Case study · CRM · Growth · Campaign · 2026
Lifecycle CRM
36 million messages, built around one shift
- Year
- 2026
- Discipline
- CRM & lifecycle marketing
- Role
- Programme ownership, creative system, channel strategy
A staffing marketplace lives or dies on whether a worker opens the app again this week. CRM is not a newsletter in that context — it is the product surface that decides whether a shift gets filled.
I own the lifecycle programme across email, push and SMS: the creative system, the channel strategy, and the editorial standard that every Canvas has to clear before it ships. In the first nine months of 2026 the programme delivered 36.2 million messages and generated 2.7 million clicks.
The useful finding was not the volume. It was that the moments closest to a worker actually earning — first shifts, verification, a live hiring event — outperform broadcast comms by an order of magnitude. That reordered where the effort goes.
The principle
Message the moment, not the month.
Results
- Messages delivered year to date
- 36.2M
- Clicks generated
- 2.7M
- Click rate, new-worker activation SMS
- 46%Best programme in the stack
- Channels — email, push, SMS
- 3
Measured
Braze and platform push · 1 Jan – 30 Sep 2026 · all markets
- Flying Starts SMS click rate
- 45.99%New-worker activation — the highest-performing comm we run
- Flying Starts push click rate
- 23.31%
- Welcome email click rate
- 19.25%
- Hiring event SMS click rate
- 15.09%134,944 sends — the CRM layer under the field activations
- Unverified re-engagement SMS
- 14.34%Pulling stalled sign-ups back through verification
- Job notification push click rate
- 13.80%
- Braze SMS — blended click rate
- 9.55%vs 6.28% push and 4.03% email
- Platform push click rate
- 7.82%31.5M sends · 2.46M taps
How it was built
Channel fit beats channel volume
SMS clicks at 9.55% blended against 6.28% for push and 4.03% for email. It is also the most expensive and the easiest to abuse, so it is reserved for moments with genuine urgency — a first shift, a verification that is about to expire, an event happening tomorrow.
Activation is where the leverage is
Flying Starts — the sequence that carries a brand-new worker to their first shifts — clicks at 45.99% on SMS and 23.31% on push. Nothing else in the stack comes close, which is an argument for spending disproportionate creative effort on the first two weeks of a worker’s life.
CRM carries the field work
Hiring event comms clicked at 15.09% on SMS across 134,944 sends. The taco trucks and city activations look like experiential marketing from the outside; the thing that actually fills the room is a well-timed message to people within driving distance.
Hold a quality bar
Braze campaign naming had drifted to 324 distinct freeform names in a single month, which makes performance impossible to read. Part of owning the programme was imposing a QA and naming standard so that what works can be identified and repeated.