Shaw

Academy

A leading online education platform, boosts

its revenue by 25% through multi-channel
student engagement

CASE STUDY 1
 Shaw THE OBJECTIVE
Academy
• Engage with the students timely and effectively
• Accelerate freemium to premium conversions
COMPANY • Retain existing students
PROFILE • Encourage the students to keep coming back to
the platform
Shaw Academy is a
leading online education
platform founded in 2012. THE CHALLENGES
The platform offers • Contextually engaging with students at scale
100+ skill development
• Mapping the students’ learning preferences with
courses to over 12 million
students. Whether you are the communication
a full time professional, • Motivating the students by sending unique,
part-time worker, personalized communication at scale
someone looking for a
career change, or starting
your own venture, Shaw THE SOLUTION
Academy makes it easy to
Shaw Academy adopts a hyper-personalized and
get real qualifications by
localized multi-channel approach to engage with its
empowering students all
over the world. students, encourage them to continue using the app,
and boost its revenue.
Shaw Academy’s mission
is to deliver great
education and provide
accessible, affordable
learning to everyone.

WebEngage has been crucial in revolutionizing our entire online user

experience. The platform has helped us deliver a highly-personalized
experience to our students consistently. The Customer Support and
Customer Success teams at WebEngage are supportive like no other
teams I have encountered.

­— Scott Newton
CCO at Shaw Academy

2
So why did Shaw Academy choose WebEngage?

• The product and marketing teams at Shaw Academy wanted to scale their reminder
communication framework (details in solution #1) from limited time slots of 7 PM GMT,
7 PM EST, 8 PM IST to 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.

• The teams at Shaw Academy chose WebEngage as they realized that WebEngage has
the perfect mission - to help consumer brands take their user engagement and growth to
the next level. Additionally, they also discovered that WebEngage was able to handle the
scale of millions.

With the expectations in mind, the WebEngage Onboarding team proactively coordinated with
the team at Shaw Academy to identify and discuss the use cases. As this was a process of
configuring the user data at a scale of millions, the teams did stumble upon a few hurdles.
But made it through with persistence and a desire to achieve growth, together.

After successful integration, Shaw Academy was ready to achieve its goals and implement
some primary use cases.

Read on to find out how Shaw Academy solves various use cases using WebEngage.

3
Goal #1: Increase class attendance

Shaw Academy’s goal was to boost student engagement with the platform and the most
obvious way to achieve it was to nudge the students to attend their classes on time. Shaw
Academy wanted to make sure that its students do not miss out on any learning opportunity
and complete their lessons on time, resulting in the improvement of Shaw Academy’s North
Star Metric - Lesson Attendance.

Challenge #1: Contextually engaging with students at scale

Contextual engagement is challenging because you have to identify the intent and behavior
of the student. You have to ask yourself questions like:

• What does the student expect from the platform?

• What does the student want to achieve after completing the course she has enrolled for?
• How does the student interact with the educators?
• What excites the students to attend the class?

To get answers to such questions to send contextual messages, all the student data had to
be collated at a single place to have a unified view of each student. Which was a daunting
task for the teams at Shaw Academy.

Solution #1: Action-based, timely, and hyper-personalized

communication
With a thorough understanding of the challenge, the WebEngage Customer Success (CSM)
team collaborated with the teams at Shaw Academy to come up with a multi-channel
communication approach using the WebEngage Journey Designer.

In order to implement the multi-channel student engagement strategy, the CSM team first
assisted Shaw Academy in consolidating the student data from across various touchpoints
and platforms (app and web) that Shaw Academy comprises.

4
Once the data was in place, the user engagement journey was designed to encourage
students to attend their classes on time.

5
Before we get into the functionality of this journey, did you notice something impressive?

Let us make it clear.

The journey above involves a two-step customization process.

The first step is the free + paid students check where the system checks whether the student
is a paid student or not.

The second step is the Active Segment Geo check where the system checks student (user)
attributes like Country and UTM campaign.

Now the obvious question here is - why is two-step customization required?

FIRST To ensure that not even a single user receives incorrect communication from
Shaw Academy. For example, if a student named ‘Jane’ has already attended a Digital
Marketing course, then Shaw Academy would want to avoid sending a nudge asking Jane to
attend a “Cooking” Course.

6
SECOND Shaw Academy, being a global brand, understands that every country has its
local laws, language, forms of currency, and payment. By adding this extra layer of user
attributes, Shaw Academy abides by its mission of delivering personalized learning at scale.

