How Mammoth Growth helped build custom user segments and deploy to lifecycle marketing tools to unlock new revenue opportunities.

Dropbox, founded in 2007, is the original cloud file hosting provider and the leading global collaboration platform.  The company has more than 700 million registered users across approximately 180 countries, and is on a mission to design a more enlightened way of working.  

Over 90% of the company’s revenue comes from individual consumers buying subscriptions, and Dropbox is increasingly focused on multi-product adoption. It reported total revenues of $2.33 billion in 2022 and is a five-time CNBC Disruptor 50 winner.

Getting the Most Out Of Lifecycle Marketing Tools

As part of its growth plan, Dropbox wanted to optimize their lifecycle marketing initiatives around re-engaging dormant users.  However the team was held back by legacy infrastructure that couldn’t easily support personalization, and suffered from data latency limitations.  

The company was already working with Mammoth Growth, world leader in data analytics and growth consulting to help implement a new Customer Data Platform (CDP).  Partnering with Mammoth for this lifecycle marketing initiative was a natural progression.

For its outbound campaigns, the Dropbox marketing team was previously using homegrown tools built on legacy architecture. This approach required the engineering team to write custom SQL queries anytime they wanted to build a new audience.

It was a complicated process that was vulnerable to human error. Compounding this, there was a lack of support for real-time data, relying instead on pushing batch updates of data sets on a daily schedule. Sending timely messages based on timely events was impossible. 

This spurred the company into action.

Dropbox’s growth plan had two goals. The first was to build custom audiences using its CDP’s persona capabilities — and make these available for use in Iterable, its customer engagement platform. This would help the company to reduce over-reliance on its internal engineering team.
The second was to activate CDP powered user data for targeted, personalized and orchestrated communications in Iterable focused on reactivating dormant user accounts.

Rethinking the CDP

Mammoth helped guide the implementation of their CDP by building a taxonomy that would accommodate all the existing architecture and tables of events, while removing unnecessary nested tables and sources. This new structure reduced the data latency experienced with the older legacy system. Now data can be fed into the CDP in a way that is easily understood by all downstream marketing tools.

The CDP made data more reliable and more user traits readily accessible to the marketing team.  For the first time Dropbox marketers could build their own audiences without relying on the engineering team to write SQL queries for the same information. Furthermore this new CDP infrastructure allowed the team to generate event-based emails in their campaigns which put timely messages in front of prospects based on specific user actions.

Using the personas functionality in the CDP, Mammoth also set up new audiences for existing campaigns, pushing these audiences into Iterable. They built journeys in Iterable that captured the necessary triggering and routing logic for their core audiences. They then ported over the reactivation campaign into the new CDP-powered Iterable workspace for improved personalization.

Side-By-Side Reactivation

Together, the Dropbox and Mammoth Growth teams ran side-by-side reactivation campaigns to AB test the legacy infrastructure and existing tools setup against the new CDP/Iterable implementation.  The latter’s improvement in data recency, reinforced with the backend reliability of the API powered CDP to Iterable integration, drove a 12.8% increase in conversion of dormant users to paid.  

With Iterable, the team also saw improved deliverability and enhanced data fidelity. Despite these many improvements, the company’s work with Mammoth isn’t over yet. Dropbox continues to collaborate with the agency to build additional campaigns to test new audience segments with higher fidelity user traits and personalization techniques.