WeightWatchers partners with Hightouch and Snowflake to boost new member growth by 52% and reduce data onboarding by 2 weeks

Business Results

• Improved LTV-based ROAS by 24%
• Increased new-to-brand members converted from Meta by +52%
• Reduced data onboarding time from 2 weeks to 5 minutes
• Reduced data onboarding costs by 80%
• Unlocked higher match rates for audiences across TikTok, Google, and Meta

Match Rate Improvements (Non-boosted vs. boosted audiences)

• Increased TikTok Match rate from 9% to 23% (a 155% increase)
• Increased Google match rate from 44% to 64% (a 45% increase)
• Increased Meta match rate from 78% to 89% (a 14% increase)

The Challenge

The WeightWatchers paid media team is tasked with increasing membership revenue (LTV) by acquiring new members and winning back churned members. To do this, the marketing team relies heavily on first-party data strategies to maximize return on ad spend (ROAS).

The challenge was that the social team was relying on a data onboarding solution to upload all of their first-party audiences to their ad platforms, which negatively impacted the team’s ability to target and suppress the right audiences, creating several problems:

1. Slow Onboarding Speed: It took 2+ weeks for audiences to be created, processed, and made available on ad platforms. In most cases, onboarding new audiences was so slow that the marketing team was limited in conducting segmentation and personalization experiments. Performance and membership experience also suffered as audiences had lower match rates, causing the team to target existing subscribers with new membership ads inadvertently.
2. Limited Observability: It wasn’t clear which members were in each audience, how effectively audiences were being updated, and when they failed. This lack of observability led to costly errors via inaccurate segmentation.
3. Constant Engineering Support: The absence of self-service capabilities meant the marketing team depended on submitting tickets to the data team to create, update, and manage their audiences, causing further delays and inefficiencies.
4. High Cost of Ownership: The need for constant support from the data engineering team added to the total cost of ownership, wasting time for the paid media and data teams that could be spent on productive activities instead of an underperforming onboarding solution.

The Solution

In order to accelerate the speed and effectiveness of their paid media programs, the WeightWatchers marketing team realized that they would need to modernize their data and advertising stack. To do this, the company set out to centralize their member data in a secure cloud data warehouse and adopt Composable CDP, which would allow them to quickly onboard data directly from their warehouse to their paid media channels.

Managing Member Data in Snowflake

Customer PII data management is a top priority for WeightWatchers. So, when it came to consolidating their data into a single location, they chose Snowflake to ensure they treated their customer data with the utmost security and confidentiality. Snowflake’s Data Cloud has robust security features, including end-to-end encryption and role-based access control.

This decision gave WeightWatchers greater control over their data, ensuring that PII was securely stored within an infrastructure they managed directly, giving them the flexibility to easily address various analytics workloads in one platform.

Revamping Data Onboarding with Hightouch

To address the problems of their previous data onboarding platform, WeightWatchers adopted Hightouch as their Composable CDP to achieve higher match rates, faster data onboarding, and self-serve audiences for the marketing team.

Higher Match Rates

When WeightWatchers or any marketing team sends first-party data for ad targeting or suppression, the ad platform only finds a portion of those users. It’s extremely valuable to increase the number of users the ad platform can find (e.g., increase the ad platform’s match rate.) A higher match rate means a larger audience that WeightWatchers can target and use for lookalike audiences or suppression lists to maximize revenue. With tens of millions being spent on ads, a single percentage point change can have a huge impact on ROAS.

After transitioning to Hightouch Match Booster, the marketing team saw significant improvements, with match rates surpassing previous benchmarks across platforms like TikTok, Google, and Meta, ranging from a 14%, 20%, and 11% increase between non-boosted Hightouch audiences and Hightouch-boosted audiences.

Faster Data Onboarding

Before Hightouch, the marketing team would have to wait upwards of two weeks anytime they wanted to launch a new campaign. With Hightouch, the process of moving first-party member data from Snowflake to ad platforms is completely streamlined. No extra data copies have to be stored because Hightouch runs within WeightWatchers' existing infrastructure. This has transformed the audience creation timeline from weeks to minutes, enhancing the agility of the marketing team, all while ensuring that data remains secure inside Snowflake.

Self-Serve Audiences & Testing

Since switching to Customer Studio, Hightouch’s no-code UI, the marketing team can build audiences and run experiments without any engineering support, using data points available in Snowflake, which has unlocked far better targeting and personalization. Hightouch’s observability features have approved our ability to understand audience definitions, check the contents of each audience, and get alerted if there is an issue with any audience sync before it impacts their campaigns.

Rapid Experimentation

The WeightWatchers media team has also made strong use of Hightouch’s Splits feature, which allows them to create and run randomized tests across audience segments and channels, and to tie that data to their subscription LTV metrics, which are stored directly in Snowflake. This has empowered the team to make investment decisions based on which campaigns are driving true incremental LTV, and which are not.

In an early experiment using Splits, the paid media team tested whether excluding churned customers with an ML score that indicated a high likelihood to return to the brand on their own would improve the incrementality of ad performance. By sending a test and holdout group to the ad platforms, they learned that excluding this audience led to a 10% drop in incremental sign-ups.

Lower Total Cost of Ownership

Since migrating to Hightouch, WeightWatchers was able to reduce their data onboarding costs by 80% and also saw improvements in match rates and speed, all while maintaining better governance, security, and compliance.

Closing Thoughts

Building on the success Hightouch brought to the paid social team, WeightWatchers is now extending the use of Hightouch to other marketing departments and channels. This rollout means they can amplify the positive results across their business, enhancing efficiency and effectiveness across every marketing channel.