Practical Automation for Busy Marketing Teams with ClassDojo

Speakers:

• Ben Okea: Customer Success Manager, Blueshift
• Andrew Tosiello: Marketing Operations, ClassDojo

Welcome and Introduction

Ben Okea: Welcome, everyone, to today's webinar: "Practical Automation for Busy Marketing Teams" with our friends at ClassDojo. We'll be joined by Andrew Tosiello from ClassDojo. I'm Ben Okea, a Customer Success Manager at Blueshift, and Andrew works in Marketing Operations for ClassDojo. Before we dive into the main discussion, we'll have a few poll questions for you, our audience, as we'd love to hear your thoughts and insights. Andrew, it's all yours!

Introducing ClassDojo and the Blueshift Partnership

Andrew Tosiello: Thanks, Ben. I’m Andrew Tosiello, leading marketing operations at ClassDojo.

About ClassDojo

ClassDojo is a global community connecting over 50 million teachers, faculty, and students. Our mission is to share kids' most important learning moments, both in school and at home.

• Founding: Started in 2011 as a classroom tool for behavior management using a positive points system.
• Evolution: We've expanded significantly, offering desktop, iOS, and Android apps. Our products now include:
  • Messaging
  • Tutoring
  • Classroom tools
  • An online educational game called Dojo Islands (popular for "Fun Fridays")
  • Event scheduling
• Core Offering: We provide a comprehensive suite of tools that enable teachers, parents, and children to build a supportive community, ultimately enhancing kids' education.

Why ClassDojo Chose Blueshift

ClassDojo relied purely on organic, word-of-mouth growth until mid-2020/2021 when we decided to scale our marketing efforts. Our prior in-house email and push system was engineer-dependent and difficult for marketers to use. We chose Blueshift for three key reasons:

1. Privacy and Security: As a platform focused primarily on K-4 education, data privacy and security are paramount. Blueshift helps us maintain a secure data platform.
2. Robust Customer Journeys: We needed a tool for multi-channel marketing (email, push, in-app notifications, with potential for SMS, WhatsApp, and website content). Blueshift allows us to create highly personalized journeys for our diverse audience of parents and teachers.
3. Flexible Platform: We sought a solution that could grow and adapt with our scaling needs, offering ample options for future development and marketing initiatives.

ClassDojo's MarTech Stack

Our marketing technology ecosystem is designed for seamless data flow and message orchestration:

• Customer Data Platform (CDP) & Marketing Automation: Blueshift
• Cloud Data Warehouse: Redshift (stores business data)
• Storage: S3 (for static files like images and downloadable resources for teachers)
• Business Intelligence: Metabase (makes Redshift data accessible organization-wide)
• Orchestration: Blueshift
• SMTP: SendGrid (Blueshift's adapter sends data to SendGrid for email delivery)
• Custom Delivery Systems: In-house built push and in-app notification services, which Blueshift seamlessly connects with.

This robust stack allows us to take data from Redshift, integrate it into Blueshift, and then send the right message to the right user at the right time through the right channel.

Marketing Operations at ClassDojo

Our marketing operations team is small—just two people—yet we support over six teams. My counterpart, Kiara, handles parent marketing and engagement, while I focus on teachers, school leaders, and district leaders. Our portfolio is extensive:

• Identifying audiences
• Setting up and running experiments
• Analyzing experiment data
• Reporting
• Launching an average of 110 new multi-channel campaigns (email, push, in-app) per month.

When I started, I was a solo marketing ops person, primarily focused on parents. Within a year, my responsibilities scaled to cover marketing for the entire company, necessitating the addition of another team member. This high workload with a lean team is common in marketing today.

Poll: Which Channels Do You Use?

Ben Okea: It's incredibly impressive how much Andrew's efficient team accomplishes. This leads us to our first poll question: "Which channels do you use to interact with your customers?" Blueshift offers a wide range of channels, and ClassDojo, for example, primarily uses email, push, and in-app notifications.

(Audience Poll Results Displayed)

Ben Okea: The results are in! It seems the vast majority of you use websites and email. Email, in particular, remains a core marketing channel. Social media is a close third, followed by SMS, which we know is a growing channel, and in-app notifications. Thank you for sharing!

Andrew's Strategies for Practical Automation

Andrew Tosiello: When I joined ClassDojo, I implemented four core strategies to boost our marketing operations efficiency.

