When times are tough, people emphasize the importance of building a village and leaning on your neighbors when you need them the most. Whether it’s finding a job, a new place to live, or simply a babysitter for your next date night, dual-sided marketplaces have brought communities together.
Dual-sided, or two-sided, marketplaces have existed as long as there have been buyers and sellers. But there’s a reason that the most popular platforms were founded around the 2008 financial crisis and are now resurging post-pandemic. They’ve been closely aligned with economic turbulence and the rise of the gig economy.
Google Trends results for “dual marketplace” with a steady rise since 2018 and a peak in July 2025.
Google Trends results for “gig economy” with a peak in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.
Double the market can mean double the complexity, especially now that AI has empowered both buyers and sellers, leading to rapid technological innovation. How can dual-sided marketplaces succeed in growing and engaging multiple distinct audiences?
To offer some best practices, let’s turn to three tried-and-true methods from industry-leading Iterable customers: Redfin, Glassdoor, and Care.com.
1. Redfin increases retention by re-engaging inactive users.
Just because your marketplace is two-sided doesn’t mean that all buyers and sellers will be active at all times. No business knows this like Redfin, the number-one real estate brokerage site in the U.S.
People don’t buy or sell a home every day, so despite Redfin’s millions of users, only a small percentage of them are active at any given moment. To achieve their objective of retaining users and staying top of mind, the Redfin team turned to Predictive Goals, part of Iterable’s AI Suite.
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What Is Predictive Goals? Iterable’s Predictive Goals enables marketers to drive outcome-based marketing by forecasting their customers’ individualized probability to carry out future actions, such as make a purchase or engage with a message. |
Predictive Goals enables Redfin to eliminate the guesswork in predicting the highest-converting users and transitioning them from inactive to active. After identifying these users, Redfin sent both buyers and sellers conversion-oriented emails.
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Redfin Buyer Emails |
Redfin Seller Emails |
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Provided local market details |
Nudged them to check out their home on Redfin |
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Linked to a map of recent homes listed or sold |
Included data about potential buyers |
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Encouraged buyers to review their home’s value |
Encouraged to schedule a consultation with a local real estate agent |
It only took sending a few of these conversion-oriented emails before Redfin’s retention marketing team saw results from Predictive Goals:
- A 72% lift in converting inactive sellers to an active state
- A 15% lift in converting inactive buyers to an active state
- Directionally positive lift in seller consultations and tours booked by buyers
“Predictive Goals has been an absolute game-changer for our team, maximizing our efficiencies and accelerating time to value. We’ve seen the tangible benefits of AI on our business, and look forward to seeing the impact of Iterable’s new AI innovations.”
~ Lisa Tulloch, Email Marketing Channel Manager at Redfin
2. Glassdoor breaks silos with unified cross-channel marketing.
In a dual-sided marketplace like Glassdoor, value isn’t just about visibility—it’s about timing, trust, and transparency. With over 50 million unique monthly visitors, Glassdoor connects professionals searching for their next opportunity with employers looking to attract top talent.
But engaging a diverse community across forums, job boards, employer pages, and social apps requires a dynamic approach. By consolidating their messaging strategy within Iterable and securely syncing campaign and behavioral data through Snowflake, Glassdoor broke down tech silos and unlocked personalized, cross-channel communications that move the needle for both sides of their marketplace.
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What Is Cross-Channel Orchestration? Iterable’s cross-channel orchestration connects email, push, SMS, in-app, and more into a unified customer journey—so marketers can deliver adaptive experiences that meet users on the right channel, at the right time, with the right message. |
For instance, a job seeker browsing engineering roles might receive a timely in-app alert to explore a trending forum post on salary negotiations. Meanwhile, an employer responding to a review might get nudged to update their company profile. With seamless data flow enriching profiles in real time, Glassdoor can analyze exactly what users did after receiving a message—from clicks to content contributions.
Thanks to Iterable’s cross-channel engine and its Snowflake integration, Glassdoor has:
- Unified email and push into a single, cross-channel strategy
- Delivered compliant, personalized experiences without exposing PII
- Gained full visibility into user actions across website and app
- Increased reviews, applications, and employer engagement on-platform
“We now take a user-centric approach to all our communications. And data is fueling these communications, our business strategies, and marketing campaigns to help people find their match—a company and job that suits their skills, interests, experience, and future aspirations.”
~ Nicole Fisher, Sr. Manager, Engagement Marketing at Glassdoor
3. Care.com saves countless hours with a modern martech stack.
Dual-sided online marketplaces were built for the modern economy, so they need a modern data structure to match. For Care.com, the world’s leading platform for finding and managing high-quality family care, that meant investing in journey mapping and replacing manual processes with streamlined data and automated journeys.
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What Are Journeys? Iterable’s Journeys (formerly called Workflows) are automated sequences of messages and interactions that you can set up to happen at exactly the right moment for each user. You can use journeys to build a welcome series, cart abandonment sequence, personalized promotions, and more. |
By upgrading their standalone platforms for email and SMS with Iterable, the Care.com team could optimize their channels based on user behavior. And the best part was that they could scale up their operations without adding more human or tech support, reducing their time spent on analytics and testing from hours to minutes.
With Iterable as the hub of its modern martech stack, Care.com has:
- Saved about 25% of their team’s time
- Achieved an overall deeper understanding of customer behavior
- Scaled operations without additional engineering support
“I now spend less than five minutes pulling the data for my sites on a weekly and monthly basis. The rest of the time, I focus on actually understanding the customer behavior. These tools save time in the long run and allow your team to create the best experiences for your customers.”
~ Matthew Naturman, Associate Marketing Manager, Lifecycle Marketing at Care.com
The One Place to Power Two-Sided Marketplaces
Dual-sided marketplaces work best when there’s a symbiotic relationship between buyers and sellers. The same can be said for marketers and the martech platforms they use. Iterable is the village that marketplaces need to build their ultimate tech stack.
With AI-powered communications across email, mobile, social media, and more, Iterable enables dual-sided marketplaces like Redfin, Glassdoor, and Care.com, to achieve moments-based marketing and meet their audiences wherever they are.
| To learn how to engage your customers more effectively and ignite rapid growth, schedule a demo of Iterable today. |
FAQs
1. What is a dual-sided marketplace?
A dual-sided marketplace, also known as a two-sided market, is an intermediary between two groups of people who seek to trade goods or services. Today’s online marketplaces are supported by platforms that facilitate transactions between one user group and another—whether between buyers and sellers, freelancers and clients, or owners and renters.
2. What is an example of a dual-sided marketplace?
Popular dual-sided marketplaces include e-commerce platforms like Amazon and eBay, travel apps like Hipcamp and Secret Escapes, ticketing sites like SeatGeek and TodayTix, and service providers like Rover and RedBubble
3. What are the advantages of a dual-sided marketplace?
The primary advantage of a dual-sided marketplace is that each user group provides the other with network benefits, making the platform more valuable as participation grows. By serving as an intermediary, online marketplaces can provide a better customer experience and a more competitive environment, drawing a large audience of buyers and sellers.
