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  • Writer's pictureYogesh Jain

What is CleverTap? Best Practices, Features and Alternatives

Updated: Mar 26




Analytics is an important part of running a business. It is as important for business as it is for marketing‌ campaigns. Why? Because analytics provide insight into customer behavior. And information on patterns and data that can ‌aid in altering strategies. Which helps you improve customer acquisition and retention.


CleverTap is an analytics tool that defines itself as an “all-in-one retention platform”. The company provides an integration of data derived from apps/websites and marketing. The platform helps you understand customer demographics and behaviors. They do this by analyzing the way customers interact with your services.


With CleverTap’s analytics, you can focus on fostering long-term relations with customer engagement over several platforms and manage lifecycle stages. You can improve LTV by understanding user behaviors. And you can identify the issues at each stage of a user's journey. CleverTap provides you with real-time data and lets you deep dive into user data. 


The key to revenue growth is: a small part of customer acquisition and a large part of customer retention. There is no point in gaining new customers if you keep hemorrhaging more old customers. Any business person worth their salt knows that it takes far more money to get new customers than it takes to keep old ones. And therefore increasing the lifetime value of a customer is important to scale a business.

CleverTap Features


1. Retention centric:


While most analytics platforms focus on customer acquisition. CleverTap focuses on customer retention as its main proposition. According to a study conducted by CleverTap, an app loses about 89% of its users on average in the first week. After about a month, the number rises to 95%. To lead a successful business over an app, you can not solely rely on “app download” metrics. Such metrics can be misleading. They might show a 30% increase in numbers for the past three days. Yet you might get far more uninstalls that are not being documented. So, on average, you will lose more customers than you will be gaining.


A great way to battle this is to improve customer retention techniques and enhance their app experience. There are two advantages to knowing your churn rate:

  1. You know how many are leaving

  2. And being able to alter your retention strategy


CleverTap has a few things that help you optimize your retention rate and decimate customer churn rates.


The dashboard lets you segment your users into cohorts. And you can filter them with the help of user properties and user actions. You can run targeted marketing campaigns, analyze their performance and connect with them over segment-targeted notifications.


CleverTap uses SDKs and APIs that let them track users and their actions across platforms, on the app, and over the web. They also have several integrations like Twilio, Branch, and Facebook Audience Network.



2. AI and ML features:


Analytics in this day and age is not enough. When Google uses AI to rank search results, it makes sense that one implements AI for marketing too. Now CleverTap uses AI and ML to analyze its real-time data and provides insights into specific segments. The platform implements automated user segmentation so that you understand specific demographic behavior. Giving you the ability to create targeted campaigns for those demographics. With CleverTap, you ‌can get hyper-specific about what you are looking for. Since the interface can process complex queries and provide your real-time data for analysis.


With these targeted campaigns, you can drive revenue from each segment. You can even set up triggered campaigns. Wherein if a customer creates an event, you can target them with personalized campaigns. You can target them via social media later on. You can expect customer needs based on collective user information and behavioral patterns. The systems AI and ML calculate these expected needs to help you get ahead of improving customer satisfaction. You can also use the “omnichannel customer engagement” to personalize each step of the customer journey. CleverTap provides real-time data on campaign strategies so that you can maximize impact.



3. Behavior tracking and analytics:


With recorded user data (SDKs and APIs), you can identify trends and patterns in user actions and behaviors. With CleverTap analytics, it is easy to understand where your users are coming from. And who they are, and what they are doing. You can conduct funnel analysis, and cohort analysis with it. CleverTap automatically builds user-profiles and lets you deep dive into their properties. They host a unified customer database that gives you insight into the customer's entire customer journey. You analyze each touchpoint and identify problems and points of improvement. 


The platform tracks data, such as:

  1. Demographical data (gender, location, sex‌)

  2. Interactions (both online and offline)

  3. And platform visits across devices and channels


With CleverTap, you can identify problems, understand user behavior and even predict user needs. You can compare trends across groups and set up filters to get information on high-value segments. This lets you plan actions based on patterns in user behaviors.



4. Campaign management, scheduling, tracking, and analysis:


Campaign optimization is one of the most important tasks that lets you reach your core demographic. you can even re-target specific cohorts. CleverTap provides pre-designed marketing campaigns to its users. So that it can maximize engagement with the least amount of resources spent.


Some campaigns specifically target retention and customer acquisition. They also help you drive engagement across your platforms. You can target or re-target your customers through emails, push notifications, and in-app messages. CleverTap identifies activity periods for optimal campaign delivery times. By reaching a customer at the right time, you can boost engagement and improve retention rates.



5. Notification management and cross channel:


CleverTap has a “cross channel messaging” service that helps you engage your customers through mobile, web, and social media, among a few platforms. When you reach your customer at the perfect time, you can improve your retention rates and increase the lifetime value of each customer. Since you can also target specific cohorts, you can create personalized notifications and campaigns that the user performing specific events can trigger.


