Case study
Kununu

What made you end up as a CRM manager?

I started working at a startup during my studies, where I gained experience in various areas such as community support, paid marketing, CRM, and SEO. I ended up specializing in CRM because I found it the most interesting and it was also the least developed area in the company, which gave me the opportunity to make a significant impact. I stayed there for two and a half more years before moving on to Kununu one and a half years ago.

Can you give us an introduction to Kununu and your role as a CRM manager?

Kununu is a platform where people can share and receive real-life insights into potential employers. Our platform provides information about working at a certain company, expected salaries for job positions, and company culture, which can help people find an employer that fits their wishes and standards.

As a CRM manager at Kununu, I focus mainly on email marketing since we don't currently have an app with push notifications.

We have three main areas of focus: our newsletter, marketing campaigns, and user journeys.

These are the three big pillars of our email marketing strategy currently.

Our newsletter provides the content to our users, including blog posts and news sections on Kununu, which helps us get traffic and provide value to our users.

Marketing campaigns are run across different channels like organic social, paid social, and email to collect new insights for our website.

Lastly, we have user journeys, which are automated emails that are more life-cycle-oriented.

Can you remember how you used to create emails before Chamaileon?

What did that process look like?

As a CRM tool, we were using Braze, but we never created the templates directly within Braze. Before choosing Chamaileon, we had an in-house built tool that we used to create our email templates, which we later exported to Braze.

The process was similar to Chamaileon, but we were more restricted in terms of the changes we could make ourselves in that tool.

Personalization options on our side were quite limited, and it required the people maintaining the tool to make changes on the backend. As an in-house built tool, it wasn't really a team that was maintaining it, so creating new content blocks that we couldn't do ourselves took a long time because many different teams were requesting things from the people maintaining the tool.

Overall, we felt we weren't very flexible with trying out new things.

Time-to-market for your emails

What is the difference between the time it took to create an email with the in-house built tool and Chamaileon?

I wouldn't say that it takes longer with Chamaileon, but you could spend longer because you have a lot more options. 🙂

The templates were a lot more limited with the in-house tool. So I think from the usability perspective, it was quite similar with the drag and drop principle. But it really depends on what you want to do with it. But the time was pretty similar, I would say.

What was your top priority when you were looking at tools like Chamaileon?

Have you checked out others?

We had, I think, two more tools that we were looking at. But what was really important for us was that we have a lot more flexibility so that the personalization we can do directly without someone else is a lot more varied.

We also wanted support from people that could help us with building more complex blocks and also support us a bit with logic as our in-house resources regarding this are pretty limited.

We knew we had to work on email templates that required logic, so it would be great if we find someone that can also support us on this.

I think that was also what, in the end, made us choose Chamaileon because we really had a good feeling with Roland and with Gabor and the support that was offered to us. So that was something we really appreciated.

Can you tell us how long it took for you to switch from the previous system to Chamaileon?

I don't remember exactly because we did it gradually. We started playing around with Chamaileon and building the first templates, but we also used the chance of switching the tool to update the whole look of our emails.

So, our UX team extended our design system. They built new blocks that then had to be built in Chamaileon as an email design system.

It took a little longer because of that, not because the tool was so hard to grasp, but rather because this library of blocks, basically an email design system had to be built beforehand. I think it was a lot of trial and error on our side, and I would say after creating the first five to ten templates, you kind of get the gist of it.

Do you see any difference in any of your marketing metrics?

After switching to Chamaileon as opposed to the previous tool.

We really saw that the traffic increased. Of course, we're not sure if it's because the look of the email is different or because the blocks that we can use are different, or because the content is different.

We have seen also for our newsletters that we have more sessions, and I would say overall, just by improving how the template is structured, we have also a bit of a higher click rate in comparison to before.

However, we never A/B tested an old template directly versus a new, Chamaileon made template, it just makes no sense.

How are you trying to improve email metrics?

Are you the one tracking these metrics?

We track our metrics through the ESP directly, where we see all the email engagement metrics like open rates, click rates, unsubscribes, and so on, but we also use a tableau on a company level where we look at other metrics like how our conversion rate for is collecting an insight, for example.

We do a lot of testing for our campaigns in terms of visuals, copy, call-to-action buttons, and landing pages. So I think we have quite a lot of variables that we adjust, but we mostly test for our campaigns and for our automated emails.

As we have migrated a lot of automated emails from our old tool to our current Chamaileon + ESP combo, we're also still kind of in the migration here. We haven't had the chance to have so many iterations on our automated emails yet.

We have managed to increase insight collection through automated emails significantly but sadly I can't tell you an exact percentage or number as our old email tracking was all over the place, kind of nonexistent compared to what we do now.

Would you recommend Chamaileon to others?

I would absolutely recommend it!

I've worked with both in-house tools and drag-and-drop editors within CRM tools before, and I think it's always a challenge to get the most personalization without using code.

With Chamaileon, there's a lot of personalization possible with a no-code approach, even for logic. It can be challenging for very complex emails, but for basic stuff, you can even do the logic yourself.

So I think it's a great tool for teams that don't have a lot of development support, like CRM managers who need to handle several parts.

I think Chamaileon has made us super independent. There's a lot to personalize, but it's not too complex. You really find your way around it after using it for a little bit.

What I also find super convenient, at least for us, is that we have both a B2C and a B2B CRM team where we share a lot of blocks but not all of them. It's really convenient that we can just save content blocks within the content block library to reuse them.

Overall, I would definitely recommend Chamaileon to other users. It's also accessible price-wise and provides a lot of value for money. So far, we have only had positive experiences with it.