How does the reminder communication journey work?

The communication workflow starts only when the event ‘lesson reminder’ for every course is
received from the backend system of Shaw Academy. This is important as the course details
and schedule are managed on the Shaw Academy app and website. And the engagement
communication from WebEngage needs to go out based on these course schedules set by
Shaw Academy.

Lesson reminder is a custom event with attributes like -

• Course Name
• Lesson ID
• Lesson Name
• Lesson Number
• Registration ID and so on.

Subsequently, the wait block waits for the ‘scheduled lesson date’ to occur and then checks
whether the student is a free student or a paid student.

To contextually engage its students, Shaw Academy leveraged the following channels via this
journey:

• Email
• SMS
• Push
• Web Push and
• WhatsApp

7
Here’s how the communication sent via the Lesson reminder journey looks like:

Email Campaign

8
Web Push Campaign

WhatsApp Campaign

9
Action-based and localized communication at scale enables Shaw Academy to nudge and
persuade the students to attend their lessons on time and as a result, boost its North Star
Metric - Lesson Attendance.

Result

Shaw Academy has been able to drive significant results by having a Unified View of every
student and sending timely, hyper-personalized communication based on the student’s
preferences.

A 100% increase in Lesson Attendance through all channels combined

10% increase in Lesson Attendance through WhatsApp Campaigns

10
Goal #2: Accelerate free-to-paid course enrolments

Shaw Academy operates on a freemium model where it offers a 4-week free course on sign
up and then nudges the students to opt for a paid membership to continue uninterrupted
learning and unlock additional features. Given the nature of the business model, it’s critical
that the students complete their free trial and don’t abandon it midway.

Shaw Academy wanted to encourage its free students to continue their learning spree.
Precisely, following a two-step formula of motivating the students through timely nudges and
then converting them into paid students.

Challenge #2: Mapping the students’ learning preferences with

the communication

The challenge with triggering the purchase behavior is associated with ‘decision anxiety.’
With so many options and courses available on the platform, students often experience the
effect of choice overload. The students know that they want to make a choice, but simply
cannot because they are not able to capture and assess the available options to such a
degree that they can confidently make a purchase decision.

That’s where guided communication comes in to help students compare the options and
make them feel confident about their decision.

Solution #2: Engagement based on students’ course progress

To help Shaw Academy students make the right choice and invest in their future, the
WebEngage team introduced a comprehensive step by step process to make it easier for the
teams at Shaw Academy to understand the process and hence, execute better.

11
12
The aforementioned steps can be executed and automated via a journey on the WebEngage
dashboard and you can also set up conversion tracking by defining the conversion event on
the journey designer canvas.

Here’s how the communication sent from behavior based journey looks like:

Push Campaign

13
 Email Campaign

Once the student purchases a course, he automatically exits the journey with the exit trigger
‘course purchased.‘ (as shown in the image below)

Pro-tip: Exit Triggers can help you end the Journey prematurely for users who have achieved
the Journey’s end goal, mid-way through their Trip. Read more about Exit Triggers on the
WebEngage knowledgebase.

Result

Shaw Academy has been able to witness a 25% growth in revenue by engaging with the right
audience at the right time on the right channel.

14
Goal #3: Retain the existing students

With so many options available in the e-learning market, students are always on the lookout
for better offerings. Aligning with its mission of empowering students with affordable and
accessible learning, Shaw Academy always wanted to keep its offering unique and retain its
students as much as it can.

The team at Shaw Academy realizes that no two students are the same and hence, have
different learning styles and behaviour. To cater to such a diverse group of students, Shaw
Academy has this interesting feature where students can reschedule their lessons and
attend it at a later date and time as per their convenience. To facilitate such kind of flexibility,
the marketing team at Shaw Academy wanted to send out the right communication to the
right set of students to:

• Offer a flexible and convenient learning experience

• Reduce membership cancellations

Challenge #3: Motivating the students by sending unique,

personalized communication at scale

With millions of students on the platform, manually segregating them based on their
respective attributes was not only challenging but also extremely time-consuming. Even for
a minute, let’s assume that someone from Shaw Academy’s marketing team sits down to
take up the daunting task, chances are he/she will commit a mistake while mapping the right
communication to the right set of students.

So, can someone like Shaw Academy afford to send the incorrect message to its students?
Of course not!

