How Doppler Grew Customer Lifetime Value by 36% With Userpilot
Doppler is a marketing platform that helps businesses reach their customers across every channel. What started as an email tool now covers landing pages, marketing automation, SMS, ecommerce integrations, push notifications, in-app pop-ups, and AI-supported chatbots. The product serves marketing teams who want to engage their audiences and grow customer relationships over time.
| ⚙️ Challenge | Doppler’s product team needed a single platform to understand feature adoption, run in-app engagement, and act on the data. They outgrew their previous vendor, Beamer, and wanted to find a more complex tool that would still allow them to act quickly without engineering dependencies. |
| 🏆 Solution | ✅ Doppler team now tags around 90% of product events himself with Userpilot’s no-code event tracking, so he can measure adoption the same day a feature ships. ✅The team uses flows, checklists, and spotlights to onboard new users and drive adoption of new features. ✅In-app messages handle billing reminders, big event announcements, and maintenance notices at the right moment. ✅NPS surveys and behavior-based segments help product, customer success, and commercial teams act on feedback and spot upsell opportunities. ✅Customer lifetime value rose from 11 to 15 months, average session duration increased by around 2 minutes, and user retention keeps climbing. |
The challenge: Searching for a self-serve product analytics and engagement solution
Doppler’s main goal is to grow its customer base and increase customer lifetime value. To do that, the product team needed to understand how people actually used the platform and guide them toward the features that drove activation.
The Doppler team’s previous setup couldn’t handle either job exactly right.
A changelog tool that only did one job. Doppler first used Beamer to send in-app notifications to customers, but the tool wasn’t built to track adoption or onboard users. When Beamer was acquired by Userflow, Diego Noya, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Doppler, started looking for a solution that would combine product analytics and in-app engagement, and let the Doppler team act faster on insights.
No easy way to see how features were adopted. Diego wanted to know how customers moved through the product. But without a no-code analytics tool, getting that knowledge required developers’ help in setting up and tracking events.
Engagement that depended on engineering. Beyond notifications, Doppler wanted to build real onboarding and in-app guidance to raise adoption and lifetime value. With their old setup, shipping a flow or a walkthrough was an engineering project.
“It all started when I wanted to send notifications to our customers. I knew there had to be a tool for that already, so I didn’t want to build it ourselves. While I was evaluating options, Userpilot came up, I tried it, and it was exactly what I was looking for.”
The solution: No-code analytics and in-app engagement that the product team runs on its own
Doppler moved its product communication to Userpilot and expanded their in-app engagement well past notifications. Diego’s team now tracks behavior, sets up onboarding and walk-throughs, and collects feedback from one platform, with little day-to-day help from engineering.
No-code event tracking and real-time product analytics
The Doppler team’s work starts at events. Using the visual labeler, Diego tags product events himself instead of waiting for developers. That changed how quickly the team can get data on newly shipped features,
“All the events and flows you can tag really help us understand how customers use our application without asking the development team for help. When we release a new feature, I can tag the event and see the adoption right away. I’d say I’m about 90% self-sufficient. I can track almost all the events I want on my own.”
On the analytics side, Diego monitors activation reports to watch customers move from the free to paid plan. He has also built 10 to 15 of his own reports and uses funnels to see how many people reach a feature and how many convert. When adoption falls short, the team responds with a flow or a pop-up to re-engage users, and de-prioritizes less successful features.
Flows, checklists, and spotlights to onboard users and launch features
For onboarding, the product team uses checklists that help new customers get instant value from the platform, walking them through the shortest path to value. The team is also setting up an onboarding experience aimed at free users and new customers, plus a resource center to aggregate all guidance in one place.
Separate flows introduce new functionalities and explain how they work, often including short videos from the resource center.
For smaller releases, Doppler uses spotlights to draw attention without interrupting the workflow.
In-app messaging for billing, events, and maintenance
Doppler uses in-app messages for the moments that matter most to revenue and trust. The most common case is billing: when a paying customer’s credit card expires, the platform prompts them to update their payment details. The team also announces its two big online events each year and warns users ahead of scheduled maintenance.
NPS surveys and segments to close the loop with customers
Doppler’s customer success team runs NPS surveys in Userpilot to gather feedback. Diego also builds behavior-based segments that are later used by other teams. One segment captures customers who activated a 30-day free add-on trial but did not buy, which the commercial team uses to reach out and understand why.
The results: Extended lifetime value, longer sessions, and rising retention
The Doppler team attributes a lot of their success regarding users’ lifetime value to Userpilot. The numbers moved in the right direction across the team’s most crucial KPIs.
Customer lifetime value grew from 11 to 15 months
Over the past year, average customer lifetime value rose from 11 months to 15 months, an increase of about 36%. Diego credits the flows for new functionality and the checklists that help customers get started.
“Last year, we worked hard on extending lifetime value, and Userpilot helped us a lot. Our lifetime value went from 11 months to 15 months, and the flows and checklists were a big part of that.”
Average session duration went up 2-3 minutes
As Doppler added in-app guidance, customers spent longer in the product. Average session duration climbed by two to three minutes after the team rolled out flows and walkthroughs. Diego links the lift directly to the in-app content that helps people understand the tool.
“The average session duration of our customers went up by two or three minutes since we started using Userpilot. I think it’s because of the flows and everything we put in place to help customers understand the tool.”
Rising user retention
Retention has increased with the gains in lifetime value, which the team sees as closely linked. Diego can continuously monitor it in Userpilot dashboards and quickly react if he sees any dips.
90% less reliance on developers and getting user insights right after launch
Because Diego tags events and builds engagement himself, the product team no longer waits on engineering for most measurement and in-app work. He puts his self-sufficiency at around 90%. The clearest proof is speed: he can tag a button and read adoption the moment a feature goes live.
“Last week we released a new feature, and the same day it went live, I tagged the button in Userpilot. I knew how many people were using it right away.”
What can you learn from Doppler?
Doppler’s work with Userpilot shows how a product team can take ownership of adoption and lifetime value without turning every idea into an engineering ticket. A few lessons for teams in a similar spot:
- Own your product data. Tag events yourself with no-code tracking so you can read adoption the day a feature ships, instead of waiting on developers to instrument it.
- Use flows and checklists to extend lifetime value. Guiding customers to first value and to new features kept Doppler’s users around four months longer, on average.
- Send in-app messages at the moments that matter. Billing reminders, launch announcements, and maintenance notices land better in the product than in another email.
- Close the loop with feedback and segments. Pair NPS with behavior-based segments, so customer success and commercial teams can act on deeper user insights built on qualitative and quantitative data.
- Measure before and after. Watch adoption, session duration, and retention so you can double down on what works and drop what does not earn usage.
As Diego told us:
“Userpilot is a really good tool to understand how your customers use your product, which sections work best, and which features they take advantage of. It’s very easy to measure impact and see what’s going on.”
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