Scaling Growth with Marketing Automation Infrastructure

Clever, a fast-growing edtech platform connecting school systems with learning applications, found itself constrained by its own success. With a small team (around five marketers) and an expanding user base, Clever's marketing efforts to retain and engage users were being held back by outdated tools and fragmented data. The company's marketing stack – formerly reliant on Pardot – couldn't support the sophisticated segmentation and personalized campaigns needed for the next stage of growth. In short, Clever needed to upgrade its marketing infrastructure to better nurture its core users. The ask was twofold: provide growth marketing support to boost user engagement and retention, and serve as the technical lead in migrating to a more robust email service provider (ESP) and implementing a customer data platform (CDP) for deeper analytics. This was a classic scale-up challenge: how to empower a lean team with automation and data so they can punch above their weight.

Levered identified the marketing technology stack as the fulcrum for unlocking Clever's next phase of growth. The strategy centered on marketing automation and data segmentation. Levered's team stepped in to manage the migration to a new ESP and the implementation of a modern CDP, which together formed the backbone of an automated, scalable customer engagement system. With the CDP in place, Clever could unify user data from various sources and create intricate segments based on behavior, demographics, and engagement level. This enabled a more nuanced Growth Marketing roadmap: rather than "one-size-fits-all" campaigns, Clever could deliver tailored messaging to different cohorts (teachers, administrators, high-use schools vs. low-use, etc.). Levered worked cross-functionally to ensure the new tools were not just set up, but fully integrated into daily operations. The team transformed raw datasets into operational dashboards, giving both marketing and leadership a clear view of user engagement and conversion metrics in real time. These insights highlighted where to invest in new campaigns and experiments. One immediate win was designing a series of growth communications via Clever's in-app messaging feature – targeting the most engaged core users with tips and use-cases to deepen their usage of the platform. By automating these personalized nudges (triggered by user behavior data from the CDP), Clever kept its active users even more engaged. Importantly, all of this was accomplished while scaling the capacity of the five-person team – automation took over repetitive tasks and complex segmentation logic, effectively multiplying what the team could do. Levered's founder, with his background in marketing engineering and analytics, was able to act as a technical coach for Clever's marketers, training them on the new ESP and CDP capabilities so that they could self-serve more of their campaign needs going forward. The fulcrum here was implementing the right technology and processes to turn a small team into a force multiplier.

With a modern growth stack in place, Clever saw immediate and measurable improvements. The marketing team rapidly rolled out more targeted experiments and lifecycle campaigns, now confident that they could segment users and track results with precision. One key outcome was the successful launch of Clever's new in-app messaging tool: by targeting engaged users with relevant content, adoption of this feature increased by 10%, and those who used it showed a robust 40% week-over-week retention rate – significantly higher than average. This proved that better segmentation and timely outreach could actively boost user engagement. Additionally, the new ESP + CDP combo empowered Clever's marketers to run sophisticated A/B tests and iterate on campaigns without heavy engineering help. The marketing team could, for example, identify a cohort of low-engagement schools and automate a re-engagement email drip specifically for them, while simultaneously delivering in-app tips to power-users – all orchestrated through the new platforms. Anecdotally, the team reported a sense of "new superpowers" after the implementation; tasks that previously took days of manual work (or weren't possible at all) could be done in hours. In summary, Levered's intervention on the automation front allowed Clever to scale its growth efforts sustainably. By investing in data infrastructure and automation (the often unsung heroes behind growth), a growth-stage company was able to unlock agility and precision in its marketing – exactly the kind of operational leverage that yields outsized returns. At Levered, growth isn't about doing more—it's about doing what matters. By pinpointing the pivotal lever (Fulcrum) within your business challenges and applying focused, strategic action (Force), we deliver outsized results without the overhead. Inspired by our founder's proven track record—from scrappy startup campaigns to sophisticated growth initiatives at multi-billion-dollar tech companies—our approach cuts through noise to deliver clear, measurable impact. Whether you're a DTC brand, startup, or growth-stage company, Levered turns your toughest challenges into your greatest opportunities.