How Airtasker integrated Talon.One, Braze & Segment to drive customer retention

Airtasker is Australia’s leading online marketplace for local services, connecting people and businesses who need work done with people who want to work. With a mission to empower people to realize the full value of their skills, Airtasker aims to have a positive impact on the future of work by creating truly flexible opportunities to work and earn income. Since launching in 2012, Airtasker has put more than $450 million into the pockets of workers (payments made after all fee revenue is deducted) and served more than 1.3 million unique paying customers across the world.

Airtasker came to Talon.One in 2022 to help incentivize user actions - and our collaboration has gone from strength to strength. Currently, Talon.One supports Airtasker with promotional capabilities such as emailing discount codes to new users and sending in-app coupon notifications. In the future, Airtasker plans to leverage Talon.One’s referral capabilities to drive customer acquisition in new markets.

My name’s Douglas Toy, the UK Country Manager at Airtasker. I’ve been with Airtasker for two years and previously worked in ride-sharing, banking, and technology industries. 

Airtasker is a local services marketplace that connects people who need tasks done, with those who have the time, skills and equipment to do those tasks. From simple and familiar tasks (like handyman, gardening, or furniture assembly) to more complex or interesting tasks (like recruiting a mystery shopper or rescuing a drone out of a tree), you can find local Taskers to help you with any tasks you can think of.

At Airtasker we use incentives to help us:

We turned to Talon.One because our legacy, in-house promotion tool fell short of our ambitions, and we weren’t able to run the various incentives we wanted to. With limited functionality and no integration with our CRM tool Braze, it required a lot of engineering resources to update and then maintain the system. Given how expensive these resources are, it was not a viable option.

The quality of Talon.One’s product, along with the local support offered in Australia, made our decision easy.

Airtasker uses incentives (mostly discount coupons) to help acquire new users through our paid marketing and partnership channels. 

Upon arriving at Airtasker.com, new users are then sent additional discount codes, aiming to encourage them to create an account and, ultimately, post their first task.

In the future, we want to run referral campaigns using Talon.One to further drive acquisition, particularly in new markets where we want to encourage people to share Airtasker by word of mouth.

Regarding retention, users are segmented into different audiences based on their behavior. They receive discount coupons by email and by in-app notifications, motivating them to return to Airtasker to post their next task. 

Partnerships are a key source of growth for Airtasker. Airtasker has partnered with Dunelm in the UK (one of the UK’s leading home furnishings manufacturers) to help their customers assemble and install their new products. Dunelm promotes Airtasker on their website and via email to their customers who have bought relevant products (furniture, lighting, curtains, blinds, etc), giving them a promotional code to use on their first task.

Promotional codes are also used in offline street marketing campaigns (flyers and door hangers), helping us accurately track the conversion performance of this offline activity. In a single campaign, we hand out over 150,000 flyers each with a unique code that is powered by Talon One. 

At Airtasker we use Braze as our CRM tool for cross-channel engagement which integrates directly with Talon One and Segment as our CDP.

When deciding whether to invest in upgrading Airtasker’s legacy incentive tool or onboarding a third-party promotions engine, we completed a cost-benefit analysis which showed that it made more sense to partner with Talon.One. While this required engineering lift upfront, once integrated it freed up engineering teams to focus on improving our core product, rather than maintaining an incentive tool.

When we plan to run new incentives we work closely with our finance team to model the ROI of each campaign to ensure that they make financial sense before going live. Once live, we report regularly on their performance, documenting the wins and losses in a playbook in order to build our confidence in what kind of incentives work best for each market.

Having local support in Australia was a big factor in our decision to work with Talon.One. 

We found it useful to have both technical and account support easily accessible as we completed the engineering integration and initial campaign setup. It allowed us to hit the ground running at full speed.

Our success team at Talon.One helps us broaden our knowledge of what kinds of incentive campaigns could work well for our market and are very responsive whenever we have troubleshooting queries or technical issues as we get used to the new platform.

As Airtasker launches new cities internationally, the ability to encourage customer to customer word-of-mouth recommendations through referrals is a fantastic lever to be able to pull to help a new market reach its tipping point. Talon.One is continuing to help us with our international expansion. 

On the supply side, we experience a wave of new Taskers signing up and exploring the platform at a new city launch. The ability to easily run campaigns in Talon.One such as “Do X Get Y” where a new Tasker is incentivized to complete their first 1, 2, or 3 tasks will help new markets adopt our services and grow our customer base. 

We plan to unlock multiple new incentives on Talon.One in the next 12 months such as referrals and Tasker bonuses.