Helping Businesses Grow with CleverTap
By: Decode Staff
Tags: Mobile Apps, Marketing, Technology, Mobile Marketing, Startup

Marketers these days often measure their products’ lifetime value in short-term cycles, focusing more on user acquisition than retention. They tend to not assign a lot of value to the consumers’ long-term loyalty. Moreover, they often skip the campaigns that trigger user engagement and increased usage frequency. At the same time, there is no doubt that user acquisition is vital for the success of a new app or a website. In fact, most marketers focus mainly on user attraction. The higher the number of downloads of the app, the more successful their product is. To a certain limit, this thinking gives a great starting point. However, these companies fail to understand how easily and quickly users get distracted. This mindset results in missed opportunities to develop individual user journeys for consumers.

More and more research suggests that user retention is the foundation of any business’ growth. This is basically the mantra of CleverTap, a mobile marketing platform with app-marketing automation, helping marketers retain their loyal consumer base. App user retention is more than just keeping your mobile app users. It also involves building relationships with the users and showing them that they play an important role in your business and brand identity.

Foundation & Growth

CleverTap is a B2B, SaaS-based(software-as-a-service-based) mobile analytics and mobile marketing company which helps brands build valuable, long-term relationships with their users. They help them to access the users’ behavioural analytics to understand who their customers are. They provide a platform which enables the mobile marketers to analyse, identify, categorise, engage, and measure their marketing efforts.

Founded in 2013, by Anand Jain, Sunil Thomas, and Suresh Kondamudi, CleverTap now provides services to over 8000 companies, all over the world. They are currently based in Mountain View, California. The founding trio met during their stint at Network18 in 2013. They acquired their first customer, BookMyShow within 6 months of inception. Now they provide their services to global giants like McDonald’s, SONY, ESPN, Domino’s, Vodafone, and 7Eleven!

CleverTap is a customer lifecycle management platform for consumer brands across multiple verticals. Their client base varies from travel and transportation to media and entertainment, and even to F&B and e-commerce. With onboarding, engagement, retention, and monetisation, CleverTap helps brands personalise their customers’ journey at scale.

Tools For Long-Term Growth

The mobile marketing platform, CleverTap puts together real-time consumer insights, a powerful segmentation engine, and robust engagement tools into one single platform. Through this, it becomes easy for marketers to collect, analyse, and act on consumer insights within no time.

CleverTap platform offers all the relevant tools and features that the B2C companies need, to drive their long-term growth.

- Customer Data Platform: This feature helps the brand understand how their consumers interact across platforms. This also helps in creating strategies to enhance the consumer experience for brands. This way, the marketers generate a deeper understanding of the users and how they interact with their product.

- Automated Segmentation: CleverTap uses artificial intelligence to divide the brand’s users based on recency, frequency, user intent, and user preferences. This way, the brands can easily target their consumer base.

- Campaign Optimisation: This feature helps build powerful and smooth user experiences. It uses triggered campaigns which are activated by real-time user activity and inactivity. They build and deliver omnichannel campaigns, based on user behaviour, location, and lifecycle stage based on the data from user journeys. The push notification amplification tool is used to drive particular messages so that the users do not miss out on important notices.

- Audience Analytics: It helps the brands to identify their users, their location, when do they drop off, etc. Tools like Funnels, Flows, Cohort Analysis, Uninstall Tracking, come in handy to better understand their users.

- Omnichannel Engagement: The marketers can easily classify their campaigns across 12 channels, which includes push notifications, in-app messages, email, Google Ads, etc.

- Data Privacy and Security: An all-in-one platform which is trusted by brands worldwide for complete privacy, compliance, risk management, and scalability.

From 1 to 8000

CleverTap was formed from the idea of customer engagement that is personalised, contextual and non-intrusive. Before CleverTap, Jain found that not many brands were working to understand consumer behaviour. Their product went out in the market, only after ensuring that it was completely evaluated at various levels, and efficient across all platforms. They made a series of test runs to validate the potency and troubleshoot every bug, before their launch. After successful tests, they made their SaaS available to users.

In 2013, 6 months after their launch, when they got on board with BookMyShow, the only services they offered were analytics, user segmentation, and user engagement. CleverTap’s biggest turning point was when India’s largest telecom player, Reliance Jio, got on board. Once businesses started adopting CleverTap, they realised that the platform was able to eliminate data silos and made a unified user journey accessible to marketers.

The company now claims to have their Software Development Kit (SDK) installed in over 8,000 apps and their clientele appears to be global. With a huge market in Asia, CleverTap puts a particular focus on mobile phones because markets today, are all about personal devices. They claim to have seen customer growth by 2 times in the past year, with an average of 8 billion user actions processed each day. They have also helped to generate $2 billion of revenue for their clients. It recently opened its APAC HQ in Singapore and expanded its presence in the US and Europe as well, to cater to rapidly-scaling brands.

Funding & Market Value

The San Francisco and Mumbai-based mobile marketing platform, CleverTap is valued over $385 million, more than double of what it was in 2018. Back in 2015, the company got its first investors, Accel and Sequoia, on board. They raised an amount of $26 million in Series B funding, led by Sequoia and Tiger Global Management, with support from Accel as well.

In their Series C funding, they announced a fundraise of $35 million from Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global Management. The company has raised a total of $61 million in 2019 alone, and its funding so far, has grown to over $76 million.

Future Plans

The company claimed that the funds they raised will be used to develop an engineering hub in the US, add amplifying predictive capabilities to its platform, and develop a strong expansion strategy. CleverTap claimed that the company has been growing at a rate of 250% every year since 2015. Global expansion and product development seem to be a priority. The company claimed that they will be getting more people on board for engineering, sales, and marketing in their US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia operations.