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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
“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.
Ketan Anand, Senior Growth Product Manager, Kippa 
