How Cleo rebuilt its welcome series to be as personal as the care it delivers

Cleo is a global family care platform offered as an employee benefit through employer and health plan clients. The app supports members across every stage of the parenting and caregiving journey—from families thinking about growing, to parents of newborns, to those raising teenagers, to adults caring for aging parents. Cleo provides access to dedicated human Guides, expert-led classes, articles, and specialist sessions, all designed to meet members wherever they are in life and help them to thrive.

Because clients can purchase different support packages—maternity, infant care, children and adolescents, and adult care—Cleo's member base is diverse. Meanwhile, a small-but-mighty marketing team is responsible for ensuring every member feels like the product is built for them.

The challenge: Boilerplate welcome messages in a deeply personal product

Built years earlier, the former welcome series was sent to all users, and had to deliberately use vague messaging and broad value propositions to avoid sending members content that wasn’t relevant to them. While it performed well, it wasn’t fundamentally personalized to the different combinations of support packages available.

Holly Jacobson joined Cleo's marketing team in February 2025, moving from a member support role where she’d spent four years talking directly with the people Cleo serves. She came in with deep empathy for members and immediately recognized how Cleo could improve to build and maintain even better relationships with its customers.

Cleo designs its app experiences around what they call high-value interventions—support that has been proven to result in improving member health and wellbeing—and Holly saw that the welcome series offered a perfect opportunity to get these experiences in front of the members who most needed them.

Holly had a clear vision for what she hoped to build: A personalized ‘Cleo Quickstart’ plan that would show each member exactly what Cleo could do for their specific situation. The challenge was in the execution.

The strategy: A Liquid-writing collaborator that thinks ahead

Cleo has rich member data that includes care recipient ages, package types, support topics members have self-selected, and more. Turning that data into the right Liquid logic meant combining multiple custom attributes, handling edge cases like members with multiple children within the same age bracket, and accounting for every permutation of care recipients a member might have. Coding that kind of multi-criteria conditional logic was beyond the scope of what Holly felt she could do on her own.

That’s why she turned to BrazeAI Operator™, an AI assistant built directly into the Braze dashboard, to write and debug the Liquid code powering the new welcome series. BrazeAI Operator™ gives marketers a conversational interface to get help with questions, troubleshoot campaigns, and generate code.

The centerpiece of the new welcome series was the personalized Quickstart plan. Holly created content blocks for each life stage and care recipient type: pregnancy, newborns (0-6 months and 6-12 months), children ages 1-3, 4-12, and teenagers, plus adult care recipients. Each block was designed to surface the most relevant resources and high-value interventions for that group.

Getting the email logic right required handling real complexity. Cleo tracks child age and package type as custom attributes rather than birthdates, so the code needed to evaluate multiple criteria simultaneously—where package type equals kids, age falls within a specific range—and then nest those conditions correctly. Holly began building this herself, but when some blocks appeared and others didn't, she leaned on Operator for help.

What happened next surprised her. Operator reviewed her Liquid, but went beyond fixing the immediate error in her code. It also anticipated problems she had yet to encounter. For example, if a member had two teenagers, the teen content block would render twice. Operator rewrote the logic to deduplicate it proactively.

“At first, I tried standard LLMs, but they struggled to come up with usable code, much less achieve the complexity I was looking for. Operator, on the other hand, literally thought of things I hadn’t. I was able to achieve the deep level of personalization I was looking for—not only more easily and quickly, but even better than I imagined.”

Holly Jacobson

Lifecycle Marketing Manager, Cleo

The interaction captured something Holly described as the product's biggest differentiator: Unlike general-purpose AI tools she'd used before, BrazeAI Operator™ understood the Braze context, knew her custom attributes were already in the system, and generated code that worked within her specific environment. "It feels like it has a bit more of a brain than it should," she said. "It was just very cool how it thought of things before I did."

The new welcome series also became a vehicle for a broader shift in Cleo's member marketing philosophy, moving further away from feature-first messaging toward a more holistic and empathetic approach, where each personalized block was designed to help members see themselves in the product.

The results: Jaw-dropping numbers

When Holly presented the results at a Cleo all-hands, the numbers that stood out most were at the extremes. Unsubscribes across the welcome series dropped by 81%. Opt-outs on the very first email—Cleo’s first impression—fell by 97%.

App opens increased by 284%, push notification engagement rose 124%, and meaningful in-app behaviors—the metric Cleo's data team uses to measure true engagement in the first 30 days—climbed by 178%.

"Our old welcome series was not doing badly," Holly noted. "It never felt like a problem. So seeing these numbers was very exciting. The whole company is really pumped about it, because that means more members are getting the support they deserve."

The results validated the hypothesis behind the redesign: More personalization drives more engagement. But the scale of the improvement reflected something more than better messaging. Members were receiving a welcome experience that matched the specificity of their lives and what Cleo can offer to meet their needs.

Key takeaways

1. Personalization at the member level requires technical tools that match your ambition: Cleo had the member data and the strategic vision. What was missing was a way to translate complex, multi-attribute logic into optimal Liquid code—a gap that BrazeAI Operator™ closes.

2. The first email sets the tone for everything that follows: A 97% reduction in opt-outs on the first email is evidence that members who previously immediately tuned out are now staying in the journey long and engaging, underscoring the importance of that first message.

3. AI-assisted marketing doesn't replace human judgment: The strategy, vision, and tone were all from Holly and Cleo. BrazeAI Operator™ helped to handle the code, together producing the best results that followed the voice and tone that Holly set.

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