How YouNow built a Holistic Communications Strategy to Engage with Millions of Community Members

Reliance on multiple automation platforms

Initially, YouNow relied on 4 different platforms to create and orchestrate email and push campaigns. They faced the challenge of managing these diverse platforms along with additional costs of software, API integrations, and technical support.

No visibility into campaign performance

While YouNow had automatic email and push campaigns before CleverTap, they lacked clear visibility on how their campaigns were performing. This lack of knowledge around open and click rates hampered their ability to make data-driven decisions and improve marketing ROI.

Limited capabilities in modifying campaigns

Another bottleneck was the inability to refine their campaigns or make changes without involving their engineering teams. As a startup with a product backlog, it was taxing to get engineers working on the marketing communications front. The effort was not sustainable.

The KPIs for the marketing communication function at YouNow include open rates for emails and click-through rates for push campaigns. A segment-based breakdown of all their campaign performance also helps them immensely in streamlining their marketing efforts. When it comes to growth, important metrics for them are weekly active users, weekly revenue, and retention.

With CleverTap’s complete engagement toolkit, they now create a consistent brand experience for customers wherever they may be — inside or outside the app.

Journeys

YouNow builds and orchestrates a sophisticated sequence of triggered campaigns across channels like email and push notifications using journeys. The journeys they’ve created are either based on past in-app behavior or based on real-time actions performed by users.

One of their journeys is to retain new users. Once a user creates an account, a welcome email is sent, followed by another email sent a couple of days later educating the users about the platform. If the user doesn’t open the email, they send a push notification.

Since YouNow is available in multiple languages, they personalize messages based on the user’s preferred language, followed by creating a default message copy and creating further copies based on user properties under the same campaign. Also, since CleverTap is compatible with multiple languages, they can create campaigns in multiple languages.

Campaigns

YouNow relies on email and push notification campaigns to engage with users. A campaign that is super successful for them is their daily login reminder, which also happens to be their most frequent campaign. They’ve also tested some retention email campaigns targeting active users who haven’t spent money on the platform, nudging them to engage with bars (in-app currency) and subscriptions.

With comprehensive campaign analytics, they maximize the impact of their campaigns by optimizing the content, timing, and reach of their messages. The ability to preview their campaigns in terms of the UI and how the messaging will look on different devices has worked well. The intuitive email editor also helps them edit and test content on the fly.

YouNow sends monthly newsletters to their user base highlighting specific broadcasters, new events, and features on the platform. This helps foster a sense of community within the platform.

Segmentation

Initially, the journeys they had created were targeted to a broad user base. They used to send daily emails to over 200,000 users, many of whom were no longer active. By segmenting users based on past behavior or real-time actions and sending campaigns to a targeted audience, they now ensure that their messages reach users who are active on the platform.

Since integrating CleverTap, YouNow has seen weekly average users increase 22% month-over-month, with similar increases in user engagement on the platform. By tweaking the content in their campaigns or by targeting more specific segments, they have been able to better communicate the most effective messages possible via the most appropriate channels to the proper cohorts. The team has seen an improvement in open rates and click-through-rates.