15
Solution #3: Event-based automated student engagement

After carefully analyzing the students’ behavior on the platform, the teams at Shaw Academy
inferred that the students who have missed their classes are most vulnerable to becoming
inactive (dormant).

To engage and retain these students, the team at WebEngage along with the teams at Shaw
Academy decided to leverage WhatsApp as a channel of engagement.

16
Pro tip: You can localize your WhatsApp messages according to the user’s device locale
settings. Read more about it here.

Here’s how the class reschedule communication sent on WhatsApp looks like:

WhatsApp Campaign

Result

Shaw Academy has been able to retain its learners by engaging them on WhatsApp and has
also witnessed some amazing results.

• Offer a flexible and convenient learning experience

• Reduce membership cancellations by 20%

17
The WebEngage Effect

Shaw Academy has been able to offer a seamless and personalized learning experience
to its students using WebEngage. The team at Shaw Academy easily boosts its student
engagement resulting in improvement of its North Star Metric - Lesson Attendance.

18
Summary

WebEngage enables Shaw Academy to not only get a holistic view of its students, but also
engage meaningfully with the students at the right time.

At WebEngage, we are privileged to be associated with a vast portfolio of EdTech companies

such as Toppr, Unacademy, Testbook, Cuemath, and Simplilearn among others.

19
 Loved the case study?
Get a free product walkthrough. Talk to our automation
experts for custom solutions.

Schedule my free demo

WebEngage is a consumer data and a full-stack marketing automation platform that

empowers consumer tech brands to scale up their user engagement and retention initiatives.
Further enabling the customers to make more money from the existing users via hyper-
personalized, data-backed lifecycle campaigns across channels including SMS, Mobile
and Web push, In-app message, Web overlays, Surveys, Email, WhatsApp and Facebook
remarketing.

WebEngage serves thousands of consumer brands across industry verticals including

EdTech, FinTech, OTA, Gaming, E-commerce, OTT among others.

TALK TO US TODAY

+1 (408) 890-2392, +91 (022) 6110 2400 support@webengage.com

@Webengage /Webengage @Webengage @Webengage

20
World's First & Largest
Online University
Fair Platform,
UniConnect by
Leverage Edu, Drives
250% Uplift
in Student
Attendance

C A S E S T U DY

1
UniConnect by Leverage Edu, a first-of-its-kind online university
fair platform, helps over a lakh of Indian students to choose best-
in-class education available in India and abroad. The web platform
enables students to attend education fairs virtually and also interact
closely with the global universities of their choice.

GOALS
• Increase attendance for UniConnect’s online education fair
• Improve student engagement on the website

CHALLENGES
• Unifying leads from various sources
• Segmenting students as per their preferred universities,
courses,etc.
• Assisting students at every stage of their lifecycle

SOLUTION(S)
The concerned teams at WebEngage and UniConnect came together
to adopt a multi-channel, personalized and contextual engagement
approach. This approach has been benefitting UniConnect to engage
with the students in a timely manner via WhatsApp, Email and SMS.
Thus, driving more online education fair registrations and retention.

WebEngage is an extremely helpful platform for EdTech marketers

and Product Managers. Student engagement has increased
especially on the UniConnect platform significantly - 2.5X boost
in UniConnect’s attendance. We’re really impressed with the way
WebEngage experts constantly support our business growth!

—Akshay Chaturvedi
Founder & CEO, Leverage Edu

2
Introduction

Over the past few years, EdTech has emerged as one of the booming
sectors across several regions of the world. EdTech encompasses the
simple use of computers to teach math, submitting homework online,
upgrading skills using mobile apps, appearing for competitive exams
online and much more!

Various categories have also emerged in the Edtech sector making it

easier for students to carry out a wide range of educational practices
using the internet and a mobile phone or a laptop. The advent of
smartphones and the internet has now enabled companies to aid students
in exploring global education systems sitting right at home.

Leverage Edu, world’s leading platform for higher education and career
growth, is one such platform that empowers millions of school students
to transform their careers with online mentorship, university applications
and test preparation.

UniConnect by Leverage Edu, is the world's first & largest online university
fair platform, guides 1 million+ students to explore and get admissions
from over 200 global universities and colleges hosted by Leverage Edu.

3
At UniConnect, a student's lifecycle consists of four main stages

1. Lead to registration
The first stage kicks off when a prospective student
creates an account by signing up on UniConnect.
And moves closer towards registering for an online
university fair.

