Founded in 2012 by two avid sports fans, Dream11 is India’s first single-match fantasy sports platform. It offers fantasy cricket, football, kabaddi and NBA basketball. Dream11 has more than doubled its user base year-over-year since its inception, quickly growing to 30 million+ users and over 90% market share in the fantasy sports market in India.
The platform features online games where players use their knowledge of sports to create a virtual fantasy team of real-life players. They then earn points based on how those players perform in real matches. India currently accounts for nearly 13% of the world’s online mobile gaming population. And with the industry expected to reach $1 billion by 2021, Dream11’s growth potential is limitless.
User Activation & Retention 
Brand 
Marketing Automation The two-month Indian Premier League season is a critical period of acquisition and engagement for Dream11. The team must act fast to capitalize on the fever-pitch of excitement among the Indian sports community, expand brand awareness, and drive customer acquisition.
Dream11 then faces the added challenge of keeping those users engaged well beyond the IPL season. Effective mobile marketing is pivotal in expanding their user base, fueling greater app adoption, and ensuring that users experience value on the platform to keep coming back, match after match.
On top of this, the sheer scale at which Dream11 operates is a challenge in itself. As the largest fantasy sports platform in India and the sixth largest in the world, the Dream11 team has to engage its massive 30 million+ user base with timely, personalized messaging campaigns that reflect the fast-paced action of live sports. That means sending millions of messages in a matter of minutes to capture users’ attention and prompt them to launch the app.
CleverTap’s Cohort Analysis feature allows Dream11 to get a deeper understanding of how users engage with the app. By identifying user trends and analyzing retention rates, they can anticipate churn and run effective engagement campaigns that keep delivering value to users over the long term.
Using Cohorts, Dream11 discovered that users who had participated in the previous match displayed a higher probability of coming back to the platform for the next one. To drive continued engagement, they needed to prompt users to create teams and participate in every match.
The team performed A/B tests on different notification send times for these cohorts and found the highest engagement rates for afternoon campaigns. In these cases, users only had a few hours before the 7 pm match to build their teams, creating a powerful sense of urgency and anticipation. They added their tagline, “Dimaag Se Dhoni,” as the notification sound to make messages stand out and reinforce brand recall.
With targeted campaigns based on user behavior, location, and lifecycle stage, Dream11 engages users on the most effective channels to drive greater conversions and retention.
Dream11 uses Flows to understand how users are navigating the app. With these insights, they can refine new user onboarding, new feature adoption, and identify friction points in their UX.
By tracking user cohorts Dream11 can identify user trends, analyze churn, run effective winback campaigns, and improve app engagement.
On their journey to becoming the leading sports fantasy platform in the world, the Dream11 team is eager to capitalize on the T20 season and 2018 World Cup momentum to further expand its user base. To fuel growth, Dream11 also plans to tap into thriving sub-markets for each sport. The increasing popularity of sports like cricket, football, and basketball across the globe will only help them power greater user acquisition, monetization, and retention. Conquering demographic and technographic barriers will be essential in enhancing the live sports viewing experience, and powerful mobile marketing technologies will continue to play a key role in Dream11’s success.
