Real Brands. Real Gains. Real Proof.

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.

As ApnaKlub scaled across Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets, the platform had solved the supply problem. What it hadn’t solved was communication.

The kirana buyer in Lucknow or the wholesale retailer in Patna is not an impulse purchaser. They operate on tight margins, deliberate buying cycles, and deep price awareness. They don’t browse for fun – they buy when the timing, the margin, and the inventory align. And they decide fast: in their vernacular language, on WhatsApp, on a budget Android phone.

Generic catalogue blasts and English push notifications were landing with a thud – not because the offers weren’t good, but because the communication didn’t speak the language of the person receiving it. Three fault lines emerged:

1. Catching the Buyer at the Right Moment

Intent was never the problem. The challenge was showing up at the exact moment they were ready to act – not blasting them at random and hoping the timing worked out.

2. Staying Relevant Across 30,000 Different Buying Patterns

No two wholesalers restock the same way. Sending everyone the same message wasn’t just ineffective, it was invisible.

3. Breaking the English-Centric SaaS Barrier

A wholesaler in Bihar doesn’t think in English. A Hindi notification showing a live margin figure and a product image lands in a completely different universe from a plain-text English push.

For a brand built on personal connection, growth brings a trade-off. More members, clubs, and programmes mean more communication – but a one-size-fits-all message loses the personal feel that members value.
Planet Fitness had two clear goals:

• Drive registrations for challenge programmes like DadBod and HYROX through timely, personalised email that matched how members actually train over several weeks.
• Reach the full member base for launches and seasonal moments, without losing deliverability or engagement quality.

One system of record, but no engagement layer.
Planet Fitness managed its membership on Itensity, its internal gym management platform and the main record of all member data.

Itensity handled membership, billing, and access well. But as a core management system, it wasn’t designed to serve as a dynamic marketing engagement layer.
To unlock advanced communication, Planet Fitness needed a dedicated engagement layer on top – one that could support multi-step automated journeys, deeper segmentation, high-volume sends with reliable inbox placement, and clear campaign tracking. It also needed to do all this without a large internal technical team.