2. Profile completion
When the registered user fills in necessary information such as
current education level, preferred education destination/university,
field of study, session of admission and so on to complete the profile.

3. University exploration
At this stage, the students look for the desired universities and the
details such as scholarship programs, location, admission criteria
and so on. And select the university.

4. Online education fair participation

The final stage involves the students attending the online
education fairs scheduled for different universities by
UniConnect.

So, engaging with the students at every stage of their lifecycle in a timely and hyper-
personalized manner at scale encouraged the team at UniConnect to look for a robust
marketing tool which would automate UniConnect’s student engagement initiatives
seamlessly. Soon, the team at UniConnect got in touch with the WebEngage representatives
and after a detailed discussion, decided to collaborate with WebEngage’s marketing
automation stack.

Read on to find out how UniConnect has been able to overcome various challenges and
continue to drive significant results with the help of WebEngage Solutions for EdTech.

4
Goals:
UniConnect’s primary goals include:

1. Provide personalized and expert mentorship, and a seamless online education fair
experience to the students. It also aims to administer a platform that enables the students
to interact with the universities, discover various courses and attend scheduled university-
specific fairs online.

2. Increase student attendance for the online education fairs by engaging with the students
at every stage of their lifecycle on the UniConnect platform.

Challenges:
The team at UniConnect faced major challenges that centered around:

Unifying leads from various sources into one platform

At UniConnect prospects land onto the website through various sources such as social
media, organic search, word of mouth, and so on. So, keeping a track of all the data points
and then collating them into one file manually is challenging. So, the team at UniConnect
wanted to automate this process and speed up their engagement initiatives.

Creating micro-segments of students based on their preferred universities

With over a database of 6 lakh students mapping every students’ university of choice and then
updating them about the upcoming online education fairs individually is difficult. So, the team
at Uniconnect wanted to segment every student as per their university preference early on.

Assisting students at every stage of their lifecycle at scale

The team at UniConnect wanted to make sure that every student goes through a seamless
and personalized experience on the UniConnect platform right from the time they register on
the platform. But, with the growing students’ base, engaging with them on a personal level
manually calls from great time and resource allocation which is a difficult feat if done at a
massive scale like UniConnect does.

5
Solution(s)

Accelerating profile completions through in-the-moment student

engagement

UniConnect acquires students from multiple sources like Direct, Referral, Social (Facebook,
Instagram, etc.) and more. When the student visits the UniConnect website, he/she first
needs to create an account and provide basic details like name, phone number, Email ID, etc.

In the next step, the student is then required to complete their Event Profile on the
UniConnect website to register for the fair and join the preferred university booth at the day
of the event.

Event Profile

State City

Select City

Gender
Male Female Others

Your Current Education Level

Select

Your Preferred Study Location(s)

Please Select

Your Preferred field(s) of study

Please Select

Your Preferred session of admission

Jan 2021 Fed 2021 May 2021 Sep 2021 2022

Percentage of marks in Class 12

Have you taken any English Proficiency Tests (IELTS/TOEFL/PTE)?

Yes No

Percentage of marks in English subject in Class 12

Do you have any work experience?

Yes No

Save profile

6
But the UniConnect team observed that a lot of students don't complete their profile and
drop-off before registering for an online education fair.

To tackle this challenge, the UniConnect team leverages the WebEngage Journey Designer
along with the dynamic segmentation capability to contextually engage with these students
and encourage them to complete their profile.

The UniConnect team has created dynamic segments based on students’ source of
acquisition. They are dynamic in the sense that WebEngage tracks students’ actions in real-
time. So students get added/removed from the segments as and when their actions match/
don't match the rules of a particular segment.

For example, if a student lands on the UniConnect’s website via Facebook, then the student is
automatically bucketed under the ‘UniConnect - Facebook Leads’ segment.

Sample Segment

Segment UniConnect - Lead Gen contains users

with User Attribute, Medium contains UniConnect Lead - Facebook

This helps the UniConnect team to automate the segmentation of students at scale,
eliminate errors and save time.

Now, to contextually engage with these students coming from various sources at scale, the
UniConnect team then runs different student engagement journeys using the WebEngage
Journey Designer for each of these segments.

Here's a glimpse of one of the student engagement journeys run for the segment of students
who visit the UniConnect website via Facebook ads:

When User enters:

UniConnect Facebook Send WhatsApp
Lead Gen....

