Skype

Engagement

Growth as the metric that mattered

Skype was already a product people wanted to share. Our job was to make that behaviour easier, amplify it and create more ways for new users to discover and enter the service.

Every touchpoint was treated as part of the growth engine – from a landing page or campaign to a recommendation from a friend or encountering Skype in an electronics store.

The question was always the same: "Does this help more people discover Skype, understand its value and start using it?"

Online

Turning attention into users

Online was the primary acquisition engine. We designed landing pages and conversion journeys around specific audiences, offers and use cases — taking people from their first encounter with Skype through to becoming active users.

Campaigns created new entry points into those journeys. One example was a collaboration with Ninjas in Pyjamas, the Swedish professional esports organisation, using the rapidly growing gaming culture to introduce Skype to a highly relevant digital audience.

We also built a "refer-a-friend platform" around one of Skype's strongest growth behaviours: existing users bringing new users into the service. Rather than treating referrals as a campaign, we designed them as a repeatable growth loop:

User → Invite → New user → Activation → Invite

The product itself became part of the acquisition channel.

Offline

Taking a digital service into physical retail

Growth couldn't rely on digital channels alone. We worked with major consumer electronics retailers to give Skype a physical presence in stores – turning an intangible online service into something customers could see, understand and buy.

We created packaged products for both consumers and businesses that made getting started with Skype simple. Customers could immediately call other Skype users for free and purchase credit to make calls to traditional phone and mobile networks.

But retail wasn't only a sales channel. It was also a mass-reach communication channel.

Packaging, displays and in-store communication gave Skype visibility alongside established consumer technology brands, helping explain what the service was and why it mattered to millions of people walking through electronics stores.

The result was a growth system that connected online acquisition, referrals, partnerships and physical retail — multiple entry points into the same digital customer journey.