Cleartax switched from legacy platform to Netcore - and achieved 73% Growth in returning users

ClearTax is India’s largest tax-filing platform, and over the last decade it has grown well beyond that into a full-stack fintech spanning income-tax filing, GST, and more. Founded in 2011 in Bengaluru by Archit Gupta, Srivatsan Chari, and Ankit Solanki, it was the first India-focused company backed by Y Combinator.

Its consumer tax business runs at a serious scale – around 1.8 crores tax filers. At peak, an average filer generates around 26 distinct events as they move through the flow – a heavy, real-time signal load in a matter of weeks.

When filing season hits, traffic spikes hard, and every user is somewhere different in the funnel – some just logged in, some are staring at a tax summary, some are one nudge away from paying. New filers and returning filers, all at once.

For a marketing team, that’s the whole game: get the right message to the right filer at the right moment, and do it without burning a budget on people who don’t need it. Whatever you’re running campaigns on either makes that possible or gets in the way.

ClearTax ran its lifecycle marketing on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). It worked – until the season scaled past what it could keep up with. The problems weren’t settings you could tweak; they were baked in:

• No single view of the customer. Customer data was split across Salesforce and Mailmodo, with no unified view – not even something as basic as how many times a given user had filed. No single profile meant no real targeting, just educated guesses.
• Flying blind on the funnel. No funnel or cohort analytics, so the team couldn’t see where filers were dropping off or how different groups behaved. You can’t fix what you can’t see.
• It buckled under load. Sends couldn’t keep up with peak-season volume – exactly when timing matters most.
• Laggy, patchy data. Data showed up late or not at all, which kills real-time triggers and any chance to optimize while a filer is still in the flow.
• Slow to troubleshoot. When something needed fixing fast during the tax filing months, the setup fought back instead of helping.

And the kicker: their Salesforce plan didn’t even include email. One of their core channels lived in a separate tool, which meant more stitching, more handoffs, more places for data to fall out of sync. At some point the question stopped being “how do we tune this?” and became “why is all of this in so many different places?” That’s what kicked off the project – and it broke into three pieces.

They didn’t bolt anything on. They moved the whole lifecycle setup onto Netcore and rebuilt it in the right order – get everything in one place, get a real view of the customer, then actually use it.

Move 1 – Getting off Salesforce

This was the hard one, and they did it first. Swapping out the platform your marketing runs on is nobody’s idea of fun – doing it with peak tax season on the calendar is the kind of thing that gets you talked out of it. ClearTax did it anyway, because patching around Salesforce had stopped paying off.

The reason wasn’t one missing feature. It was that everything lived somewhere different. Data in one place, email in another, automation in a third – every campaign was an exercise in keeping tools in sync, and every tool added its own lag. The pitch for Netcore was simple: put the data, the channels, the automation, and the analytics in one system so the team could stop being integrators and get back to marketing.

Yes, re-platforming before the busy tax filing season is a risk. But the bigger risk was managing the upcoming volume of tax filing with the same fragmented setup that had capped them the year before. Once the migration was done, the next two moves were actually possible – they weren’t, before.

Move 2 – One view of the customer

With everything finally in one place, ClearTax built a single customer view on Netcore’s CDP. This is harder for them than for most businesses, because at ClearTax the customer’s identity literally changes mid-journey.

Here’s the wrinkle: before someone files, their email is the primary key. But one email can file for a whole family, and the moment a return is filed, the key that identifies them shifts. Most customer engagement platforms would treat that as two different people – or lose the thread entirely. The CDP held it together across two automation panels and two primary keys so the same person stayed the same person no matter where they were in the flow. It did this by linking the two identities into a single parent-child relationship – the pre-filing email and the post-filing key resolved to one person – so engagement history, segmentation, and suppression all carried across the moment of filing instead of resetting.

With that view in place, the segments were obvious: highly engaged users, unresponsive ones, cross-channel hoppers, and people who’d already converted. It also cut spend, not just improved targeting – anyone already moving through a funnel got pulled out of drop-off journeys, and converted users stopped getting messaged. No more paying to reach people who’d already done the thing.

Move 3 – Targeting that earns its keep

With a clean view in place, the team could finally run on data instead of instinct.

Analytics they could actually act on

For the first time they could see conversion and drop-off at every stage, for every cohort – and see which channels were really pulling weight versus which just felt busy. That told them where to put effort, and the product-level drop-off data fed straight into win-back journeys aimed at the people who’d stalled.

Segmentation a marketer would recognize

They sliced users on the stuff that actually predicts behavior: salary slab, when they last filed, ITR type (ITR 1–4), whether they file themselves or want assisted filing, and what kind of filer they are based on the plan they have selected.Then they layered channel engagement on top, segment by segment, so each group got to where it actually pays attention.

Journeys built for tax season calendar

Those segments drove tailored drip and drop-off journeys – sharper targeting, better engagement, lower cost to serve – timed to the season: early- and mid-season nudges to get filers moving, and reminders to push filings over the line before the deadline.

Beyond the filling: Support and NPS

The story didn’t stop once a filing was done. ClearTax also used Netcore to close the loop on support – the part of the journey most tools leave untouched.

When a filer hits a problem mid-filing and raises a request, a support agent steps in to sort it out. The moment the agent resolves and updates the case, Netcore automatically triggers an NPS survey to that user – built as a form-based use case on AMP so the filer can rate the experience right inside the email, without clicking away.

The scores flow back into Netcore tagged at the agent level. So if two agents touched the same filer’s case, ClearTax can tell whose help actually landed – turning raw feedback into agent-level insight on how the support team is performing. It’s a small addition that does real work: the same CRM that drives acquisition and retention also powers post-support feedback and continuous engagement, so the relationship keeps improving well after the return is filed.

Making the switch before peak season – instead of playing it safe on the old stack – paid off exactly when it counted:

And because the unified view kept them from spending on people who’d already converted or were already in a funnel, those numbers came from smarter spend – not a bigger budget.