in real-time, and even help them plan their work in advance. Unlike many apps, Gridwise quickly becomes essential for gig workers. They’ve found and solved real needs, which is reflected in their users giving them 5000+ reviews at 4.8+ stars across IOS and Android.
Better yet, Gridwise has a sensible business model for generating actual revenue without taking a cut out of their user’s paychecks (insert any number of jokes here). They have a clear audience of engaged users and they know the most commonly shared challenges faced by these users. It makes it easy for them to provide value by matching advertiser products to the slices of their audiences that would benefit most from those solutions, and earn revenue from what results.
They use Everflow for managing these advertiser offers and tracking the revenue by placement.
The Starting Line To Context
Gridwise started looking for a replacement to their manual analytics setup back in Q3 of 2018. They compared multiple tracking platform solutions, including Cake, Tune, and more.
What sealed the deal, though, was their experience speaking to real humans and having a pleasant experience.
The Danger of Being Feature-Rich
We’ve run into a common problem with having an awesome tech team: They keep building exciting features, which in turn creates an overwhelming onslaught of options for first-time users. That experience can’t be solved without a customer success focus to learn both what the clients need and where they struggle.
The human touch is required to cut through complexity. From the very beginning we prioritized accessibility to our customer success team for answering questions via the platform’s live chat, but it was passive, and we realized we needed to be proactive for the clients that needed us the most. We built our mandatory onboarding support process; because first-time customers don’t have the context needed to ask the questions they need to know to be successful.
Great Onboarding Is Context
Gridwise has seen a 40x - 60x increase in their performance-side revenues since switching to Everflow. That is what happens when your team is fully aligned to understand where their tech platforms support their efforts.
How did they get there? Their onboarding was great at balancing and accommodating the needs of both their business and technical stakeholders.
Minus the definitely problematic last line, those are some pretty kind words. This was our approach that inspired this proclamation:
Peter walked them through every part of Everflow over the course of their training calls. He provided them with a custom curriculum for training up the Gridwise team, so the entire team was empowered to know where Everflow supported their daily tasks and pitches. Ryan, who has plenty on his plate, said that he felt like an expert after the onboarding process was completed.
Ongoing Context Is Essential
Supportive onboarding and an accessible customer success isn’t enough, it never stops being necessary to have real human connection. We recently released a Facebook integration for pushing Everflow client data into Facebook. This should prove to be a killer new feature, but that description probably doesn’t spark any opportunities for you. Context is needed.
Gridwise has an inarguable advantage: Their deep understanding of the advertiser offers that resonate with their audience. Using Facebook Ads Lookalike feature to find users that look exactly like their app’s audience, and then promoting the advertiser offers that they know that user wants. This lets them massively expand their reach by leveraging their existing unique knowledge.
Our Facebook integration opens up a massive new window of opportunities for Gridwise. They can now use Everflow as their performance hub for both their internal and external marketing and advertising. By tracking all of their advertiser performance campaigns in Everflow, expanding their reach through Lookalike audiences in Facebook, and then pushing that engagement data directly back into Facebook for optimization. That is why this integration is a powerful new weapon for them and why it should spark some new ideas for you.
Without ongoing conversation, Gridwise may have never learned why this Facebook integration matters, and why it’s so relevant to enhancing what they are already doing.
The Merging of Success and Context
Once you adopt the perspective that context is everything, you’ll see the world a bit differently. Ever been bored out of your mind in a museum where every exhibit goes into the minute details of the artist and nothing about the place and time that inspired their creation? A great museum provides just enough details about the time and place of the creator, so that you can have the threads necessary to build a narrative of why the work should matter.
I firmly believe that, like Everflow, the secret advantage that will lead to the success of the next wave of startups will be the opposite of algorithms: It will be in prioritizing customer success as their deepest core value. Building products that both serve and evolve with the needs of the user creates the unique advantage that propels Gridwise’s business model. Providing the needed context for both your external users and your own internal team, positions you to beat even the largest of companies.
Gridwise’s takeaway from their experience was in this order for a reason:
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