Strategy Guide: Using Mobile Marketing Automation to Optimize the Customer Lifecycle

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1 Strategy Guide: Using Mobile Marketing Automation to Optimize the Customer Lifecycle

2 Why should I read this guide? The Mobile Era has changed everything. The Internet-connected computers in our pockets have forever changed the way we work and play. This revolution requires a fundamental rethinking of how brands communicate with consumers. If brands want to reach modern consumers, they must communicate intelligently with them on the consumer s terms. Traditional digital marketing focuses on , with very direct user-journey maps and the idea that each consumer can be tied to a single device. That just doesn t cut it in the Mobile Era. The modern consumer has multiple devices, wants information that s uniquely targeted, and doesn t fit neatly into a broad cohort. Brands wanting to win in the Mobile Era must use personalized communications at scale. Mobile marketing automation (or as it s increasingly being called, communication automation ) has emerged to address the disconnect between what consumers want and the tools that are available to brands. When mobile marketing automation is done right, it results in higher retention, greater revenues, more engagement, and customer delight. 2

3 Mobile Marketing Automation

4 Mobile Marketing Automation Brands need to reach modern consumers where they want to interact, and that s increasingly on mobile. A recent Nielsen analysis found Americans already spend more than 37 hours a month in apps 1, and that figure is only expected to increase. A strong ecosystem of customer acquisition tools emerged to fill this demand for app discovery, but this is only part of the equation for success. Intelligent brands understand how important the entire customer lifecycle is as well as how big of an impact an engagement marketing strategy can have on the customer journey. Up to 90% of app installs do not become high-value users after 90 days without an engagement marketing strategy. 2 In order to efficiently increase revenue and user engagement, while simultaneously enhancing the user experience, brands need to automate, personalize, and measure their mobile marketing activities. Mobile marketing automation is a solution that enables brands to achieve their business goals through intelligent messaging to users across all platforms, channels, and levels of engagement. These messages can include s, push notifications, in-app messages, social media ads, and more. 4

5 Mobile marketing automation is characterized by an intuitive understanding of each individual s preferred devices, channels, and time(s) to be engaged. Mobile marketing automation technology must include the following three requirements in order to drive successful results. 1. Person-centric approach Consumers today use multiple devices and multiple platforms. A proper mobile communications tool needs to understand a person s behavior across every device and platform. Communications based on a person s behavior on a single platform will lead to mis-personalization, which ultimately leads to a poor user experience. For example, a consumer may often browse a shopping app on his smartphone but ends up purchasing on his tablet. Sending conversion campaigns to the phone likely won t yield the results the brand wants. Even worse, it may turn the user off because it doesn t fit into how he likes to engage with the app. 5

6 2. Intelligent Personalization The Mobile Era requires more than just personalization by first name. Brands that want to engage and delight customers must provide deep personalization for each user, at scale. For example, sending a mass message saying, Hey [First Name], we have shoes on sale isn t going to be as effective as sending a message with intelligent personalization. A message like Hey [First Name], we re having a sale on [Last Item Browsed]. Check it out! is more relevant and will yield better results. 6

7 3. Automatic Optimization Messaging should be automatically delivered based on user behavior; timed based on individual usage patterns; and optimized based on an understanding of user value, conversion, and engagement. A/B testing can give some insights into the best message copy, but the limitations of performing this type of testing can hurt a brand s business goals. Manual A/B testing requires valuable time to spin up tests, measure results, and optimize. Even worse, running manual A/B tests means there s a significant portion of users receiving the non-optimal message. Communication automation can provide automated testing and optimization that adjusts communications dynamically, saving time and effort for the marketer. 1. Nielsen Analysis, So Many Apps, So Much More Time For Entertainment, June Kahuna Mobile Marketing Index, June

8 Using Mobile Marketing Automation to Optimize the Customer Lifecycle

9 Using Mobile Marketing Automation to Optimize the Customer Lifecycle In this section, we ll discuss how mobile marketing automation can be used to optimize the customer lifecycle through four types of users: New Users, Engaged Users, Top Users, and Dormant Users. Brands that want to win will continually communicate with users in a personalized manner. 9

