How Colendi increases customer traffic by 60% with branded short links

“It’s critical to lead marketing and product-related projects with solid data-driven models so you can act on the results. Combined with our daily operational tools, PixelMe helped us refine our strategies and increase our efficiency immensely.”

-- Eray Eren, Chief Product Officer, Colendi

Meet Their Team

📖 Colendi is a blockchain-based, decentralized credibility evaluation and microcredit platform. One of Colendi's 4 co-founders previously built one of the most prominent FinTech startups in Turkey - Ininal, a prepaid card company that birthed a new concept of banking transactions without the need for a bank account. By taking this concept one step further and allowing a “credit-flow” for unbanked people, Colendi launched in 2017 in Istanbul and later opened their HQ office in Zug, Switzerland (blockchain valley). They’ve since been focused on R&D to create an alternative credit score and microcredit platform that provides access to financing for everyone.
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🏢 The team includes mostly FinTech sector professionals and young minds that are passionate about making a real contribution. Their CPO, Eray Eren, leads all product and growth activities. When he's not launching innovative credit scoring products, he spends time on his own FinTech startup Zoom (P2P money transfer application).
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Success In Numbers

💻 60% more customer visits to their website blog

🔗 200% increase in CTR across all links shared

⏰ 1 hour saved daily with all-in-one UTM building & link shortening
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The Goal

Colendi aims to build brand awareness and grow to 1 million users signed up with a Colendi ID by 2020.
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🎯 Colendi has various target audiences:
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• Blockchain communities to spread the word about their mobile app Dapp & Colendi Token
• Consumers to use their Colendi Apps to access credits
• FinTech, Banking, and Software businesses to understand their technology & services
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The Problem

📱 By nature of building brand new technologies, Colendi focuses on content marketing and product education to their communities. Colendi needed easy ways to:
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• Brand themselves and help people understand their offerings by simply looking at links they shared. For example, whether it was a link to their blog or 3rd party content.
• Understand the performance of every URL shared. Their team is heavily data-driven to improve their Marketing & Product efforts and plan for new campaigns.

The Solution

Colendi adopted the following steps with PixelMe to solve their needs:
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🔗 1. Create short links with Custom Domains: Colendi created the branded short link social.colendi.com, to grow brand awareness in every link they shared. They use custom domains with any kind of content, including 3rd party articles, blog posts, event pages, sharing photos, and more.
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• Colendi has a Telegram channel of 15k people and has nearly 30,000 clicks using the following branded short link to help their channel grow: social.colendi.com/telegram
• They also customize links they send to people to download their mobile apps in the App Store or Google Play Store: social.colendi.com/colendi-mail-dapp

2. Add UTM parameters to each URL: Each piece of content Colendi shares has multiple UTM tags attached when they setup the URL. This lets them track which platforms their website clicks came from, and see which campaigns generated the most traffic.
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🔑 3. Manage & easily edit links: After setting up a link, Colendi takes advantage of the ability to change the Destination URL of a shortened link as needed, without changing the PixelMe shortened link. This gives them more flexibility to make quick tweaks and optimizations after a campaign starts.
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They're able to change the target URL and easily share the same link in various media, while being able to divert their community to various content destinations.

📈 4. Measure the success of any link: They often create multiple links for the same URL, and use them in different channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Medium. In their PixelMe dashboard, they measure total and unique clicks every content receives, and track which locations their clicks come from. This helps them understand the types of content people preferred and which platforms to keep investing in.
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Colendi also saves a lot of time staying up to date on their URL performance through regular PixelMe emails that show how many clicks they received in the email subject line 💌.
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🎯 5. Link Retargeting: Colendi is restarting their paid performance marketing campaigns in Summer 2019 using PixelMe's link retargeting tools. They plan to retarget people clicking on their links with ads across their platforms (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn) by embedding ad pixels to their links.
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Products Used

🎯 Audience Builder: Build retargeting audiences by embedding a retargeting pixel into every link & adding UTM parameters to track traffic sources.
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Tips for Businesses

Here are 3 tips for getting started from Colendi's CPO, Eray Eren:
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• Grow brand awareness: "Use PixelMe to make your links more branded and professional with custom domains."
• Optimize your marketing campaigns: "Monitor performance across your links to improve your marketing content planning."
• Simplify your campaign setup: "PixelMe is easy to set up and very easy to use. I never had any performance marketing or social media experiences before using PixelMe. PixelMe is the one tool I enjoy playing with and managing."

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