uTest

The Client  

As the community side of digital testing leader Applause, uTest is a professional network of over 400,000 digital experience experts in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. Every single tester within the uTest community is trained and certified to provide user feedback and market insights into how software works in the real world. uTest provides testers with a shared space where they can find support for their professional activities and career initiatives — from peer networking to online courses, to postings for upcoming paid projects. 

The Situation

uTest users expect frequent and relevant communication about opportunities to participate in new projects as well as current status updates for projects in which they’ve already registered. 
Providing regular, informative updates to such a large global community means that uTest’s team needed an easy, efficient way to create and send emails with targeted, valuable content to specific segments of their audience. And those emails needed to be able to react in real-time to project milestones and user interaction.

In addition to uTest’s ongoing customer projects, uTest was also recently engaged for a custom project to test the user experience of a mobile app. This project would require a separate community of 40,000 global participants providing feedback over a span of 3 years. The assignment asked participants to install the client’s app on their personal mobile device and regularly report back on the application’s user experience. The scale and the extended timeline for this project meant recruiting, evaluating, onboarding and optimizing over 1 million users to determine the right user demographics of test participants. uTest needed a way to launch and manage multiple sophisticated campaigns to these different demographics based on specific identifiers such as location, qualification, activity level, and much more. 

The Challenge

uTest’s expansive, highly active testing community meant that their team was continuously managing upwards of 30 projects at once and looking to reach people at all stages of testing journeys. However, the uTest team faced frustrating barriers when trying to streamline all of their communications processes across multiple regions. More so, the existing technologies the team used were proprietary, closed solutions that made it difficult to access and use all of the various types of customer data, from registration forms to evaluations to participation feedback. 

As customer expectations continued to rise, so did the need for uTest to regularly improve and scale their communications strategy. In their recent app test project, recruiting, retaining, and maximizing engagement for a diverse, international community of users for the duration of a multi-year project posed a major challenge for the uTest team. uTest sought a way to reduce user churn and boost active user conversions within the first month of an individual downloading the app on their device. Success depended on sustaining user interest without over-messaging or frustrating their audience with irrelevant experiences. 

To successfully gather feedback and optimize engagement, the uTest team looked for a solution that could continuously personalize communications and deliver those communications at the right time based on where users were in their testing journey - even reminding users to stay involved when necessary. And ease of use was a critical component, as non-marketing teams would also be responsible for creating and sending essential notifications to users around things like new software releases and required app updates.  

The Solution

When evaluating marketing automation vendors in 2017, uTest chose Acquia’s marketing automation solution, Acquia Campaign Studio, for its agile and open approach to technology that simultaneously shared information between all of their disparate technology systems and its highly intuitive interface and campaign visualization feature. uTest had experienced the limited, strict parameters of other monolithic software solutions, and Campaign Studio offered them a better user experience, modern features, powerful API, flexible integration and continuous product innovation. With Acquia Campaign Studio, they were no longer operating from inefficient spreadsheets and imports. The platform delivered a unified view of their data in a centralized, accessible location and allowed for them to increase the scale and sophistication of their nurture stream as their community continued to grow.   

“[Acquia Campaign Studio] is malleable, accessible and flexible, and we’ve seen the tech improve year after year. It enables our whole global team to make big decisions quickly without bottlenecks because the data is available in smart places.”  

-Kelly Potvin, Vice President Corporate Strategy at Applause (formerly uTest)

Knowing the consistency, reliability and power that Campaign Studio offered, uTest was confident that the marketing automation system would be their silver bullet to achieving better long-term engagement for this recent client project. Here are the key features that informed uTest’s decision to leverage Campaign Studio in this initiative: 

• Multiple customized fields to build out robust profiles for each user, representing data and behavior points from "days since last log-in" or "time since last email engagement" 
• Hyper-specification that would allow uTest to better segment audiences and design relevant communication targeting more “active” vs. “inactive” community members 
• Centralized visibility into user interactions to inform decisions and tune messaging to match the observed behaviors of different segments

The Results

Since implementing Acquia Campaign Studio in 2017, uTest has been able to better enable and activate their global team across the U.S., India and Germany through leveraging real-time customer insights that preemptively inform their messaging across a variety of channels. Acquia Campaign Studio helped uTest learn which days or times were most effective to communicate with different audiences across multiple regions. Now, the uTest marketing team can proactively influence the new member registration experience and optimize their process of matching community members with projects.

In the case of their long-term app project, Campaign Studio’s flexible, easy-to-use features helped the uTest team keep more individuals active and reduced user churn after individuals downloaded the app. This meant they could gather feedback from the same individuals over longer periods of time and deliver more robust feedback to the customer. 

Here are some key results uTest achieved through leveraging Acquia Campaign Studio in this project:

• Deployed personalized campaigns to over 44,000 active users simultaneously across multiple global regions
• Reduced individual user churn during the first 30 days from 62 to 26 
• Reduced rolling churn during the first 2 weeks from 20 to 4