We helped 1Team more than double in-app user engagement

People are any organisation’s most important asset. Retaining top talent is central to business success, but it’s a difficult task for an employer, as workers get poached or search for greener pastures.

Enter 1Team: an NZ-based employee benefits app on a quest to help organisations retain top talent, by recognising and rewarding staff members, and giving them a reason to stick around.

1Team serves two distinct groups: the employers that form its client base, and the workers who enjoy the rewards offered up through the app, such as discounts and deals for leading retailers. The company then generates revenue through small commissions from those retailers when a user takes up a deal.

1Team were already market leaders, with 100,000 app users spread across some of New Zealand’s largest companies. But this ambitious team sought to take the next step, and understood the value of specialist marketing expertise in doing so. But the company’s unique business dynamics presented a challenge.

“Many partner organisations struggle to understand what we do and how we do it,” says Jason Masters, General Manager at 1Team. It meant that truly valuable assistance from third parties, including marketing agencies, would often prove hard to find.

In good news, 1Team was clear on the assistance it required.

“HR teams and large corporations will typically work with us to set up an app, then use that app to better engage with their staff,” Jason explains.

“We’d never actively tried to connect with end users or promote the deals in our apps. We worked with employers on a technical level but offered little ongoing support to them in engaging those users.”

With revenue being driven by the uptake of deals, 1Team saw the importance of growing engagement within the apps. They just weren’t sure how, nor where they’d find the marketing assistance they needed.

So they began their search for an organisation that could get them where they wanted to go. Enter Traction.

According to Jason, it quickly became apparent that Traction wasn’t your average marketing partner.

“Traction was quick to understand our business, and to show us how they could add value.”

The first and largest hurdle was quickly cleared.

“They did a great job of stepping back and guiding strategic discussions about our audiences, who they are, and how to segment and engage with them.”

Ultimately, a three-pronged strategy was developed:

• Grow companies: Get more employers offering the app.
• Grow usage: Get a larger percentage of an organisation’s employees on the app.
• Grow engagement: Increase app use by individual employees.

While the ‘grow engagement’ component was the final step of the process, it was the one that 1Team felt they had previously overlooked, so it became the focus of Traction’s efforts.

Traction would also work to centralise all marketing efforts within a single platform, where 1Team could watch the strategy play out: identifying objectives, understanding the audience, then engaging them.

Soon the results began to show.

When asked to describe the experience of working with Traction, Jason leads with the word ‘proactive’.

“With some organisations, we’ll request services, they’ll provide those services, then you won’t hear from them again. But Traction really pushed us forward – they always had a clear plan to help us meet our targets”

The quest to grow engagement soon bore fruit. Deal uptake rates within 1Team apps climbed and climbed. They’re now sitting at over double what they were before Traction first came on board.

Traction’s efforts drove other, more surprising gains too. The process uncovered critical business intelligence that 1Team says will inform their growth strategy moving forward. And the clarity that has come from a complete view of the digital marketing process has allowed the organisation to enhance its traditional marketing efforts too.

On top of ‘proactive’, Jason describes Traction as transparent, accountable, engaged, flexible, honest and goal-oriented.

“They understood what we needed at any given point in time. They were proactive in spotting opportunities, highly responsive, really clear, consistent communication. A collaborative partner, not just a service provider”

Our inbound marketing is our most consistent and easiest channel to convert into sales. The work the team at Traction marketing do behind the scenes for our SEO is superb. Chris has some great ideas and always likes to challenge our team on different initiatives. We have a fantastic working relationship with the team!! John-Paul McKay