Yes On send

Check if User is
End Journey
Reachable on WhatsApp

7
In the journey, as soon as the student enters the segment, the system checks if he/she is
reachable on WhatsApp. If yes, a personalized WhatsApp message is then delivered to him/
her - nudging him/her to complete the profile.

Why use WhatsApp for EdTech student engagement?

Have instant, two-way communication with students

Do cross-border, multilingual communication

Add a humanized touch to your communication

Send multimedia messages

Moreover, just like all the other channels, creating WhatsApp campaigns on the WebEngage
dashboard is super easy and hassle-free:

5 Easy Steps to Send WhatsApp Messages using WebEngage

Get your WhatsApp Business Account approved

Get your message templates whitelisted by Facebook

Collect user opt-ins

Integrate the WhatsApp Service Provider(s) with WebEngage

Upload the whitelisted templates on the WebEngage dashboard

and start sending out messages on WhatsApp

8
Here’s how the WhatsApp messages can be personalized on the WebEngage dashboard
after the template is whitelisted:

TEMPLATE NAME UniconnectLead

TEMPLATE TEXT Hey {{1}} Thanks for registering for UniConnect - world's first & largest online
university fair platform powered by Leverage Edu on {{2}}. Click here {{3}} to
complete your profile and attend the online education fair you signed up for.
You can reach out to {{4}} on {{5}} for more assistance!
Best Regards, Team Leverage Edu

VARIABLES {{1}} = {{user[’system’][’first_name’]}}

{{2}} = January 26th

{{3}} = https://uniconnect.leverageedu.com/event

{{4}} = Our experts

{{5}} = +91-892971****

As seen above, the message template consists of variables’ numbers which are used as
placeholders. These variables are then substituted with the information mentioned in the
‘Variables’ section. Thus making the message customized and targeted.

So here’s how the WhatsApp message appears for the end user i.e. the student who
becomes a part of this particular journey.

9
 WhatsApp
4:13

Leverage Edu

Hey Sara!

Thanks for registering for UniConnect -

world's first & largest online university
fair platform powered by Leverage Edu
on January 26.

Click here to complete your profile and

attend the online education fair you
signed up for. You can reach out to our
experts on +91 - 892971**** for more
assistance!

Best Regards,
Team Leverage Edu

The students are similarly targeted on various channels viz Email, SMS, etc. depending
on their channel reachability. A similar drill is followed for all the leads coming in from
various sources - to ensure in-the-moment engagement and encourage maximum profile
completions on the same day the lead visits the UniConnect website.

Another interesting bit about this journey is that the team at UniConnect has enabled
Frequency Capping on the WebEngage dashboard. Frequency Capping is a simple one-time
setup that helps UniConnect to avoid spamming its students by controlling the number of
messages they receive within a day, week and month, spaced out evenly over a time gap.

Result:
The UniConnect team has been able to witness a 2.5X boost in students registering
for online fairs on the same day of the student’s first visit through in-the-moment
student engagement using dynamic segments and contextual journeys on the
WebEngage dashboard.

10
 2. Aiding the students with university exploration through automated
student engagement campaigns

Providing unbeatable assistance to every student coming to the UniConnect platform lies at
the heart of UniConnect’s student experience. So, the team at UniConnect aims at providing
all the necessary information to the students who show interest in exploring particular
universities.

Doing this helps the students to understand their chosen university's application, admission
procedures, additional facilities that are available at the university campus, the scholarship
criteria, the fee structure and much more.

However, before onboarding WebEngage, the assistance around the university exploration
was carried out by the Telemarketing team at UniConnect. The telemarketers would provide
one-to-one telephonic consultations to every student and encourage them to register for the
online fair held on UniConnect by the student’s chosen university.

This meant spending lengthy human hours on calls and deploying a huge team of
telemarketers to reach out to lakhs of students.

So, after adopting WebEngage, the Marketing team at UniConnect started running automated,
multi-channel campaigns to provide all the university-related information to the students.
Gradually reducing manual intervention, cutting down its cost of telemarketing and ensuring
timely communication at scale.

At UniConnect, we have been able to save massive man-hours

and efforts through automated, timely and hyper-personalized
campaigns. We’ve witnessed a striking 16% conversion rate
through WhatsApp as an engagement channel!

—Digvijay Gagneja
Chief Operating Officer, Leverage Edu

11
Email

Hi Kelly,

Here’s everything you need to know about your preferred university - University
of Liverpool, UK

About the University

The University of Liverpool is a public university that has always believed in the
advancement of learning and ennoblement of life. The University of Liverpool
offers a plethora of courses at its campuses at Liverpool, China, London along
with a wide range of online programs.

