The challenge

An EdTech platform had grown rapidly to 2 million registered learners but had no systematic approach to lifecycle engagement. Users who signed up and completed one course either churned silently or converted to paid subscriptions with no intervention in between. The platform had selected CleverTap as its engagement platform but the implementation had stalled — user events were being sent inconsistently, user properties were incomplete, and the marketing team could not build the segments they needed because the underlying data was unreliable.

Event schema audit and redesign

The first step was auditing what data was actually reaching CleverTap. The engineering team had implemented events based on an initial brief, but the schema had evolved inconsistently — some events had camelCase property names, others used snake_case, several critical events were missing entirely, and the user profile properties were populated only for users who had made a purchase.

We designed a new event schema from scratch — documenting every user action that mattered for lifecycle engagement: course started, lesson completed, course completed, quiz attempted, quiz passed, subscription started, subscription lapsed, content bookmarked. Each event was defined with its required and optional properties, data types, and the conditions under which it should fire.

User property strategy

CleverTap's segmentation is only as good as the user properties available. We defined a comprehensive user property schema covering learning behaviour (courses started, courses completed, preferred subject, last active date), subscription status (plan type, renewal date, payment method), and engagement signals (push opt-in, email opt-in, app install date).

Historical data for existing users was backfilled using a one-time export from the platform's database — giving CleverTap accurate profiles for all 2 million registered users from day one of the new implementation, rather than starting with an empty slate.

Lifecycle journey design

With clean data in place, we designed 14 lifecycle journeys covering the full learner lifecycle — from onboarding through engagement, conversion, retention, and win-back. Each journey was tied to specific user behaviour triggers rather than time-based sends, ensuring messages were contextually relevant.

The highest-impact journeys were the course completion to next course recommendation flow and the 7-day inactivity re-engagement sequence — both of which could not have been built correctly without the complete event schema.

  • Onboarding: 3-step welcome sequence triggered by signup
  • Activation: course-start nudge for users who browsed but did not begin
  • Engagement: lesson completion streaks and milestone celebrations
  • Conversion: contextual upgrade prompts triggered by specific course completions
  • Retention: inactivity alerts at 7, 14, and 30 days
  • Win-back: lapsed user reactivation with personalised course recommendations

Outcome

The rebuilt CleverTap implementation gave the marketing team a reliable data foundation for the first time. Within three months of the 14 lifecycle journeys going live, 30-day learner retention improved by 23%. The course completion to next course recommendation journey alone accounted for a 15% increase in multi-course enrolment among active learners.