Totaljobs
User Reactivation
Fourteen million people had registered with Totaljobs, made a single application, and never come back. The business needed to bring them back genuinely, not by carpet-bombing an inbox, but by giving each of them a reason that actually applied to them.
I designed the reactivation campaigns and the cohort model underneath them.
- Users
- Fourteen million dormant candidates
- Ownership
- Cohort model, campaign design, email journey
- Role
- Product Designer
Approach
Working with the Product Experience Lead, UX Research and product managers, I analysed our experience map and drew up exit surveys to find out why people stopped coming back.
One assumption came out of it and shaped everything after: dormant users are not one group. They divide into cohorts with distinct behaviours and distinct reasons to return.
Using those cohorts and our prior research, I helped run a design thinking workshop with stakeholders and the development team, which generated the ideas and secured buy-in early.
I wireframed the campaigns, presented them, and refined them into mock-ups on the team’s feedback. Building the emails in Selligent meant we could track engagement properly, not just who opened what, but where each cohort went after returning and what they did once they got there.
Challenge
The harder shift was organisational. The business thought in binary terms: active or dormant, and reactivation only works once you accept that most of your users live in the space between those two labels.
Turning that into something a team could act on was a visualisation problem as much as a research one. Working with product management, I built a campaign flow mapped directly to what our live email tests had shown, so the complexity became something stakeholders could see and argue with rather than take on trust.
Outcome
12% of the dormant base came back, 1,680,000 people returning to the platform in the first month. It worked well enough that a second engineering team was assigned to the on-site journey they were landing on.
The campaigns were a series of personalised emails auto-targeted at cohorts ranging from three weeks to two years dormant, segmented across blue and white-collar workers. What each person received next depended on how they had responded to the last one, so the sequence adapted rather than repeated.
Reference
Elliptic
Product vision
Turned a fragmented investigation journey into a single auditable decision path
