Scaling Growth with Marketing Automation Infrastructure
ESP migration, CDP implementation, and lifecycle automation so a five-person marketing team could segment, ship, and measure without waiting on engineering for every send.
At a glance
+10%
In-app feature adoption
40%
WoW retention (feature users)
5 marketers
Team supported
Capabilities used
The problem
• Clever's marketing team was capped by legacy tooling and fragmented data — every cohort export required an engineering ticket. • No behavioral segmentation meant one-size-fits-all email to a user base that included teachers, admins, and district IT — very different audiences with different activation needs. • A new in-app messaging product was launching with no growth communications strategy behind it. • The ~5-person team couldn't scale comms through manual exports and static sends — they needed infrastructure that let them move independently.
The fulcrum
The highest-leverage change we could make
• Led ESP migration and CDP implementation so behavioral data, user roles (teacher vs. admin), and engagement signals all lived in one place. • Designed growth communications specifically for Clever's new in-app messaging tool — targeting engaged core users inside the product, not just email. • Built dashboards leadership could read without filing a weekly analytics request. • Unlocked triggered programs and drip sequences the team could run and iterate without engineering involvement.
Applying force
What happened, and what we scaled into
• In-app messaging adoption rose +10% among targeted users — the new channel worked. • Users who engaged with the in-app messaging surface showed 40% week-over-week retention — a significant lift vs. baseline. • Marketers could run segmented tests and drip sequences without engineering requests for every cohort. • The CDP became the foundation for future experimentation, not just a tool migration checkbox.
Why this matters
• The CDP migration was table stakes. Every vendor will sell you the implementation. The real work was knowing what to build on top of it — which segments to target, which surface to use, and how to measure it. • That's the gap between a tool implementation and a growth program. One gives you infrastructure. The other gives you results. • If your marketing team is bottlenecked on engineering for every send, or you've invested in a CDP but haven't unlocked its value, this is the model. • The goal is a team that can move independently — not one that's permanently dependent on a consultant to run the next campaign.
Most engagements fail at the handoff between strategy and execution. Levered doesn't hand off — we own both.