Blinkist Personalizes “Year in a Blink” Campaign and Boosts Re-Engagement

Blinkist launched in 2012 and offers the key insights from top nonfiction books and podcasts to users around the world. Check out how they created a Year-In-Review campaign that increased engagement by 15%.

Today's consumers are increasingly short on time, ever on the go, and choosing more often to consume content in audio format. Thankfully, Blinkist enables curious minds to understand the key ideas from more than 5,000 nonfiction books in as little as 15 minutes.

To better engage their 21 million users, Blinkist wanted to create a highly personalized campaign that supported deeper brand relationships with their users and drove stronger engagement with their mobile app.

A Year-in-Review Campaign for All

When creating their “Year in a Blink” campaign, the Blinkist team wanted to highlight the merits of being a part of their community with user data they’d collected over the course of the year. Goals of the campaign included:

  • Targeting their entire audience, not just premium members

  • Showcasing a high level of personalization

  • Demonstrating the value of Blinkist to the segment of their audience that was seeing low engagement

But creating a personalized campaign to fit every audience and activity level can be a challenge, especially when you consider that not as much first-party data can be gathered from users with low engagement. Luckily, the Braze platform’s segmentation and personalization tools made it easy. Blinkist started by creating user segments in Braze based on subscription and activity levels: Premium users with high usage, premium users with low usage, and basic users with low usage.

Premium Blinkist users with high usage (and who therefore had the most behavioral data to draw from) received the most personalized campaign emails, complete with stats on their own activity and accomplishments, as well as more general stats about usership and trends across the entire community. And while the other, less-active segments received emails with fewer behavioral metrics about content they consumed, their emails were still personalized with personal information as well as titles, motivational messages, and images to encourage them to re-engage, thanks to Liquid personalization in Braze, which automatically pulls a user’s unique data into marketing messages.

Campaign Results: Increased Re-Engagement and More Returning Users

Thanks to the Braze platform's ability to support highly personalized messaging across multiple audiences, Blinkist was able to successfully execute a complex campaign at scale and saw significant positive results. 15% more users re-engaged with Blinkist after receiving the campaign (as compared to their control group) and 76% of users who had received the campaign were still engaging a week later.

"The Year in a Blink was one of my favorite campaigns of 2021. It was a complicated setup, but Braze allowed us to connect with our users in a hyper-personalized way. By segmenting the audience based on behaviors and using liquid code to provide the personalisation, the campaign was a hit with customers—which we saw both in the performance and feedback on social media."


Isabelle von Matuschka
CRM Content Manager, Blinkist

Final Thoughts

When they needed ways to deliver rich personalization to users with varied levels of engagement, Blinkist took advantage of the personalization capabilities built into the Braze platform to provide an exceptional experience to their users. In the process, they had two key learnings:

  • Be thoughtful about how you segment your audience to create the most relevant and valuable messaging

  • Optimize for the data you have—and the data you don’t have—to create cohesive experiences that are as personalized as possible

To learn more about personalization and how it can support stronger customer relationships, check out our exclusive personalization guide.