Calendly builds personalized experiences for 20M users and increases activation rate by +16% with a Composable CDP

Summary

Calendly relied on a traditional Customer Data Platform (CDP) to collect and sync customer data to marketing tools but continuously struggled with data consistency, governance, and tight coupling. Behavioral data was scattered throughout their warehouse, often duplicative or incomplete. In search of a solution that allowed anyone to activate data directly from their data warehouse, the team turned to Hightouch and a Composable CDP architecture. Hightouch's no-code activation features now empower Calendly's marketing and product teams to fully utilize their data, facilitating the activation of audiences and other data points directly from BigQuery into essential downstream tools like Optimizely, Braze, and various advertising platforms.

Results

Operational Improvements

• Implemented and onboarded Hightouch in less than one day

Marketing Impact

• 16% increase in user activation rate
• Year-in-review email for 20M users

Cost Savings

• Reduced MTU costs by 15-20%

The Challenge

Calendly is recognized for pioneering product-led growth (PLG) and creating a viral loop so that any user who receives a meeting link can immediately experience the value of Calendly and sign up for the product. This marketing strategy has been a huge acquisition driver for the company: millions of users sign up and start using Calendly every year. When they do, the company collects millions of behavioral events across the website, mobile app, and browser extension to understand user intent and product behavior better. The goal of this data is to build and deliver personalized experiences tailored to each individual user.

Calendly relied on Segment to push these behavioral events back into the operational tools of the marketing team. While seemingly simple, this traditional CDP architecture created a big problem: the marketing team had no easy and scalable way to join the data in their traditional CDP to their other data sources that only existed in BigQuery. Consequently, the marketing team was unable to leverage critical insights about their users to experiment and personalize.

To deliver multi-channel personalization, Calendly wanted a new architecture that would bring together their data across all of their sources (not just their behavioral events). Additionally, it was crucial that this system be user-friendly for non-technical teammates, enabling marketers to access and utilize data independently, without dependency on the data team. This need led them to adopt the Composable CDP, powered by BigQuery and Hightouch.

The Solution

Calendly's data architecture

BigQuery

Calendly is a mature data organization. The company has a data platform team that manages all of the infrastructure and data quality, a data science team that builds proprietary models, and analysts across various business units to help create data products.

Previously, the data platform team at Calendly relied on a legacy data warehouse that forced them to provision resources and allocate hardware and individual nodes manually. This made it very difficult to scale with constantly changing workload requirements to ensure both the analysts and the data scientists could run workloads concurrently.

Switching to BigQuery eliminated this bottleneck and also unlocked new use cases that weren’t possible with the old architecture. The data team can now join millions of events directly in their data warehouse, which has been a huge value unlock for the organization. Additionally, BigQuery’s native integrations with other cloud products provide greater flexibility for the platform team, enabling the data scientists and analysts to drive more value.

Hightouch

At Calendly, a key to their ongoing success lies in their ability to conduct experiments and personalize experiences, ensuring they deliver value that resonates with users across diverse roles and preferences. However, a significant challenge emerged in reliably providing their team with the necessary data to power these experiments. The previous solution lacked the required capabilities and restricted data access to only behavioral events.

In response, Calendly transitioned to using Hightouch and a Composable CDP architecture to unlock the full potential of their data. Within a day, Calendly set up Hightouch and began activating their data directly from BigQuery. Using Hightouch’s powerful suite of no-code features, marketing and product teams at Calendly can now self-serve from all of their data in BigQuery, building audiences and activating other valuable data points to power best-in-class personalization and experimentation.

Activation Use Cases

A/B Testing

The Calendly team is constantly performing A/B tests across the website, product, and mobile app with Optimizely. Previously, the team had trouble measuring the full impact of these tests because there was data about customers and outcomes in BigQuery that was not in Optimizely. Now, the team uses Hightouch to quickly sync enriched behavioral events directly to Optimizely so they can understand the implications and downstream effects of specific tests and make adjustments as needed.

Hyper-Personalized Emails

One of Calendly’s biggest channels for growth has been email marketing. With Hightouch, the marketing team can sync data directly from BigQuery to Braze to power personalized data-driven campaigns. This includes campaigns such as highly relevant year-in-review emails based on individual product usage, automated follow-up emails when users don’t accept their invitations, and new feature announcements that provide additional value to existing users. These highly personalized emails have increased user activation rates by over 16%. This has huge revenue implications given the millions that sign up for Calendly each year.

Calendly year in review email

Advertising to Audiences

Before Hightouch, anytime the lifecycle marketing team wanted to run an advertising campaign or target a specific audience, they were forced to work with a data analyst to pull a customer list. This entire process is now self-serve. The lifecycle marketing team can build granular audience cohorts within the Hightouch UI and sync them directly to various ad platforms to launch and test new campaigns.

What’s Next?

Calendly is rolling out more personalized marketing use cases powered by BigQuery and Hightouch to deliver even more value to new and existing users. The future for Calendly lies in building and joining together even more customer data to better understand how users engage with the platform. With BigQuery, Calendly can join this customer data together using any source and identifier to make it readily available for the marketing team through Hightouch.