Data-driven email communication for EdTech company

Introduction

The client: An online educational platform PracticeBox.
The task. To set up an email marketing strategy building on the user behavior data.
In-app communication solves different tasks, but its primary purpose is to push users forward in their customer journey, increasing LTV.
In my view, you should build your user communication upon two fundamental principles:
1) Consistency. Before we write any email (or any other copy), we need to choose the tone of voice, the frequency, and style of our emails - are they going to be long or short, personal or branded? So from the very beginning, we show users how we communicate. Over time, this can change slightly or even significantly, but too rapid change can feel jarring for users unless properly communicated.
2) Relevance. I don’t say “value” because relevance is the value itself. Modern tools allow us to build complex and flexible communication and personalize content depending on how users interact. We can utilize our content marketing funnel at the same time. We can adapt content to different stages: awareness, consideration, decision, and action.
PracticeBox works on the “one-time-purchase” model. Customers create a free account and add any number of courses; some are free, but most are paid.
In the case of PracticeBox, we use email communication with users to:
- convert empty users to users who added at least a free course
- convert free users to paid users
- encourage users to complete the courses they have bought
- incentivize paid users to buy more courses, increasing LTV

On top of that, in PracticeBox, we use email marketing to engage subscribers to convert them into users. For us, a subscriber is anyone who registered on our webinar, subscribed to the newsletter, or left an email for a white paper or another lead magnet. 
The user journey looks like this:

MailerLite + Make integration

We tactfully use our email marketing to move users toward the higher LTV steps on the right. This is an entirely different email marketing approach than just emailing everyone about everything.
I use MailerLite + Make (aka Integromat) + PracticeBox webhooks for email marketing and user management. I add all users to MailerLite via Integromat and Webhooks.
My dev team created a webhook sent when a new account is created and a user adds a new course.
Here's the complete integration flow:

MailerLite has convenient and flexible entities to operate: segments and groups. We organize our subscribers via groups, creating, for instance, a separate group for each webinar or each paid course. Integromat catches the webhook data and adds a subscriber to the group Users.

Welcome flow

Everyone who joins the Users group gets a welcome email and joins a welcome flow.
The welcome email is an integral part of our communication; it not only tells the new user how everything works in the product but also determines the style of future communication.
Two days later, all Users receive an email offering them the most popular courses and webinars on the platform.
In 7 days, the welcome flow is divided into 2 parts and segments come into play. All Users fall into 3 segments: empty users (haven't opened any course/webinar), free users (have opened a free webinar), paid users (have purchased a course).
Empty users receive an email with a suggestion to start exploring the platform with a free course. If in 3 weeks those users are still `empty` (haven't opened any product) they get a final email checking in on them and giving a link to all courses.
Free users receive an email checking on how they liked a free webinar and offering to explore paid courses. In two weeks, still-free users get another email with tips on how to get the most out of online studying and link to all courses page.

Welcome flow

In the welcome email, we say something like: “We’re going to send you updates about our new webinars and courses occasionally. If it’s not okay, you can unsubscribe at any time”. Establishing expectations is key, and unsubscribe links are required in all major markets.
Marketing communication should be separated from transactional communication (passwords, successful payments, refunds, etc.). However, it can build on it (e.g. sending a user an email sometime after their last purchase).
To understand our users, we collect and update the number of courses, the total amount spent on the platform, and the last session. It helps us carefully build our communication with users, to bring them value depending on their stage of using the product and according to their experience.
When you’ve bought one course, you’ll most likely buy another one. Then, when you’ve bought/opened more than three courses, we will provide you with a promo code.

In 89% of cases, registration on the platform comes after users have purchased a course — to get access, you must create the account first.

Based on that metric, we understand that our users are in the action stage, so they don’t need content from any other stages.
So, for instance, if someone came form a course landing page, created an account but hasn’t purchased the course, we create a kind of “Abandoned cart” sequence.
We also store the date of the user session to re-engage users who have been inactive for a long time. We compare dates in MailerLite and see how many users were on the platform for more than 30 days.
Grouping users by courses let us gently communicate with the user during his course tuition to increase the number of course completions and to get feedback on each course.
Of course, email marketing is not the only way to communicate with users; however, our tests show that our users love emails and reminders. According to Google Analytics, our email newsletter and automation generate about 15%-20% of our revenue.
By the way, communication with users can also be done via Intercom; it is more powerful and combines email marketing with in-app communication. But when we scored the hypotheses, it turned out that Intercom is a great solution when you have basic communication working. So we decided to set up MVP to measure important numbers for three months and then "upgrade" to Intercom.