The Business
As a market leader, Babbel offers one-month, three-month, six-month or yearly subscription options to its language-learning programs. The app saw triple-digit growth during COVID-19 and learning activity in the app doubled from March 2020. Together with Emarsys, they diversified their marketing activity from just to what now includes personalized mobile marketing.
The Challenge
- Consistent cross-channel execution
- Delivering real-time, relevant engagements
- Scaling mobile strategies
Overall, the brand had to maintain innovation to remain competitive with smaller, more agile players in the market. In addition to a new focus on the live tutoring space and making the app free for students, Babbel needed to boost personalization within its app. The goal was to create a quicker, easier path-to-purchase for those with high likelihood to convert right away while serving helpful suggestions and courses to those who may be undecided.
Nina Pollex
Director of CRM at Babbel
“At the end of the day, we want to personalize the whole product experience. Eventually, no two people who enter [our] bubble should have the exact same experience if they use the product differently… [and] we’re working to have personalized recommendations at all times… [in the future, things will become] much more diverse… real-time personalization will get much more interesting for us in the future.”
The Solution
With the Emarsys Customer Engagement Platform, Babbel was able to gain insights about customers such as their level of intent to learn a new language. They were able to identify and segment high, medium, and low intent learners to streamline the right personalized engagement at the right time.
With email as the core communication channel, Babbel’s investment in mobile — personalized in-app messaging along with push — converted 50% better than email by itself. After implementing personalization within the app, Babbel began driving better brand awareness, gaining more subscribers, and boosting engagement.
Customer-centric channel orchestration
Babbel delivered channel-agnostic personalization to communicate with learners on subscription services, course completion, next steps, and recommended learning materials from their onboarding journey to course completion.
Real-time Interactions
Babbel sends mobile in-app messages and push notifications in real-time for learning reminders, time left on lessons, and new learning lessons such as podcasts and articles.
Combined approach
Achieve a 50% better conversion rate as a result of using push notifications and email together, compared to email alone.
Building customer understanding
Gain customer insights with behavioral data to understand the journey of a customer learning a new language.
The Impact
Due to their investment in mobile, Babbel saw year-over-year growth, especially in the US market, which has been their biggest market to date. Push and mobile messaging also converted better than email, which has traditionally been their go-to communication method. They also increased engagement in key segments.
The vision is to ultimately create UX parity across all platforms and devices – web, desktop, email, and mobile – completely optimized based on customers’ affinity, programs or courses taken, plus more.
