Productivity improvement with Iterable's Smart Ingest
Calm
The demands of everyday life can often leave us stressed, anxious and unable to focus. Many find relief in self-care practices that ease the mind and foster healthy habits. Enter Calm—the #1 app for sleep, meditation, and relaxation that offers guided meditations, sleep stories, soothing background music and more.
While Calm has seen continual growth since its founding in 2012, Sue Cho, Head of Lifecycle Marketing, knew the company needed a deeper, more holistic view of its customers to drive sustainable growth and retention.
By coupling Iterable’s cross-channel customer journeys with Amplitude’s visualized product analytics, Calm gained a deeper understanding of customer behavior. With visibility into how their marketing influenced in-app behavior, Calm was able to test and optimize for incremental gains in their new-member onboarding sequence.
“When thinking of how to optimize campaigns, my answer is always, it depends. I ought to look at the data. Iterable allows me to take insights across technologies and apply informed changes that drive the most important metric—revenue.”
Data as the Source of Truth
As marketers, we’re continually seeking to answer “what’s right,” “what performs” and “what’s true?” We look to industry best practices, internal teams, and sometimes our own gut instinct in search of answers. But instead of letting best-guess drive her growth marketing strategy, Sue Cho turned to data and testing.
Calm’s previous new-member onboarding flow included a series of eight emails over the course of one month, with the first email being triggered one day post-signup. The subsequent emails in the series were set to deploy every two days thereafter.
In auditing their onboarding program, Sue reviewed Amplitude’s retention analysis chart, which displays how many users come back to a product after a given period of time. After drilling down to the hour, the chart revealed that about 80% of users drop off after the first 30 minutes with a low likelihood of returning. Sue recognized that the first hour was a critical opportunity to capture engagement, which could have significant implications for long-term user retention. Equipped with this knowledge, Sue went back into the journey to look for opportunities to optimize.
Test, Learn, Iterate, Repeat.
Recognizing that user engagement is highest in the first hour of downloading the app, Sue began testing her new-member onboarding flow. In her experiment, half of new members were funneled through the same onboarding touchpoints, but without the existing delays—instead of 27 days, the same eight emails went out in 15 days. With this shift, Sue quickly saw that users sent down the shortened path were engaging at a higher rate than those on the extended journey.
Continual testing and optimization are foundational and applicable to all of Calm’s campaigns. “If you don’t know where to start, study the people who are using the product the most. Study the people who are retaining the most. That’ll nudge you in the right direction on what content to show, how often you should message, and what your superstar user looks like. Take that intel, then build your campaign to start having users that aren’t super engaged begin to exhibit and practice those wanted behaviors.”
In gaining a deeper, more holistic view of user behavior, Calm identified opportunities to improve user retention that the team might have otherwise missed. By optimizing their customer journey in Iterable based on user-engagement data from Amplitude, Calm’s new-member onboarding sequence saw a 4x increase in revenue performance.
Investing in Amplitude and Iterable helped Calm build a MarTech stack that was fit to scale and keep pace with their rapid growth. It has enabled their team to be better informed about their users and continue to refine communications throughout the entire customer journey, ultimately bringing a little more Calm into people’s lives—one test, one conversion at a time.
The Proof is in the Data
Analyzing product usage in Amplitude inspired simple changes, like shortening the onboarding series length from 27 to 15 days, that produced significant results.
Revenue attributed to their new-member onboarding sequence increased 4x through testing and optimization.
Leaning into user behavior trends gathered from product and campaign analytics allowed the team to more effectively tailor their communications.
Results
4x increase in revenue from new-member onboarding
15 day onboarding, shortened from 27 days
"Iterable has made it extremely easy for us to execute and optimize sophisticated engagement campaigns with minimal engineering support." Read more