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How MovingWaldo Grew Revenue and Optimized Messaging

With a mix of analytics, A/B testing, Mailchimp’s QuickBooks integration, and one‑stop shopping, MovingWaldo helps relieve the stress of moving homes

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Snapshot

  • Industry: Tech
  • Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
  • Company size: 15 full-time employees
  • Year founded: 2017

Published: April 26, 2023

The founders of MovingWaldo, Philippe Tardif-Michaud and Guillaume Lahoud, have experienced the stresses of moving—finding places to live, packing their things, making sure everything gets to their destinations.

“We know that there's a lot of things in a to-do list when you're moving, and a lot of that comes with making financial decisions that can be important. It comes with a lot of changes in your life as well,” Phillipe says. They've each had to go through the strain of relocating their homes multiple times, and wanted to find a way to make it easier—even just a little bit.

Founded in 2017 in Montreal, Quebec, MovingWaldo began as a simple platform to automate changes of address, a service unavailable in Canada at that time. Since then, they’ve built a network of trusted providers in the markets they serve. This network includes moving, van, and storage companies, plus it offers help with switching utilities and comparing new internet plans, home insurance, and security systems.

“What we have is this digital platform that helps users get organized and find assistance through our technology content and human support,” says Philippe. “And along the way, we'll be able to help them not only save time, but also save money by being able to compare different vendors near them.” Now, MovingWaldo is a one-stop shop digital concierge for moving.

The challenge: Monetizing and optimizing messaging for their 3 audiences

MovingWaldo serves several groups, both B2C and B2B. They first built their B2C audience—the end users of the platform—organically, collecting contacts who signed up for the free address change service. They now send campaigns in French and English to thousands of subscribers, but back in the beginning, building revenue from their growing audience was their first priority.

MovingWaldo also communicates with B2B audiences. The company needed a way to organize the vendors who pay for referrals on the platform—the service the vendor provides, their contact information, and their spend, all drivers for how to speak to them. In reference to the vendors, Philippe says, “It was a bit challenging for us to manually enter all of them, one by one, and include everything you need to know about them in the system. It made no sense.”

They also communicate with realtors who make referrals to MovingWaldo’s platform and earn commissions. These realtors all have an affiliate link they can use to drive traffic to MovingWaldo, but they often forget to use it.

“That's what we love about Mailchimp. It was there at the beginning when we needed it to generate revenue, but it's still here to not only support our user journey, but also, it pays for itself as it generates revenue for the business.”

The tools: Mailchimp email, segmenting, automations, A/B testing, and the QuickBooks integration

That initial B2C email list they built? They were able to meet the needs of the audience by creating sponsored newsletters with moving tips, tricks, and products. “That's what we love about Mailchimp,” Philippe says. “It was there at the beginning when we needed it to generate revenue, but it's still here to not only support our user journey, but also, it pays for itself as it generates revenue for the business.”

MovingWaldo currently sends more than 100 automations, which include resending realtors their affiliate links with every newsletter, and automatically segmenting their audiences based on whether customers visited MovingWaldo’s French or English website. The company also uses A/B testing based on the customer’s move date to determine what kind of content resonates, and what doesn’t.

MovingWaldo now has a large enough audience of B2B clients buying referrals that they want to share more news and updates with them. They already used QuickBooks for their accounting and Mailchimp for their marketing efforts, so they started using Mailchimp’s QuickBooks integration in April of 2022 to seamlessly integrate their data between the products and to segment their B2B audiences. For instance, they can see if there’s a van company spending $2,000 in referrals versus one spending $100, or determine if one product drives more referrals than another. This lets them use their QuickBooks data in a way that helps them pre-qualify vendors, and then market to them more effectively using Mailchimp, all in one place.

The results: Growing engagement, optimizing content, and saving time

MovingWaldo uses several tools within Mailchimp, and A/B testing is a big part of how they determine which email to send, who to send it to, and when to send it. They provided a look at 2 of their campaigns to show how they use the A/B test data to help optimize their messaging.

Learn more

A/B testing revealed:

  • 18.2%

    rise in interest in electricity saving tips email in December 2022 versus October 2021

  • 1.2x

    more interest in a telecom provider-sponsored email sent during versus after a move

  • 12.2%

    rise in interest from an English-speaking audience for telecom provider-sponsored email

In their first campaign, they looked at a newsletter they send every calendar year in Q4.

Canadians spend money to keep their homes warm in the cold winters, so MovingWaldo sends a newsletter with tips on saving on electricity bills.

This A/B test used open rates to compare interest in the email sent in October 2021 to the same French-speaking audience, with the same subject line, at the same time of day in December 2022. In October 2021 the open rate was 20.3%, and in December 2022 it was 24%, giving it an 18.2% rise in interest in December. With this valuable insight into its customer base, MovingWaldo now knows to send the newsletter later in the year.

In another campaign sent in June of 2022, MovingWaldo A/B tested whether their audiences were interested in a telecom provider at a specific time. To do this, they sent a sponsored newsletter to people in the process of moving, and to people who had already moved.

They found that the email sent while the customer was in the process of moving had a 42% open rate, versus an open rate of 19% for the email that was sent to people 45 days or more after they moved. Given such a significant change, MovingWaldo now knows to send that type of email while a customer is moving for ideal engagement.

In that same campaign from 2022, they also found that the language an audience segment speaks can affect how that audience behaves. MovingWaldo tested whether their French- or English-speaking segments were more interested in the telecom product, and found that Anglophones had a 43.3% open rate versus their Francophone audience, who had a 39.5% open rate. With a 12.2% rise in interest, MovingWaldo can now use that information to better target English-speaking audiences with telecom products.

In addition to their sophisticated use of Mailchimp’s marketing tools, they use the QuickBooks integration. Before connecting the platforms, MovingWaldo manually downloaded B2B customer contact information from QuickBooks and then uploaded it to Mailchimp. With the integration, they can save time by skipping the manual download and upload, and have their contacts from QuickBooks automatically added and segmented in Mailchimp, allowing them to more easily send updates to their B2B clients.

The future: More QuickBooks, more personalization

But as the company grows, MovingWaldo wants to use the integration to make deeper connections with their customers by sending more personalized messages. “The tonality is so different when you talk to a moving company owner in New York than when you talk to an internet provider executive in Toronto,” says Philippe. Using Mailchimp and QuickBooks together can not only help tailor messaging more effectively, but also can help them to serve all their customers better. More vendors and more referrals could mean more help for the end user when they’re moving, and in turn, more revenue for MovingWaldo.

Bring Mailchimp together with QuickBooks and see all your invoice and marketing data together, all in one place—helping make campaigns more effective. Get the integration now.

Bring Mailchimp together with QuickBooks and see all your invoice and marketing data together, all in on place—helping make campaigns more effective. Get the integration now.

Disclaimer

* Available for existing QuickBooks customers only

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