The Kippa Story
Kippa is an all-in-one financial management app for small businesses across Africa, bringing many merchants into the digital ecosystem for the very first time. To understand how Kippa relies on CleverTap to boost user engagement, we spoke to Ketan Anand, who is the Senior Growth Product Manager. He leads the growth team, which consists of growth marketing and CRM managers. The KPIs for the team include all growth metrics—from the user acquisition stage to activation, engagement, and ultimately retention.The North Star metric for Anand’s team is the number of Monthly Transacting Users (MTU) and Weekly Transacting Users (WTU). The team also evaluates what percentage of the MTUs are new users vs. recurring users.
Challenges
Need for a User Engagement Platform
Building Kippa’s growth team from the ground up, Anand knew he needed a user engagement platform that could help the team ensure that their communication was optimized for the most impact and results. Building an in-house user engagement platform would mean relying on their internal tech teams, which would cost them valuable time and resources. Boosting User Activations
The growth team at Kippa focuses mainly on user activations, and successful user activation is dependent on the experience a user has on the platform. “We focus a lot on the first action made by our users. If our users have a good experience on our app, they tend to come back again,” says Anand. They needed an engagement platform that would ensure a stellar user experience. Test and Iterate Campaigns
As a group of data-driven marketers, it was important for the team at Kippa to test various hypotheses and validate their results against control groups. The results would guide them in developing campaigns and optimizing the app experience to improve customer lifetime value. CleverTap Solutions
In his previous role, Anand had used CleverTap, thus he knew what it could do and the value it offered. “Since I was building the growth team at Kippa from the ground up, we knew we needed a user engagement platform that was effective and reliable. Because of my past experience using CleverTap and the market share CleverTap has, I chose CleverTap as our user engagement and retention partner at Kippa,” he says.Kippa strengthens its Omnichannel Strategy by leveraging CleverTap for SMS, Push Notifications and In-App Notifications.
Onboarding Journeys to Boost Activations and Repeat Usage
Users come back to the app when they have a great
first-time user experience (FTUE). So the Kippa team focuses on the first action made by the user on day zero. This is the user flow: they install the app and onboard, then they complete their first action. If the user comes back consecutively to complete another action, then Kippa considers the user account activated.“Our onboarding journey focuses on events from app install to activation. We’ve divided it into different journey segments and accordingly, built journeys using CleverTap,” says Anand. In comparison to the control group, Kippa has seen a 5-6% uptick in user activation.
In-app Messages to Cross-Sell Products
Kippa leverages
in-app messages to cross-sell its products. “We have merchants who use the Cashbook feature in our app to record sales and expenses incurred. To boost usage of other features like invoice generation, inventory, or our recently launched online payments, we use in-app communications to get users to adopt other features in the app,” adds Anand.
Action-Based and Custom List Segments for Targeting the Right Users
The growth team at Kippa segments users based on actions performed, like clicking a button or reaching a certain screen limit. In addition to these, they also create
custom list segments using CleverTap’s APIs
Results
Measurable Improvement in Conversions and CTR
“Compared to our control groups, we’ve seen a 5-6% uptick in our user activation using CleverTap. As user retention is the result of successful user engagement, we’ve had more weekly transacting users due to the increased user engagement,” notes Anand.Also, the team extensively performs A/B testing for all their campaigns and journeys, and they’ve seen an increase in user engagement in comparison to the control groups.
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Building an in-house engagement system takes a lot of effort from our tech and product teams. CleverTap adds a lot of value by removing a huge chunk of effort needed from our internal tech teams. Also, from a cost-benefit perspective, integrating CleverTap into our marketing tech stack makes perfect sense to us.At Kippa, we’ve benefitted from CleverTap in two ways: we’ve been able to set up user communications which are vital to digital organizations and also gauge how effective our campaigns have been.
Ketan Anand,Senior Growth Product Manager, Kippa
