Nextdoor unlocks 56% better efficiency with Marketing Campaigns

Nextdoor is the world’s largest private social network for neighborhoods. With email as its most critical channel of communication and a history of success using Twilio SendGrid for their transactional messages, Nextdoor’s data-driven marketing team grew curious. What kind of efficiencies might they see from moving marketing email over to Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns too?

Tyler Green, Growth Marketing Manager at Nextdoor, decided to find out. He got to work, building the same campaign twice—once in Nextdoor’s legacy enterprise solution and again using Marketing Campaigns. The results were clear.

Founded in 2010, Nextdoor was born when its founders realized a striking gap in the market. There were numerous social networks popping up for friends and family, interests and business—but what about the part of people’s lives closest to home? In a world busy with longer commute times and countless distractions, there was no easy way for people to connect with those who could be most helpful to them locally—their neighbors.

Nextdoor launched nationwide in the fall of 2011 and, since that time, has experienced incredible growth. Today, the platform is used by over 92% of neighborhoods in the United States, over 3,300 police, fire and city agencies, and continues to expand quickly into international markets.

Whether fostering friendly conversations between neighbors or enabling members to send urgent emergency and safety alerts, as Nextdoor continues to grow, it relies on email as its most critical channel to deliver important messages on time.

A move for marketing

For years, Nextdoor has relied on its deep and collaborative partnership with Twilio SendGrid for its transactional sending, thanks to best-in-class deliverability, scale, and expert support.

In July of 2018, Nextdoor made it the platform for their marketing communications as well—moving all marketing emails from a well-known enterprise email solution over to Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns.

“Emails like new post and comment emails, daily digests, and invitation triggers are fully built into our product; there’s a very real cost to changing them,” says Tyler Green, Growth Marketing Manager at Nextdoor.

In addition to these use cases, Nextdoor also uses Marketing Campaigns to drive innovation and validate hypotheses early in the product development lifecycle.

“It’s a huge advantage that we can use email to run low cost experiments and validate hypotheses without involving engineers” Tyler says.

“We use Marketing Campaigns to quickly assess the level of interest that our members have in potential features.”

Beautiful, engaging emails in half the time

After diving into Marketing Campaigns, Tyler and his team immediately noticed an impact. First, they noticed how easy it was to send an email. Then came the realization that the tool empowered them to move faster and spend quality time making the emails, themselves, better. Others across the company began to notice too.

These improvements made Tyler and team curious. Marketing Campaigns’ flexible workflow (offering both visual drag-and-drop as well as streamlined code editing), its powerful segmentation and personalization, and the tool’s clear actionable analytics seemed more efficient…but was it? Their team of data-driven marketers wanted proof.

With Nextdoor’s legacy email provider still available to Tyler for a short period of time, he set out to build the exact same campaign—once in Marketing Campaigns and again in their legacy enterprise email provider. With each, he counted the number of clicks it took to complete. A head-to-head battle of capability, usability, and efficiency. The results were clear.

“A click may seem like such a small amount of time, initially,” says Tyler, “but any marketer realizes the impact that 56% more time can have—especially when expanded out over minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. It’s undeniably valuable.”