Fender Play Sees 4x Increase in Membership Sign-Ups with Wunderkind

During the initial phases of the lockdown, Fender launched their Fender Play app to help people learn how to play the acoustic guitar, electric guitar, ukulele, and bass guitar. As a show of good faith to those stuck at home, they offered free lessons to the first 100,000 to sign up. After seeing success, they needed a partner to help them exponentially grow their Fender Play user-base through powerful, one-to-one messaging.

At Wunderkind, we knew there were a few ways that we could help them reach their goals. But at the crux of their needs was the desire to help scale their marketing while maintaining a good level of personalization. “The promotion that we ran to help our first 100,000 guitar players access free lessons was a great way to grow our initial user base,” said Matt Annerino, VP Digital, Growth & CRM at Fender. “But we knew that there was more we could be doing in order to capture more users and expand the reach of our messaging around Fender Play.” First, we worked to identify the root of the problem. With many people stuck at home, there was a great opportunity for Fender to create a new generation of guitar members. But they needed to do so without the added benefit of their many wholesale partners who were still closed due to the pandemic. To address this fact, Fender Play was born with the idea of creating a complementary revenue stream to their guitar sales business by offering a subscription-based virtual lessons app. But they needed to get people onto the new platform. Once we identified this lesson, we set out to see how we could help them with their goal of growing their Fender Play user base. First, we helped them launch targeted campaigns onsite to alert site visitors about the new app and encourage them to sign up. Fender offered discounts and promotions strategically in order to maintain contact with site visitors in the future. From there, we were able to leverage Fender’s unique data to re-engage with customers who had not yet signed up for the new app. Depending on how they interacted with Fender’s site, we deployed a series of hyper-personalized triggered messages and one-off sends that were purpose built to grow the Fender Play user base. The results were nearly immediate.

Wunderkind helped Fender grow the Fender Play community 4x, far exceeding their original goal of doubling membership sign-ups. This explosive growth helped to ensure the long-term success of this new revenue stream. And, with this increase in customers, Wunderkind has become the #1 paid channel for Fender according to Google Analytics, driving a ROAS that is more than 6x the target amount.