How StuDocu Keeps Their 15 Million Global Monthly Users Engaged

StuDocu is an online community where university and college students can exchange study resources, ask their peers questions, and get answers. Their community has members in over 60 countries, spanning 17 languages, with over 15 million monthly active users on their marketplace. 

StuDocu’s digital community consists of a marketplace where students upload documents so other students can learn and benefit from them. The documents that their users upload are what attract new users to the marketplace, who in return also contribute more content and documents. This contribution and consumption cycle is what keeps the marketplace alive, so user engagement on the platform is the lifeline of StuDocu’s business. With an audience spread all over the world, in different languages, timezones, and interests, it can be hard to send the right messages that actually engage their audience. That’s why StuDocu relies on Customer.io to give them powerful and actionable insights, segment users, and enable event triggers to keep their community alive and thriving.

StuDocu uses Customer.io for 4 primary reasons:

• User Onboarding – Onboarding new users onto the platform to ensure strong retention.
• Transactional Messages – Sending password resets, email confirmations, and account-based status updates.
• Conversion Flows – Targeted campaigns to re-engage customers back onto the StuDocu platform, including automated platform activity notifications to stay top of mind. Note: This is the most crucial part of their business! 
• Customer Feedback – Condition triggered messages to collect feedback and information from users. For example, asking students to rank their university or college for StuDocu’s World University Ranking.

Data in the Driver’s Seat

StuDocu is a data-centric company. They use customer data to drive all decisions, especially when it comes to their email campaigns and interactions. With the help of Customer.io’s super easy-to-understand data analytics, StuDocu is able to adjust their campaigns based on the actionable insights Customer.io delivers to reach an average open rate of 33%, with their highest campaign hovering at a 73% open rate.

StuDocu’s top-performing campaign is one of their most important campaigns to their business as it’s an email dedicated to driving the supply flow. They paired the data Customer.io yields along with A/B testing multiple variants to push their numbers way above the industry average to achieve a 10% click-through rate.

Additionally, with Customer.io, StuDocu is able to keep a single source of truth for each of their users. They use the platform as a database to track whether a user is properly flowing downstream in the user journey or not. If the user is not, StuDocu is able to pinpoint exactly what’s missing, what went wrong, and adjust their strategy to make sure the user is where they should be within their journey.

Segmentation

StuDocu sends roughly 2.3 million emails a month to users in over 60 countries and 17 languages. This high volume poses quite a challenge for their email team, especially when considering time zones. 

“Customer.io has been really great because we’ve been able to automatically set up when a campaign goes out based on our specific user’s timezone, giving us the highest opportunity for success. Sometimes these emails go out in the middle of the night in my timezone, so it’s nice to be able to schedule it.”

– Martine Peeters, Marketing and Communications Manager at StuDocu

With Customer.io’s segmentation engine, StuDocu is able to send the right emails to the right people, at the right time, in the user’s preferred language. Fundamental communication like this would be nearly impossible without the help of Customer.io. The ability to group users based on their location, the field of study, preferred language, and the university they attend empowers Marketers to deliver the most relevant information. As a result, you can see results like StuDocu’s high engagement and click-through rates.

The Power of Event Triggers

The other large piece of the puzzle contributing to StuDocu’s high-performing success is utilizing Customer.io’s event-triggered campaigns. StuDocu cleverly builds data-driven segments based on their users’ actions and automatically triggers campaigns when a user performs a specific event.

“Across all of our events, we send close to 1,000 unique event properties to Customer.io. They offer us the unique opportunity to leverage all of these properties to further personalize our email campaigns resulting in higher open and click rates. Other tools did not allow for this and it would require expensive additional development time to get all the relevant data to be available in our campaigns.”

– Lucas van den Houten, Cofounder of StuDocu

Since condition-triggered campaigns are triggered the first time a user matches a set of conditions, StuDocu can either “set and forget” or jump right in and start optimizing workflows based on how people are moving through the campaigns. This gives StuDocu the flexibility they need and want to deliver content that makes the most sense to their audience.

Takeaways

Connecting and engaging with customers is not an easy task when you truly have a global audience like StuDocu. The multiple time zones and languages can become challenging without the right tools, setup, and data-driven logic. StuDocu recognizes these challenges and is able to harness the power of Customer.io’s segmentation and event-triggered campaigns to send the best messages to the right audience and in the right language. Using Customer.io, StuDocu is able to level up their messaging and strategy to meet their engagement and business goals.