Interesting facts:
• The University of Liverpool is spread across 100 acres of land in Liverpool and
has about 192 buildings as part of the infrastructure.
• There are more than 400 undergraduate and postgraduate courses offered by
the University of Liverpool.

Register for the online education fair

Best Regards,
Team Leverage Edu

12
 Result:
By automating the students engagement process to assist the students with crucial
information about the universities, the team at Uniconnect has been able to cut
down manual intervention, save massive man hours and reduce its telemarketing
cost by 25%.

3. Maximizing online fair registrations through timely, hyper-

personalized nudges

To create sustainable business growth, it’s important for the team at UniConnect to improve its
North Star Metric i.e. Student Attendance For Online Fairs.

In order to drive online fair registrations, the Marketing team at UniConnect sends a series of hyper-
personalized and timely nudges to the students, using the WebEngage dashboard. The nudges are
sent to remind the students about the upcoming online education fair that they register for.

The nudges are sent out at different time intervals leading up to the day of the fair. The series
includes a set of nudges, across multiple channels, starting from a week prior to D-day leading up
to one hour before the event goes LIVE. This helps in creating FOMO and a timely recall among the
students encouraging them to attend the online education fair on the scheduled dates and timings.

Here are some samples of the hyper-personalized communication sent via the student engagement
campaigns across various channels using the WebEngage dashboard:

Email

1 Daytotogo!
1 Day go!
India’s biggest
India's biggest
Online University Fair
Online 10TH
University Fair
SEPT | 3-6 PM IST

10TH SEPT | 3-6 PM IST

The clock’s ticking,

what are you waiting for?

13
WhatsApp
4:13

Leverage Edu

Hey Joe!

Thanks for being a part of the UniConnect

Students Community!

The webinar of your choice: FinTech & The

Future Of Finance by University of Liverpool
is LIVE now!

Join the webinar here:

uniconnect.leverage.com/financeonlinewebi......

We're happy to help you take the first step

towards your future in Fintech!

Team Leverage Edu 5:50 PM

SMS

2h ago

Hey Jenny!

Just 2 hours to go for the FinTech & The Future Of

Finance session by the University of Liverpool.

Here’s the link for the webinar of your choice:

uniconnect.leverage.com/financeonlinewebi......

Looking forward to hosting you at UniConnect's

online fair!

Regards,
Team Leverage Edu

14
Apart from automating the process of sending timely nudges to the students, the team at
UniConnect further reduces the massive man hours of manually designing personalized
Emails by using the simple drag-and-drop email editor on the WebEngage dashboard. With
the help of the drag-and-drop editor, the team at UniConnect can use the custom templates,
hyperlink relevant content, personalize the emails, add images and more in a jiffy!

Result:
Personalized and timely nudges leading up to the day of the online fair has enabled
UniConnect to drive maximum attendance and witness some amazing results.

250% uplift in UniConnect’s online education fair attendance

28% increase in MoM (Month-on-Month) registrations
16% conversion rate through WhatsApp campaigns

Sending timely, multi-channel and hyper-personalized communication to the students at each

stage of their lifecycle has helped Uniconnect to up its user engagement game and drive
significant results.

15
The Effect on

250% uplift in online education fair

attendance

2.5X boost in fair registrations on

Day 1

28% increase in month-on-month

registrations

25% reduction in telemarketing cost

16%
conversion rate through
WhatsApp campaigns

16
 Loved the case study?
Get a free product walkthrough. Talk to our automation
experts for custom solutions.

Schedule my free demo

WebEngage is a consumer data and a full-stack marketing automation platform that

empowers consumer tech brands to scale up their user engagement and retention initiatives.
Further enabling the customers to make more money from the existing users via hyper-
personalized, data-backed lifecycle campaigns across channels including SMS, Mobile
and Web push, In-app message, Web overlays, Surveys, Email, WhatsApp and Facebook
remarketing.

WebEngage serves thousands of consumer brands across industry verticals including

EdTech, FinTech, OTA, Gaming, E-commerce, OTT among others.