Strategy 1: Standardize and Centralize the Request Process

• The Challenge: Initially, campaign requests came from everywhere—Slack, emails, Zoom calls—making it time-consuming to track, gather assets (copy, images), and prioritize.
• The Solution: I established a central Asana board (Trello is another option) for all requests. I also created a Google Form for intake, ensuring all necessary information is provided upfront in a consistent format.
• Benefits: This made it much easier for me to:
  • Understand project requirements.
  • Prioritize tasks effectively.
  • Have all information readily available.
  • Stakeholders can easily track their project's progress.
• Recommendation: If you haven't already, consider implementing a centralized request system.

Strategy 2: Build Things Ahead of Time

• The Approach: Front-loading template development allows for quick campaign delivery.
• The Solution: I built a standard HTML template incorporating examples of every module used in past campaigns. Now, I simply clone this template, cutting and pasting what's needed for new campaigns. All elements are clearly commented within the HTML for ease of use.
• Benefits:
  • Saves significant time, especially for mobile-responsive designs (e.g., image on left, text, stacking).
  • Eliminates the need to "reinvent the wheel" for each campaign.
  • Blueshift's new "recipes" (one-click template setup) align perfectly with this strategy.
  • Provides clear guidelines to our creative team on easily producible assets.

Strategy 3: Set Up Self-Serve Tools

• The Philosophy: Self-serve tools are crucial for empowering campaign managers and offloading repeatable tasks from marketing operations. My role shifts from setup to execution.
• Examples:
  • The Google Form for campaign requests (Strategy 1) is a self-serve tool for providing copy and Figma links.
  • Analytics Dashboards: All Blueshift campaign metrics flow daily into S3, then into our Redshift instance, making them accessible via Metabase. I've set up simple questions and dashboards where anyone can type in a campaign name and instantly see metrics like open rate or click rate.
• Benefits: Dramatically reduces the number of "how's this performing?" questions, saving significant time. Any repeatable operation is an opportunity for a self-serve tool.

Strategy 4: Automate Everything

This strategy integrates the first three, leveraging their benefits for full automation.

• Case Study: Moja's Activity Corner Campaign:
  • The Campaign: A weekly email (with push and in-app messages) sent on Sundays to teachers, highlighting a new activity.
  • The Prior Challenge: Content often arrived late (Friday afternoon/Saturday), leading to me spending an hour on Saturdays tracking down assets, building templates, and sending test emails for a repetitive campaign.
  • The Automation: I built a system where the campaign manager fills out a Google Form with content details. This data feeds into a Google Sheet, triggering a Google App Script with custom code. This script connects to Blueshift's API, creating the email template and sending a test email automatically.
  • Results: What used to take 1 hour now takes 15 minutes. The test email is generated within two minutes of form submission. This drastically improved my work-life balance!

(Andrew demonstrated this automation live, showing the Google Form submission leading to instant email generation in Blueshift.)

• Other Automation Examples:
  • District Leader Suppression: Our account executives needed a way to prevent irrelevant emails from being sent to newly signed-up district leaders (whose data wasn't in Redshift). I created a Google Form for them to submit a comma-separated list of emails. A Google App Script uses the Blueshift API to update a custom user attribute (district leader from false to true). This attribute is then used in exclusion segments, ensuring district leaders receive only relevant communications without requiring them to use Blueshift directly.
  • Survey Sending: We streamlined the process for sending customer surveys. Campaign managers request a survey via a form, the system generates the email with the survey link, and I simply associate the audience. A critical survey can now go from question to answers within 1-2 hours.
  • Email Template Previewer: For new team members or anyone wanting to see past campaigns, I created a form where they input a template name, and the system automatically sends them a preview. This saves time previously spent manually finding and testing templates in Blueshift.
  • On-Demand User Attribute Updates: The district leader example is one of many uses for updating user attributes on demand through forms, empowering various teams to push data into Blueshift without engineering or ops intervention.

These automations, powered by Blueshift's robust and well-documented API endpoints, have made us significantly more efficient.

Poll: MarTech Stack Data Sources

Ben Okea: Thank you for that fantastic demonstration, Andrew! It's truly amazing to see these automations in action. This brings us to our second and final poll question: "How many data sources and tools are part of your MarTech stack?" Marketers often underestimate this number when considering all the inputs powering their messages. Andrew, just a ballpark, what do you think is in your MarTech stack?