You can reach your customers through:

  1. In App notifications

  2. Push notification

  3. SMS notification

  4. WhatsApp

  5. App inbox



CleverTap Complementary Tools:


1. Mixpanel:


This platform is a great tool if you are looking for an overview of your analytics in a visual format. The visual format makes the metrics easy to understand at a single glance. And it removes any need for number crunching to understand patterns in metrics. Mixpanel has a very user-friendly interface with powerful tools and functionalities that are easy to implement. Mixpanel provides real-time data and lets you define your events and name your properties. 


With its various functionalities, Mixpanel gives you insight into what function you can work on and prioritize. It also lets you dive into different intersections of data to give you insight into decisions made by specific demographics and events. You can view your data in two categories:

  1. User-centric data (age, sex, location)

  2. Event-centric data (app downloads, newsletter sign-ups, product purchases).


It is very simple to use once you get the hang of it. You can create cohorts, create business process funnels and define events for your business. You don't need to employ SQL to use the platform. All the data is accessible with just a few clicks and you can scale up with no pre-computation. Mixpanel can run high data volume queries in seconds.



2. Amplitude:


Amplitude is an ideal platform if you are looking into utilizing many use cases. The platform caters to users who require in-depth studies and user behavior. And it provides actionable information and analysis from the customer data. It provides self-service insights, meaning that users can perform complex queries on their own. 


The platform gives insights into different segmentations so that you can later your starters on custom retention, and improve your conversation rates. It helps you decide based on customer behaviors and you can oversee data across various channels, devices, and products. Amplitude lets you pull up data for very complex queries in just a few seconds.


One drawback of the platform would be that you have to customize your dashboard before you can use other facilities. They placed the dashboard front and center on the Analytics Workflow page, where you can easily create your dashboards. 


It has a high adoption rate in companies because of its transparency between teams and the utilization of common data to improve the quality result of queries. With the precise data tracking systems in place, you can easily manage and integrate various other data systems that you used to improve decision speed. Although a drawback would be that the installation of the platform is difficult and may present a challenge.


3. Adobe Analytics:


Adobe Analytics is a powerful and rich digital tentacles tool that is perfect for large corporations that want to know what is going on outside their websites. You can easily integrate the platform across devices and other platforms, like websites, mobile apps, IoT devices, and social media. Adobe Analytics has predictive capabilities because they wove AI and Machine Learning into the platform. Abode provides data accuracy without data sampling, making analytics easier. This means that you are not only looking at past data, but also estimated future data. This gives Abode startling accuracy in pinpointing attribution metrics. The platform eliminates the need for you to get an analyst to give meaning to your data and pull trends from your metrics. It is very easy to build segments on the platform and create calculated metrics for your report.


The dashboard is customizable, and you can drag-and-drop segments and rearrange the tabs to your liking. Because of the way they created the interface, there is no actual difference between reports and dashboards. When you create and download the report to send it to various stakeholders, the downloaded report is a replica of the report on the browser. What you see is what you get. Initially, the ad hoc analysis segment was a Java application that had to be downloaded separately, which meant that you had to spend time and resources on setting it up. However, over the years, Adobe has integrated this service into the main platform and pushed it into the Analytics Workspace.



4. Google Analytics:


Google Analytics is the go-to analytics platform for most businesses in all industries. It brings a powerful impact on how you see your website metrics and helps shape your understanding of your marketing strategies and optimization of the same. It lets you filter for specific parameters and metrics, allowing you to get a glimpse of the metrics that are important to you. 


Google Analytics is a big player in the web reporting world, with its application across channels and platforms. It provides information on the usages of your product by an individual on both, web and mobile, letting you optimize your marketing tactics and product presentation by using customer data optimally. The platforms provide real-time data ‌you can easily monitor by customizing your reports. It is easy to set up and has proved to be the industry standard through the years.


While you will need to have intermediary knowledge of analytics to use Google Analytics optimally, you can bring tremendous impact to your analytics with the platform. It has a lot of functionalities and tools that provide you with the perfect space to test out the platform and its capabilities. However, it can get overwhelming sometimes because of the number of functions that it sports.



5. Looker:


Looker is a very popular platform because it visualizes data. It enables data analysis and visualization with ease. While people considered it as a data exploration platform. It is so much more than that. The company built the software on the LookML language that aids in the aggregation and calculations of data for a SQL query. The plus point is you don't have to extensively know SQL to use it.


It is easy to build custom dashboards with a drag-and-drop function. It is easy to combine various metrics onto a single dashboard. You can use pre-made snippets of code called Looker blocks to reduce coding time. You can also integrate workflows easily (for example, onto Slack). This feature is called Action Hub.

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