TALK TO US TODAY

+1 (408) 890-2392, +91 (022) 6110 2400 support@webengage.com

@Webengage /Webengage @Webengage @Webengage

17
How Cuemath reinvented data
consolidation and scaled cross-
channel communication with
WebEngage

CASESTUDY
1
 THE OBJECTIVE
• Use the right technology for every aspect of
the platform
• Resolve data quality issues
• Build long-term and profitable relationship
COMPANY
with users
PROFILE
• Ensure extensibility and portability for
Founded in 2013, Cuemath
future expansions
is an interactive, after-
school math excellence
program that brings
together the best of THE CHALLENGES
technology and personal
• Data consolidation
teaching in India.
• Product communication

With so much potential • Customer - Consumer identification

in the market, Cuemath • Teacher retention
extensively invested in its Which led to:
Cuemath Learning System • Late fee payments
(CLS), a multi-format
• High churn rate
approach that provides
children with an engaging • Low student-teacher interaction
and holistic learning • Longer testing and execution cycles
experience.
THE SOLUTION

After several brainstorming sessions, WebEngage

came up with the idea of creating unique accounts for
each entity - students, parents, and teachers. Besides
solving the current challenges, this model aligned with
their principles and supported future business growth.

Being able to plug in different entities, products and channels, analyze,

and act upon the results from one single dashboard significantly
improved our productivity and efficiency. Owing to WebEngage’s
unrivalled and flexible account management, we were successful in
using the dashboard for all product and sales marketing use-cases.

­— Anushray Gupta
CTO at Cuemath

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The Student Enrollment Process

So far, Cuemath has about 50k+ students enrolled in 2mn+ math classes across the country.
Here’s how a typical student enrollment process works:

Once a child enrolls in an offline learning center (for KG to grade 6th) or an online class
(grade 7th to 10th) he becomes a ‘student’. Parents can monitor their child’s progress and
make payments on the website or the Cueparent app.

Hence for Cuemath, while the parents always initiate the transaction, it’s the students who
become the end consumers of the product.

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The Challenge for Cuemath

Though the final delivery was a mix of offline and online learning, Cuemath needed
technology for every aspect of their platform. Whether it was the way students interacted
with the platform, how parents monitored their kids’ progress on the app, or how the teachers
ran the centers.

In the customer video shown below, Anushray Gupta, CTO at Cuemath, shared the potential
challenges this posed to Cuemath’s product-marketing strategy.

Challenge #1: Data consolidation and communication

Cuemath’s active student base of 50k+ interacted across channels (online courses and
offline learning centers), devices and apps.

• While the online students used the website, the offline centers had students solving
interactive puzzles/quizzes on a tablet device.
• The tablet came with a pre-installed Cueteacher app, wherein the teacher created
profiles for each student. It helped track each student’s progress independently and
create personalized learning plans for them.
• Parents could use the website log in or install the Cueparent app to access their kid’s
profile and make payments quickly.

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To put things in perspective, these are three separate entities, students + parents + teachers
in a single business interacting across 6 different platforms.

When different technologies were used to pull data from these sources, the results were rarely
unified, making it extremely difficult to use. Cuemath needed a system that could pull all the
data at one place and present a holistic view of each user.

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 • For example, if a parent’s profile had their kid’s name, along with other important
attributes like acquisition source, locality, etc. at one place, Cuemath could easily group
parents staying in a particular area and send an email about a test-series at a nearby
learning center to them.

• Similarly, they could automate other product communication like student milestones,
progress reports, course updates, etc.

When most CRM and marketing automation platforms could not tackle these multi-sided
scenarios, Cuemath decided to join hands with WebEngage.

The Solution: Consolidation of data

WebEngage’s website and app SDK enabled Cuemath to capture all user events. These were
later used to personalize user experiences across all platforms.

As the next step, the Onboarding team at WebEngage suggested Cuemath create separate
accounts for teacher, parent, and student on the WebEngage dashboard.

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Each account served a unique purpose:

• A user on the student account would be a student exclusively. Similarly, a user on the
parent account would be a parent.
• The student account tracked the activities of the student across all platforms (website,
Cuestudent app).
• As students were the end consumers, this account became the primary source of data.
All the personalization elements were present in this account, eg: name, grade, photo,
etc.
• Each student had a unique ID that would span across their entire lifecycle. Lifecycle
stages like ‘student-lead’ or ‘student’ were kept as attributes, under the same ID.
• Similarly, a parent ID had attributes that defined their acquisition source, address,
locality, etc. It could also have their child’s name as one of the attributes.
• The parent account was used to send communication to parents.
• The teacher account contained unique information about teachers, like onboarding date,
course names, etc. It was used to communicate with the teachers alone.

