This Is The North Metric For All The EdTech Businesses Out There!
EdTechs the sun and all other stars are shining bright on you! Because this is your time to take the front seat and scale-up the economy.
EdTech is one of the most flourishing startup sectors in India. It beholds a large addressable audience, growing investor interest, increasing paid subscriptions, and intense competition. A recent Google-KPMG report estimates the overall sector to grow 8x and reach $2 billion by 2021. The paid subscriptions are likely to reach 9.6 million with 6x growth since 2016.
Irrespective of which country you belong to, schools and colleges (even professionals) have high expectations from you. It might not be wrong to say that their future lies in your hands.
Now that we mentioned ‘future’, along with your users’ future you got to focus on yours too. How?
By keeping a close track on your RETENTION RATE.
You might have heard enough about retention lately or formerly too. Have you heard that you need to focus on retention more than acquisition? Have you also heard that in the long run your existing customers will handlift you for the excellent user experience and engagement to imbibe today?
If yes, then my friends you’ve heard all things right about retention! Retention is a magic wand for your businesses’ lifecycle and chronic growth. There are many retention rate calculators and WE (WebEngage) have ours too. But, maths is not what I am talking about. I am referring to retention strategies.
Maybe you have already started sailing on the retention waters or are about to or you’re still in the consideration phase. But, in my opinion, it is NOW or never!
I have a couple of retention strategies to share with you. And I am going to present these strategies in the form of real-life examples — proper use cases!
So, get your rower in place and let’s get started!
EdTech Retention Use Case #1: Cuemath
Consolidate All User Data At One Place
About
Founded in 2013, Cuemath is an interactive, after-school math excellence program that brings together the best of technology and personal teaching in India.
The Case
A major player in the Indian ed-tech ecosystem, Cuemath had relied on traditional ways for data consolidation and product communication. But changing market conditions and increasing user touchpoints made it necessary to adapt to a fresh, more comprehensive approach.
Cuemath needed technology for every aspect of their platform. Whether it was the way students interacted with the platform, how parents monitored their kids’ progress on the app, or how the teachers ran the centers.
To put things in perspective, these are three separate entities (students + parents + teachers), interacting across six different platforms in a single business.
When most CRM and marketing automation platforms could not tackle these multi-sided scenarios, Cuemath decided to join hands with WebEngage and came up with data consolidation as the ultimate solution.
WebEngage’s website and app SDK enabled Cuemath to capture all user events. These were later used to personalize user experiences across all platforms.
As the next step, the Onboarding team at WebEngage suggested Cuemath create separate accounts for each entity; teacher, parent, and student on the WebEngage dashboard.
The above image has been explained in detail below:
- The student account tracked the activities of the student across all platforms (website, CueStudent app).
- As students were the end consumers, this account became the primary source of data. All the personalization elements were present in this account, e.g., name, grade, photo, etc.
- Each student had a unique ID that would span across their entire lifecycle. Lifecycle stages like ‘student-lead’ or ‘student’ were attributes, under the same ID.
- Similarly, a parent ID had attributes that defined their acquisition source, address, locality, etc. Child’s name could also be one of the attributes.
- The parent account sent communication to parents.
- The teacher account contained unique information about teachers, like onboarding date, course names, etc. It was used to communicate with the teachers alone.
Not only did this model serve as a starting point to automate the multi-sided communication, but also formed a blueprint for the team-structure as the team expanded.
Student engagement saw a boost of 23%. Softer aspects like parents’ conviction in the platform were touched. The result was increased engagement, word of mouth and revenue.
Browse through Cuemath’s complete case study:
EdTech Retention Use Case #2: Testbook
Leverage All (almost) Engagement Channels
About
Testbook is an Indian Ed-Tech company that provides online exam preparation solutions to students preparing for competitive exams.
The Case
Most businesses in EdTech industry operate on Freemium model i.e. offering the use of service or product free of charge but charging users for premium features, enhanced functionality or increased usage.
Testbook has a similar business model; users initially get free limited period access to tests, post which they are prompted to purchase.
Given the nature of Freemium model, it is critical that users complete free trial of the product and don’t abandon midway. Accordingly, the marketing team at Testbook aimed to reactivate users who went inactive during a free trial.
The core intent of the Reactivation Campaign is to bring back users to the platform. With this goal in sight, Testbook created a workflow using WebEngage’s Journey Designer.
User enters the journey upon Start/Resume of Practice Test, post which the system checks for user inactivity for a minimum duration of 8 days. Given the user inactivity, the system checks the reachability of user over different channels (Registered for Push Notification/Web Push Opt-in). Users fulfilling the conditions receive personalized Push Notification, Web Push, and Email, in that order. [click image to enlarge]
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Email, Web Push, and Push Notification personalized with username, course name, unique link in Call-to-action for each user.
Within the three months of running the campaigns, 15% of inactive users got reactivated; directly attributable to the Reactivation Campaign. The uplift contributed to the top of the funnel users for Testbook, significantly adding to all the succeeding stages of the conversion funnel.
EdTech Use Case #3: Toppr
Impart Personalized Learning Experience
About
Launched in 2013, Toppr is India’s booming after-school learning app for 5th to 12th grade students. It supplements classroom learning with interactive lectures, useful practice materials, regular tests & doubt-solving sessions to make learning personalized for the students.
The Case
Toppr believes that every student is unique and possesses different learning needs. Thus, Toppr needs to lay a prime focus on an adaptive learning approach that meaningfully sharpens every student’s skill sets.
With adaptive learning functionality, the app adapts itself to the student’s behavior; thus, empowering them to modify and customize their learning experience on the Toppr app.
With Toppr’s user base swelling day-by-day, it became necessary and challenging for them to collate all the relevant content and send it to appropriate user segments in the form of reminders or notifications. Sending such targeted and timely communication throughout the student’s life cycle at Toppr was essential in order to build powerful engagement.
Moreover, every student used the app at their own pace, thanks to the adaptive learning approach here. Hence, it was important to share content with them at a time when it’s most useful to them. This called for a more granular approach to engagement.
After sifting through a bunch of marketing automation services, Toppr decided to go ahead with WebEngage as a tool of choice in order to make overcoming challenges easy.
The teams at Toppr and WebEngage came together and plotted a customized solution — content personalization
Content personalization is not just limited to the in-app communication channel. Toppr sends out timely and contextual learning material to its users via push notifications channel along with SMS and email. This multi-channel communication approach adopted by Toppr not only helps them to constantly engage with their users but also supports them to improve their retention metrics.
A sample of Toppr’s push notifications sent to its users
Personalized communication and highly targeted user segmentation lead to 133% uplift in Toppr’s conversions and 78% hike in the M6 retention rate.
Take a look at what the masterminds at Toppr have to say:
I hope this article gave you a fair idea about the most crucial elements of retention marketing (the right way).
Once again I’ll highlight that, EdTechs this is your time, seize it!
Good luck and health 😀
