From Painstaking to Piece of Cake: Toymail’s “Clever” Transition to Marketing Automation

Toymail, Gauri Nanda’s hot new startup that was recently featured on Shark Tank, provides kids with a fun and easy way to talk to family and friends. Children can send and receive voice messages on “Talkies,” colorful and cute WiFi-enabled plush toys. These messages are sent to the Toymail app (to reach their grown-up buddies, who can then respond with a voice message) and other talkies (to chat with other kids on a parent-approved contact list). 20+ applets can be downloaded straight to the talkie, including games, stories, and songs.

I recently spoke to Marla Bogaerts, Head of Operations at Toymail, about their experience with CleverTap so far.

We’re so glad to have you onboard! What challenges led you to choose CleverTap?

Marla: One of our central challenges was segmenting our user base. We needed a way to identify new users to help onboard them, find our most successful customers to see what was working for them, and target inactive users for re-engagement. CleverTap made it easy to find and create personalized campaigns for each segment.

• Identify new users struggling to adopt: We needed to reach out to users who were unable to connect to their children’s talkies via the Toymail app to help them get started. Originally we were doing this outreach manually, and there was no way to get stats for each and every user who had trouble connecting. As we grew in size, we knew we needed an automated system to proactively reach out to new users and make the activation process quick and easy. CleverTap helped us segment our new users and get them successfully onboarded.
• Identify power users: As we grew, we wanted to gather feedback from power users on their favorite features and opportunities to further improve the app. CleverTap helped us find these “super users.” It became much easier for us to get their valuable feedback and use it to fine-tune Toymail’s engagement strategy.
• Identify users who’ve become dormant: Lastly, we wanted to isolate users who were previously active on the app but no longer used it, despite receiving messages from their children. With CleverTap, we were able to set up this user segment within seconds and found interesting ways to re-engage them.

CleverTap has been hugely beneficial, enabling us to quickly and efficiently segment our entire user base into important segments, including new users, power users, and dormant users. We can easily reach out to them via their ideal channel, be it email, push notifications, in-app pop-ups, and more, with just a few clicks.

What interesting tidbits have you gathered from using CleverTap’s analytics suite that you’d like to share?

Marla: Using CleverTap’s analytics suite, we made a really important discovery: while children were more likely to send a message to parents or relatives, adults were not as likely to respond.
We were curious to find out why this was the case, so we used CleverTap’s email campaigns to reach out to power users and gather some feedback.
We quickly learned from our customers that giving them ideas of content to send to the Talkies would be useful to increase engagement.
Once we understood the underlying issue, we immediately got to work putting together a fun list of prompts to send parents to help them engage with their kids via the Toymail app, and integrated these messages into a automated recurring campaign using CleverTap.
Here’s just one of the many push notification variants we used to help adults have fun talking to their kids:

Great to hear! What were the results of this campaign?

Marla: After just a few initial campaigns, we observed a spike of almost 10% in click-through rates, resulting in many more eager adults sending witty responses to their children. We definitely want to send out more of these campaigns and are eager to see what more CleverTap has to offer us.