Andrew Tosiello: That's a great question, and honestly, I don't know the exact number. It's easy to focus on integrated sources like SQL databases or our website. But consider all the other ways information flows in: Google Sheets where teams identify customers to suppress, sign-up sheets from conferences, Salesforce data from surveys, or even Slack messages like "Can you make sure this person gets this message?" Data is constantly flowing from many different sources. So, yes, it's a lot.

Ben Okea: It definitely is a lot!

(Audience Poll Results Displayed)

Ben Okea: The results are very interesting. Roughly half of those who voted said 1 to 10 data sources, which makes sense for keeping things concise. The other half said they don't know and are unsure, echoing Andrew's point exactly.

Automation Results and Resources

Andrew Tosiello: Our automation efforts have yielded significant results:

• Time Savings: We've saved a tremendous amount of time by identifying repeatable operations and building automated workflows.
• Product Launches: We successfully launched our Dojo Tutoring product with minimal engineering support, largely thanks to these automations acting as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) testing ground. This drove considerable growth and revenue.
• Enhanced User Connections: Rapid survey deployment allows us to gather user feedback quickly, informing product decisions and company direction without delays.
• Increased Workload Capacity: Our marketing operations team, despite remaining small (two people), has significantly increased its workload capacity by investing in these upfront automations.

Ben Okea: Absolutely, Andrew. Thank you for that. As promised, here are some helpful resources:

• Blueshift API Documentation: The robust API Andrew mentioned is key to these automations.
• Google App Scripts Samples: Andrew has put together sample scripts for those interested in building similar automations. He highlighted ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot as phenomenal tools for generating code and assisting those new to coding (Andrew, for example, has a degree in painting, not JavaScript!).
• Smart Guide to Cross Channel Campaigns: A Blueshift-created resource packed with campaign examples to boost engagement and revenue (link to be shared later).

Q&A Session

Ben Okea: Let's move to some Q&A from the audience. First, a question for Andrew from me: You emphasized Blueshift's API flexibility. What would you say to marketers who aren't comfortable with APIs? What are other ways to leverage Blueshift's flexibility?

Andrew Tosiello: That's a great question. I appreciate that Blueshift is a flexible platform, offering multiple ways to get data in. While I'm comfortable with APIs, you can also use:

• Manual Upload Tool: Directly upload CSV files.
• Event Test Tool: A simple tool on the events page to fire real test events into Blueshift, useful for validating event-triggered campaigns and template personalization.
• S3 from AWS Integration: Easily set up daily, hourly, or weekly jobs in Blueshift to pull data from S3 buckets.

Even Blueshift's newer "recipes" in the template library, which facilitate one-click template setup, show their commitment to making the product efficient for everyone.

Ben Okea: Awesome, thank you. We have another question from the audience: "Can you please give us an example of any successful campaigns with Blueshift?"

Andrew Tosiello: Certainly. Blueshift has been central to our marketing success. The key is always the right personalization for the right audience with the right message.

• Successful Parents Campaign: We sent an email to parents asking them to share their kids' "superstar moments" from school. We received a phenomenal 50% response rate (not just open or click rate), with half of the recipients sending personal stories. This truly heartwarming campaign was successful because we targeted the right audience based on account activity and teacher-parent message exchanges, sending the message at the optimal time.
• School Leaders Acquisition Campaign: We've also had success sending emails to school leaders who hadn't yet joined, highlighting the number of teachers already on the platform within their school. This drove brand-new sign-ups, with one campaign resulting in 300 new sign-ups.

Ben Okea: Awesome, Andrew. That's a great breakdown. It's always fantastic to hear about these wins as we strive to strengthen our partnership.

Conclusion and Farewell

Ben Okea: Thank you so much, Andrew, for your insights and for sharing ClassDojo's success with Blueshift. We truly appreciate you helping us make this webinar as successful as possible. For those who want to contact us or Andrew, contact information is available on the final slide. I hope everyone has a great rest of the week, and thank you all for joining us!

Andrew Tosiello: Thanks so much, Ben. Thanks everyone.

Ben Okea: All right. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Andrew Tosiello: Bye.