Tonies Increase Free-to-Paid Conversions YoY with Braze

The Tonies brand encourages children to listen, learn, and play via their innovative Toniebox speaker and collectible figurines (known as Tonies). When they place a Tonie on top of their Toniebox, children are transported to a magical world of stories, songs, and even personally recorded audio. Kids love Tonies for the content and playable figurines—averaging 268 minutes playtime a week—and parents love them for providing screen-free entertainment. The Toniebox platform grows exponentially each year, fueling highly-predictable repeat purchases of Tonies. In Q1 2024 alone, the brand sold over 5.8 million Tonies.

A big part of the brand’s success is their focus on customer engagement. In order to drive repeat purchases, free-to-paid content upgrades, and long-term retention, they were looking to better activate, retain, and monetize their growing community of fans. So they turned to Braze.

Free Content as a High-Value Action: Activating and Monetizing New Toniebox Users

The Tonies system consists of the Toniebox speaker, a recordable figurine, and the Tonies app, which is essential for configuring the Toniebox and accessing free audio content. The app also allows users to browse, preview, and order collectible storytelling figurines, known as Tonies—and a great app and messaging experience is essential to customer’s enjoyment of the product. To activate new Toniebox owners, the brand provides an interactive in-app guide that helps users set up the speaker and download free content onto the figurine, fostering engagement and encouraging further purchases.

Free content usage is considered a high-value action for the Tonies team because it:

• Encourages users to return to the app, where they can shop for additional content
• Extends customer lifetimes through continued use of the Toniebox—over 70% of Toniebox remain in use within three months of purchase, with most users accumulating around 20 Tonies over 4.5 years

As such, it is a gateway to unlocking the value of the product and building the likelihood of upgrading to paid products in the future.

To encourage users to download and engage with free content, the Tonies team created an in-app onboarding flow to guide new users toward this high-value action. From the app welcome screen, a Braze Content Card™ highlights the availability of free content. Next, in-app messages are used to walk users through downloading and using the content.

Once users have downloaded free content, the Tonies team can personalize future communications with related content that's relevant to users' interests.

New user onboarding flow

Step 1

• Goal: Inform new users about free content for their Tonie
• Audience: New user who first used the app in the past 7 days and has not downloaded digital content
• Trigger: Starts a new mobile app session
• Message: Push notification and in-app messaging promoting free branded content

Step 2

• If user downloads free branded content, wait three days, then upsell paid content for the same brand
• If user doesn’t download branded content, move to Step 3
• Everyone else, exit

Step 3

• After three days, promote alternative branded content

Outside of the onboarding journey, Tonies employs a strategic upselling approach for existing users with targeted messaging flows based on real-time user interactions with their content. For instance, when a user engages with the "Paw Patrol" series but does not make a purchase after 30 days, they receive a push notification to encourage their next paid content purchase, followed by a discount offer if there is still no activity after an additional week. Similarly, users who have interacted with "Peppa Pig" are prompted with a push notification or an in-app Content Card after four days of inactivity.

Existing user upsell

Goal: Upsell next paid content purchase to frequent buyers
Audience: Custom event “assigned_paid_content” where series matches “Paw Patrol”
Action: After 30 days with no purchase, send a push notification. After further 7 days with no purchase, send another message with a discount.

Goal: Upsell matching Tonie to paid content buyers
Audience: Custom event “assigned_paid_content” where series matches “Peppa Pig”
Action: After 4 days with no purchase, customers with “mobile push” as their Intelligent Channel will receive their message as push notification

To effectively implement these strategies, the Tonies team integrates client-side and server-side data into Braze, along with insights derived from their machine learning-supported data lake via Braze partner Snowflake.

“With Braze, we’re able to guide users to get the most out of their Toniebox purchase. By supporting users to download free content from our app, Tonies helps them ignite their child’s imagination without any additional cost. But by introducing users to Tonies’ world of storytelling and song for free, we pave the way for future purchases and longer customer lifetimes, as families grow with Tonies’ rich library of paid content and collectibles. Braze powers this through seamless onboarding journeys, followed by powerful segmentation and messaging personalization later in our customer relationships.”

Anh Ha

Head of Digital Growth, Tonies

Results: More revenue from their customer engagement efforts

Since implementing its new onboarding and upsell messaging flows, Tonies has seen a 117% increase in free-to-paid conversions from 2023 to 2024.

Key Takeaways

1. Identify and activate high-value actions that drive the North star of your brand.
2. Be strategic about the data you collect and channels you use.
3. Use a mix of in-app and out-of-app channels to engage users.

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