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Challenge #2: The Customer - Consumer complexity

It is common for brands to track interactions their consumers have with them and direct
each marketing/product activity towards influencing consumer behavior, i.e., induce
consumers in such a way that they take action intended by the marketer/product manager. It
could be a purchase, sign-up, fee-payment, form download, course completion, etc.

Now here’s where it started to get tricky. If Cuemath simply concentrated on their consumer,
they would have ended up sending fee payment reminders and performance reports to
6-year-olds!

For the majority of cases, Cuemath had to track a student’s activity but influence the buying
decision of the parent.

Most CRM and marketing tools were not built to automate this kind of multi-sided
communication. The only option was manually segmenting profiles and sending out ad-hoc
communication to them.

For example, to send a fee-payment reminder to parents, Cuemath would first filter a list of
‘parent profiles’ whose fee-payment was due today. Next, they would manually send an email
to them. Similarly, for the following day, they would procure a new list, and trigger another
email. Often,
• The list would not be accurate
• The email lacked personalization elements (student’s name, course, dates, amount, etc.)
• The entire process would take time and effort.

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The Solution: Event-linking for Multi-sided Communication

The next step was to ensure necessary data from one account flowed to another. For
example, if a student’s account had a payment due, the information should be immediately
relayed to the parent’s account for necessary action.

WebEngage specifically employed an onboarding manager to deploy a robust structure that

managed the inter-communication between each account. This was made possible by the
use of powerful user journeys and event-linking.

Event translation using WebEngage gave the most comprehensive view of a user and
assisted right product communication

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As soon as a student’s fee payment was due, the student account would trigger an API call
to send the necessary event details to the parent’s profile in the parent account. The parent
account would then trigger a reminder email to the parent.

On the product front, this resolved data quality issues that could have compromised the
customer experience. On the business front, it ensured extensibility and portability for future
expansions and integrations.

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Challenge #3: The teacher’s life-cycle

On top of this, was a layer of a teacher’s lifecycle. Teachers at offline learning centers could
enroll students organically to their classes. Think of this as a hyper-local learning model,
where students connected with teachers who belonged to the same geographical location.

When the offline centers became a vital source of revenue growth, Cuemath decided to invest
resources in empowering and retaining teachers on the platform for the long-term.

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The Solution - Sophisticated automation and execution

Once Webengage established the inter-communication between each entity, Cuemath

designed sophisticated conversion strategies across different devices, channels, and touch-
points:

1. Teacher enrollment

• After initiating profile creation, the teacher adds other information like personal
details, work experience, educational qualifications, etc. Until they submit the
complete profile, recurring emails were sent to them.

2. Onboarding messages

• On final form submission, Cuemath reviewed the profiles, and trained the teachers,
before making their profile live on the website. Teachers were onboarded via a series
of how-tos and guides.
•
3. Teacher-student engagement

• Cuemath sent “Your teacher has just released a new video” message to students to
increase content viewership and encourage active teacher-student engagement.

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The Impact

With WebEngage’s powerful cross-channel automation, Cuemath executed and improved

their product and marketing strategies.

The multi-sided communication model became essential to Cuemath’s growth - not just
for the click-through-rates and website visits, but softer aspects like parents’ conviction
in the platform. When monthly reports showed the child’s progress in the subject, parents
recognized Cuemath’s impact on their child’s life. The result was increased engagement,
word of mouth and revenue.

The email CTRs increased by 30%, and fee-payments went up by 15%. Moreover, the teacher
enrollment programmes generated 30% more submissions from teachers, with each teacher
bringing in 4-6 students to their classroom.

This model also served as a blueprint for future team alignment. As the business grew,
Cuemath assigned each entity to a different team. Defined accounts made it easier for each
team to concentrate on their vertical and work towards common goals.

Also read: Unmarketing Cloud For Ed-Tech Businesses

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Final Thoughts

Today, client expectations are higher than ever. It’s no longer acceptable to just meet them
where they are. One needs to give them options and be ready to greet them when they are
ready.

WebEngage’s long-term vision and experience with a plethora of ed-tech clients made them
stand apart from all other marketing workflow tools. Their foresight proved to be a game
changer for Cuemath.

With multi-sided communication becoming a necessity for ed-tech and other industries,
WebEngage is slated to come up with a better version of their product to further elevate the
customer experience. Get in touch with the team to know more about this product update
and how it can impact your business!

Also read: Unmarketing Cloud For Ed-Tech Businesses

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