Industry Overview

EdTech is one of the most flourishing startup sectors in India. It beholds a large addressable audience, growing investor interest, increasing paid subscriptions, and intense competition. A recent Google-KPMG report estimates the overall sector to grow 8x and reach $2 billion by 2021. The paid subscriptions are likely to reach 9.6 million with 6x growth since 2016.

About Toppr

Toppr is India’s booming after-school learning app for 5th to 12th-grade students. It supplements classroom learning with interactive lectures, useful practice materials, regular tests & doubt-solving sessions to make learning personalized for the students.

Launched in 2013, Toppr started off as a platform specifically focused on helping students prepare for competitive exams such as IIT-JEE, AIIMS, BITSAT, and many more. Once Toppr realized a pool of opportunities that exist in the business, they shifted their focus towards students of both junior and senior classes beginning from class 5 to class 12. 

In order to provide exceptional learning experiences to all the students, Toppr scaled up its educational resources drastically:

• 2 million+ pieces of learning materials provided
• Over 4 million doubts solved
• More than 3 million tests taken by students
• 70K educational videos uploaded
• 15 lakh+ questions and solutions provided

Shortly after raising $35 million in 2019, Toppr is all geared up to hit 20 million users (approximately) in 2020.

Objective

Equip every student with personalized learning 

Toppr believes that every student is unique and possesses different learning needs. Thus, Toppr needs to lay a prime focus on an adaptive learning approach that meaningfully sharpens every student’s skill sets. 

With adaptive learning functionality, the app adapts itself to the student’s behavior; thus, empowering them to modify and customize their learning experience on the Toppr app.

Challenges

1. Running quick and timely experiments to understand user behavior 

Experimentation is an important tool for product teams to dive deep into the users’ product expectations. 

Hence, to understand the users’ behavior at Toppr accurately, they introduced new features and further measured its user-impact. However, in order to stay abreast of their users’ expectations, Toppr was required to boost the speed at which the experimentation process functioned. 

2. Sending relevant learning content to the students

With Toppr’s user base swelling day-by-day, it became necessary and challenging for them to collate all the relevant content and send it to appropriate user segments in the form of reminders or notifications. Sending such targeted and timely communication throughout the student’s life cycle at Toppr was essential in order to build powerful engagement.  

Moreover, every student used the app at their own pace, thanks to the adaptive learning approach here. Hence, it was important to share content with them at a time when it’s most useful to them. This called for a more granular approach to engagement. 

3. Enabling unassisted sales

An increase in Toppr’s user-base meant an increase in query solving efforts. If a student encounters issues at the point of sale, then troubleshooting all those doubts became Toppr’s liability. 

Also, managing a vast database is a challenge if done manually especially, while streamlining the entire communication or keeping a tab on it constantly. Hence, scaling up its subscription-based acquisition with minimal human assistance was the need of the hour for Toppr. 

Solutions

After sifting through a bunch of marketing automation services, Toppr decided to go ahead with WebEngage as a tool of choice in order to make overcoming challenges easy. 

The teams at Toppr and WebEngage came together and plotted a customized solution for the challenges Toppr lived through. These solutions include: 

1. Driving content discovery and incorporating personalization

Building a strong user-base of 8 million and aiming to add another 12 million shortly, requires systematic segmentation of these users based on their behavior, preferences, and performance. 

WebEngage understood this situation well and suggested – intelligent user segmentation and personalized communication for engagement as an apt solution. 

While implementing the solution, Toppr collated all its user data and created relevant segments on their WebEngage dashboard. These segments are attested to an event trigger. This means, whenever the user performs any action on the learning app, a particular event is triggered, and the user gets automatically grouped under the relevant segment. 

For example, if user X performed an action tagged as event 5, then this particular user will be automatically grouped under segment B.

Note: E1, E2, E3….E12 stand for Event 1, Event 2, Event 3….Event 12.

Such action-based segmentation is backed by the RFM (Recency, Frequency, and Monetisation) model, which played a major role in amplifying Toppr’s product marketing campaigns.

Such detailed segmentation further enabled Toppr to send personalized communications to its users. As per the report, the lack of content relevancy generates 83% lower response rates. Hence, providing personalized experiences to users was critical for Toppr. 

For example, if Toppr’s data suggests that a particular student has an extensive browsing history related to Maths then, the next time he reopens the mobile app, he’ll receive communication mainly related to Maths. This is because Toppr first understood the student’s behavior very well and then sent personalized content to the student accordingly. 

Content personalization is not just limited to the in-app communication channel. Toppr sends out timely and contextual learning material to its users via push notifications channel along with SMS and email. This multi-channel communication approach adopted by Toppr not only helps them to constantly engage with their users but also supports them to improve their retention metrics.  

Personalized communication and highly targeted user segmentation lead to 133% uplift in Toppr’s conversions.

Joe Kochitty

VP Product, Toppr

WebEngage has transformed our user engagement and redefined the way we solve every student’s problems. We’ve seen that sending contextual messages to users really helps in improving engagement metrics.

2. Enabling faster testing cycles

Experimentation plays an important role when it comes to keeping up with Toppr’s DNA of experimentation. And experimentation demands quick decision making and implementation process. Hence, it was important for Toppr to conduct these experiments at Godspeed. 

WebEngage’s dashboard enabled Toppr to measure data in a real-time basis. This feature helped Toppr to analyze the impact or result of every experiment they rolled out quickly. By achieving quick results, Toppr was able to make all the required iterations in the relevant features in a lesser time frame than before.   

3. Steering user adoption

User adoption, also known as user onboarding, is the process of understanding the user’s readiness to experience a new product or service. It is one of the most important aspects of a customer’s lifecycle. If the adoption process is not smooth enough, then the chances of users relaunching the mobile app or revisiting the website are narrow. 

In Toppr’s case, user adoption was required for two major product upgrades – a monthly pricing model and a refer-and-earn program. 

With WebEngage by its side, Toppr was able to send automated and highly targeted push notifications and in-app campaigns to its users at the right time. These automated campaigns helped Toppr to engage with its users at appropriate lifecycle stages without much manual effort. 

Apart from all the above feature solutions provided by WebEngage, affection for the ‘journey designer’ grew profoundly at Toppr. 

Joe Kochitty

VP Product, Toppr

The journey designer allows us to segment users based on the actions they have performed on our mobile app and configure specific user journeys for various scenarios from a single place. This is the most used feature by almost all the teams at Toppr.

Results

WebEngage empowered Toppr to boost its user engagement significantly. Some of their notable results include: 

• More than 2-3 experiments are run daily (higher than their usual number of experiments) 
• The average time spent by students on the Toppr app increased to 120 mins/day (beyond the industry benchmark of 40 mins/day)

Along with the results mentioned above, here are some additional highlights: 

At WebEngage, we are privileged to be associated with a vast portfolio of EdTech companies such as Toppr, Unacademy, Testbook, Cuemath, and Shaw Academy to help them execute their user engagement and retention marketing initiatives. 

Want to take your EdTech user engagement to the next level? – Schedule A Demo