Problem
Online learning platform Quizlet needed an efficient way to pull user activity data in order to feed it back to students and teachers via personalized email updates.
CASE STUDY
Quizlet Leverages Braze Connected Content to Drive Consistent User Engagement
Topics:
2M
Monthly active users
Strategy
Quizlet utilized Braze Connected Content—our real-time personalization tool that makes it possible for brands to customize their cross-channel campaigns—to keep customers updated about their progress and establish brand loyalty.
Results
The email campaign contributed to nearly 17 million incremental learning sessions, over two million incremental monthly active users (MAU), and more than 2,500 incremental subscribers.
In October 2005, Quizlet’s founder Andrew Sutherland developed a study tool to help himself prepare for a French exam. He aced it. He then shared the tool with classmates, who also saw success on subsequent exams after utilizing their friend’s innovative creation. Nearly two decades later, Quizlet sets the industry standard for digitized learning tools, offering products such as digital flashcards, matching games, practice assessments, and live quizzes to the over 60 million users who sign in each month.
With such a massive, consistently-engaged user base of students and teachers, Quizlet knew they had an opportunity to create more effective messaging with better data collection, analysis, and personalization. For 2021, Quizlet set out to make use of their wealth of data to stay connected with their learners in a way that would keep them informed about their progress and motivated to keep pushing forward.
Enter Braze.
Channels Utilized
Building Brand Loyalty through Progress Tracking
To strengthen brand loyalty, Quizlet wanted to send each active user a weekly recap email that highlighted opportunities for personal growth. The goal was to provide hyper-personalized summaries with activity from the week prior that made the student or teacher feel good about their accomplishments and set them up for a success next week.
Quizlet’s User Growth Platform Team was able to dynamically template individual users’ study habits and app usage into email sends using Braze Connected Content, which helps brands leverage user data to make their interactions more personal, helpful, and considerate. With Connected Content, you can customize your cross-channel campaigns—those sent via email, in-app, push notifications, and more—with personalized information from your company's own internal servers and third-party APIs.
With such a massive user base, Quizlet’s Data Team would have had an unimaginable amount of data to sift through in order to personalize email messaging. They typically would have needed to rely on a conglomerate of spreadsheets, but with Connected Content, they’re able to pull large quantities of data from their database and use the custom queries to generate engaging, fun metrics for learners to look back on.
They further customized messaging with Liquid personalization, such as recommending study sets a user should explore based on courses they’ve selected previously. They’ve also begun using this method to send yearly recap emails to get their users excited for what’s to come just in time for New Year’s resolution season.
“We use ETL jobs to query, process and transfer data from our data warehouse to our Connected Content dedicated datastore. Our Connected Content API, wrapped in a Golang microservice, is the glue that connects Braze requests to our datastore. We are running that microservice on a horizontally scalable, fully managed serverless platform, allowing us to scale up near instantaneously to successfully process even our largest campaigns, and scale down to almost 0 afterward to dramatically reduce hosting costs.”
Rick Faulkner
Engineer, Quizlet
Quizlet’s Results: More Personalized Updates, More Loyal Users and Subscribers
By leveling up how they communicated their users’ accomplishments to them via email, Quizlet was saw nearly 17 million incremental learning sessions, generated almost two million incremental MAU, and added more than 2,500 incremental subscribers in 2021.
17M
Incremental learning sessions
2M
Incremental MAU
2,500
Incremental subscribers
Key Takeaways
Brands should leverage data in ways that will be meaningful to their users, not just use it because they can. Quizlet can safely assume that its users value doing better, so by creating an email campaign rooted in showing them proof of their hard work, they built brand loyalty by tying product usage to pride in one’s accomplishments.
The modern consumer expects personalized messaging, especially from big brands. Delivering it is the bare minimum, but delivering it in a meaningful way like Quizlet has earns brand loyalty.
Data shouldn’t just inform internal decisions. Consumers get excited about data as it relates to them, and brands can show that they care about their users’ journey by relaying to them what they know about their progress. It’s the ultimate data win-win.