Learn how you can Unlock Limitless Customer Lifetime Value with CleverTap’s All-in-One Customer Engagement Platform.
When Terra LaRock, a licensed psychologist gave birth, her road to motherhood was rocky, to say the least. Postpartum depression and OCD almost cost her her life. She sought an outpatient treatment program where she was taught mindfulness which helped her cope. But even after seeking treatment, she felt a lot of shame associated with her experience. Eventually, she began to blog about her challenges with postpartum depression, and one of her posts was picked up by Huffpost and went viral overnight.
Her inbox was flooded with hundreds of emails from women, partners, spouses, families, and friends saying, ‘I know this woman’ or ‘This is my story.’ Over time, she became a thought leader and an influencer who spoke about the struggles faced by many new mothers in the early days of motherhood. Gradually, she began to nurture deep connections with her community of followers.
Shortly after the birth of her second-born, LaRock launched a mindfulness course for new moms. The most common feedback received during the course was to launch an app to help bring these courses out to the greater community. This was how Mindful Mamas was born.
Launched in March 2020, the Mindful Mamas app is available in both Android and iOS versions. The app contains a library of guided meditations, mantras, breathing techniques, and mini-pauses, helping mothers along all stages of motherhood to squeeze some mindfulness and self-care into their hectic days. The app content is organized based on what stage of motherhood or life circumstances the woman is in, so that the app can offer the most relevant, customized support to users.
Spellbound by their story, mission, and core values, we were all ears to know how CleverTap helped them in their mission to support thousands of parents and caregivers. We spoke to Jillian Lee Kobayashi, Co-founder, and COO, and Danielle Radden, Product Marketing Manager, to understand their journey from a single, highly personal blog post to an app, why they chose CleverTap, and how they are building a safe space for parents.
As an app trying to help mothers improve their mental wellness practice, Mindful Mamas needed to connect and support users in a timely and contextual manner. The team wanted to connect with the user early on during the onboarding process itself to encourage regular use. The capability to build journeys can help them demonstrate the value of the app to the users from the very beginning.
When the minimum viable product (MVP) was launched, the team had zero visibility into what users were doing once they were in the app. All they could access was basic information like the number of app installs and purchases made. As an early-stage startup, understanding user behavior was critical for their success.
Being an early-stage startup that had undergone a conservative pre-seed round, the team did not have an exorbitant budget to accommodate multiple solutions to analyze, segment, and engage users. The team was on the lookout for a startup-friendly solution to their challenges. Being a startup, they also needed a platform that had good documentation in place to enable easy implementation.
Considering their needs, Kobayashi and Radden were evaluating various solutions on the market that could solve for real-time analytics and user engagement, while also being easy to use and startup-friendly. They found the perfect match in CleverTap for Startups.
As an entirely audio-based app, their KPIs include app launches, audio starts per day and week, and perceived experience from the app. “Using CleverTap, we’ve initiated a feedback feature where we can incorporate a feedback loop into the product in which we track the perceived experience from the app. So, we have a rating to understand if the user feels much better, the same, or worse,” explains Kobayashi.
Kobayashi and Radden also track metrics like conversion rates, active subscriptions, and lifetime retention value. They need to understand how many times a user listens to the practice and how many times in a day or week they come back.
“In terms of the conversion behavior, we’re looking at the onboarding funnel and how many users complete their onboarding. We’re very focused on getting the users to listen to their first practice. There’s a direct correlation between users listening to their first audio and day-30 retention,” explains Kobayashi.
Mindful Mamas is a freemium app. Users have access to all the free content in the app and can upgrade to purchase either a monthly or annual subscription to unlock all app contents. For the team, the number of purchases made is another key metric taken into account..
Using custom dashboards offers Radden the ability to create her analytics dashboard. This helps her to quickly compare metrics in a single view and prioritize engagement metrics.
“Many folks in our team are the creative types, so as a data-driven and evidence-based company, using the boards helps us to visualize data into actionable insights and get the whole team on board,” adds Radden.
Funnels help her understand how users navigate through the app and where they drop off before converting. Further, funnels enable her to create highly targeted campaigns from any of the conversion steps. Trends help her to spot patterns to understand how users are engaging with Mindful Mamas.
Journeys form the nucleus of Mindful Mamas’ user engagement strategy. “We use journeys to exhaustion — we always have them running in the background,” mentions Kobayashi.
Recently, she’s begun coding custom in-app messages based on custom events and leveraging in-app messaging in a myriad of creative ways. They have plans to create campaigns that’ll test user behavior and help them with the insights they need to guide their development of upcoming app features.
Earlier, the team had limited visibility into their data, but through CleverTap they now have easy access to the data that helps them understand user behavior. Thanks to CleverTap, they no longer need to run SQL queries or other types of queries on any of their databases.
“We’ve seen a 6% increase in our audio starts per user per day. This is important for us, as users who listen to at least one audio are significantly more likely to come back and listen to us again, thereby boosting our stickiness quotient,” notes Kobayashi. In August 2021, Mindful Mamas saw a 43% boost in their app stickiness..
Jillian Lee Kobayashi COO and Co-founder Jillian Lee Kobayashi COO and Co-founder 
Danielle Radden Product Marketing Manager Kobayashi and Radden intend to focus more on behavioral segmentation and connect with users in a unique and customized way, based on the lifecycle stage they are in. This can help them provide users with nudges and pushes in sticky areas like in-app messages to support users throughout their whole journey.
“We also intend to focus more on understanding how users navigate through the app and work towards improving the user experience,” mentions Kobayashi. We are delighted to partner with Mindful Mamas in their mission of uplifting mothers and families across the globe.
