How Math&Mind won back inactive users with InboxSuite CLV and hit 222% ROI

Math&Mind is one of the leading websites which provides educational mathematical content. The company uses email content to help subscribers boost brain activity in an entertaining manner. Email, SMS, and Push are the main communication channels for the company.

Since Math&Mind has very specific content, it is not really easy to engage with its subscribers, and due to this fact, the company has quite a large database of inactive subscribers. InboxSuite’s machine learning based CLV feature addresses the problem and helps the company reactivate the maximum possible number of the inactive subscribers.

Math&Mind is loved by their subscribers for the educational and entertaining math games in their email newsletters. The company’s target audience is those who want to spend a little time online while getting a workout for their brains. The total amount of content created throughout the history of Math&Mind is enormous!

The Challenge: Applying an effective reactivation strategy based on CLV while saving time and keeping a high inbox rate

Math&Mind was looking to reactivate the “sleeping” subscribers, make up the lost profits from the inactive groups and finally, extend the lifetime value of each subscriber. 

Although they put in hard work to engage and retain as many subscribers as they could, Math&Mind team didn’t have an actual implementation of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) strategy in place. The alternative workarounds were taking too much of their office time and were not very effective. Unfortunately, the non-targeted traffic they were using did not allow for high conversion rates. 

On top of the unsuccessful strategies for reactivation, sending too many email campaigns to inactive subscribers also significantly harmed delivery. 

Getting started with InboxSuite CLV

Math&Mind team chose InboxSuite as they discovered that they could use machine learning algorithms to identify subscriber behavior and apply strategies around CLV. InboxSuite can analyze activity patterns of each subscriber and predict their behavior for 90 days ahead. 

According to a Gartner research, it is 6.7x more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain a brand’s current ones. It was worth going the extra mile to work on reactivation plans, even though it meant spending more time and resources for Math&Mind team. Basically, extending the lifetime value is a great solution to keep an active subscriber base and cut unnecessary acquisition expenses. 

“As we had already been working with InboxSuite for a long time and had a few successful cases, we decided right away to use the new tool suggested by our Client Success Manager. A quick CLV calculation revealed that a large segment of the inactive base lay in the "High Potential" category but didn't receive any emails. The recommendation was to start sending email campaigns but switch to different delivery resources. According to the calculation, this would allow Math&Mind to receive around 27k more clicks annually, 2k of which would already be received in the next month.”

The Process

The InboxSuite CLV is a mathematical model which uses past subscriber interactions as an input to suggest activity segments. Using the subscriber stats from the previous year, the CLV tool calculated that there are still many inactive subscribers that could be engaged with. 

The CLV visualization (Figure 2) shows that the strategy developed by Math&Mind managers only involved 74% of inactive subscribers.

In the High Probability segment, there is still 26% of the subscriber base which was not included in the initial strategy but could still be used. Imagine – an additional 8,500 subscribers!

Together with the Math&Mind team, we decided to send emails to the High Probability segment.  As a result of the CLV calculation, the Low Probability segment was less likely to make the target action. Moreover, we also excluded the Futile segment, consisting of subscribers with unidentified past interactions, bots, and invalid email addresses. Sending emails to them would risk the company’s IP/domain reputation.

InboxSuite CLV suggests several strategies with a detailed prediction regarding inactive subscribers and guidelines on how we could use the delivery resources. 

Here's a sample prediction:

"The CLV tool recommended sending email campaigns to those high potential profiles which are currently not engaged with the team. By adding them into the email program and reactivating, the company would get an additional 7.29k clicks per year, including 2.70k clicks in the next month."

Figure 1. CLV visualization for Math&Mind

Figure 2. Segments view on CLV dashboard

Figure 3. One of the emails was sent to the High Probability segment to restore subscribers' interest in the product.

Another task we had to complete was to keep our sending resources healthy. We had to remember that we can’t send too much content to inactive traffic, especially at the beginning. 
Math&Mind had email reputation issues during their reactivation campaigns. They even had to replace their sending domain and IP addresses in use. 

We figured out that with InboxSuite CLV, sending smaller email volumes, e.g., 2-5% of the total amount, does not harm the reputation of sending resources.

Upon reaching 5-8%, we increased sending volumes gradually to keep the email reputation high and the sending resources healthy. 

Results

Out of the reactivated subscribers, we achieved the below metrics for the given month: 

Here's a comparison of the daily sending volume: at the start of InboxSuite CLV use (5%), at the stage of increasing the volume (8%), and with the maximum volume of sending to inactive data, amounting to 12% of the total sending volume:

Over to you

Would you like to learn more about InboxSuite CLV tool and apply it in your email marketing program? Get in touch with our team of experts and see how we can help! Book a demo today.