10 New Users You only get one chance to make a first impression, and that has major ramifications with apps. Recent data show app makers can lose nearly 80% of Daily Active Users (DAUs) within the first three days after an install. 3 It s critical for brands to have a cohesive new user strategy in place in order to set new users on the path to becoming valuable customers. The most critical way that mobile marketing automation can optimize your new user strategy is through targeted, personalized, and automated onboarding campaigns. Once you ve identified the virtuous actions you want new users to take after downloading your app, communication automation can help encourage your users toward these important milestones. Currently, many onboarding flows are set up purely on a time-based system, such as on day one, send message about functionality A; on day two, send message about B. A personalized onboarding experience, however, is about making every message count. A customized onboarding campaign takes into account user behavior, acquisition channel, and engagement stage. By leveraging the acquisition channel, you can tailor your onboarding campaigns to the investment level of each individual user. If a customer downloaded your app through a paid campaign, he will likely have less knowledge or interest in your app than somebody who organically searched for it. Your onboarding campaigns should take that into account and provide the less knowledgeable user with more information about your app. 10

11 Brands should also strive for onboarding flows that dynamically adjust in real time to a user s behavior because these are far more effective than generic, one-size-fits-all approaches. Personalized onboarding flows should also incorporate the user s engagement state and adjust messaging accordingly, based on your brand s segmentation thresholds. Importantly, personalized onboarding flows will also know when not to message users. For example, a shopping app could adjust its onboarding flow based on the initial activities of a new user within the app. Onboarding messages can be used to nudge the user toward explicitly indicating shopping preferences and preferred categories. Once the user has identified these preferences, the onboarding flow could shift to encourage the user to add items from a preferred category into a wishlist. As the user completes more and more of these actions and potentially moves engagement stages the messaging campaign could change again, delivering messages that are more suited to an engaged user. 3. AndrewChen.co, New data shows losing 80% of mobile users is normal, and why the best apps do better 11

12 Engaged Users Engaged users are already active users of your app, so your mobile marketing strategy for this segment of users should hone in on the key actions that will capitalize on consumer intent and lead to monetization. Mobile marketing automation is the perfect tool to help brands achieve these goals. With engaged users, your communication automation system has the added benefit of already having a good understanding of these users, through past user behavior and explicit and implicit preferences. Leveraging this data allows you to send hyper-targeted messages to encourage actions that correlate with higher retention rates, monetization, and lifetime value. Brands need their mobile marketing automation to determine the best message to send, as well as the best time to send it, based on the actions consumers have already taken in your app. For example, a music app could use mobile marketing automation to run campaigns aimed at getting engaged users to upgrade to a premium plan. These campaigns would incorporate information the music service knows about consumers to make messages personal and relevant. This could include a mobile-friendly that notifies a user about a special preview of a new album from a favorite artist. The timing of the campaign would be automatically aligned with the behavioral data of the user, ensuring the best possible chances of engaging with the message. After the user has listened to the album, another message could encourage an upgrade to a premium tier in order to get access to additional features like offline access or exclusive tracks. 12

13 Top Users An app s top users demonstrate high levels of engagement, perform virtuous actions, and/or make purchases time and time again. These users show great enthusiasm for the brand and are vital to your app s success. Top users are critical for their current contributions but can also be extremely valuable down the road as a constant source of support and referrals. You need your marketing to help sustain the enthusiasm of your top users and transform them into brand advocates. The key to sustaining enthusiasm with your top users is to make them feel important and cared for. Mobile enables brands to talk to consumers in a personal and intimate way, and brands can leverage this intimacy by sending top users special Thank You messages, rewards, or access to special features before general release. These offers and messages must be delivered in a personalized manner, to not only show your top users that their loyalty is appreciated, but also demonstrate that you understand them on a deeper level. Relationships that have taken months to build can be lost in an instant. Use your mobile marketing automation to ensure that your messages to top users are relevant, timely, and personalized. Brand advocates are some of the best weapons in a modern marketer s arsenal because they have high lifetime values and can dramatically lower the cost to acquire new users. Finding the right users and the right time to ask them to amplify your brand s message is challenging if done manually, but mobile marketing automation takes the guesswork out of it. 13

14 For example, a news app could send a push notification campaign to top users, granting them exclusive access to premium content in a relevant vertical. After users hit a certain threshold with content consumption, the news app could then use an in-app message asking for a review in the App Store. When you combine these personalized messages with the optimal time and device distribution all powered by communication automation you ve got a formula for a winning top user campaign. 14

15 Dormant Users Dormant users can be a major drag on your long-term prospects because these are people who downloaded your app, went through an onboarding process, were once engaged users, but are no longer engaging with your app. Your marketing efforts need to reach dormant users in a variety of ways. For dormant users, your goal is to inspire them to re-engage with your app and take the key actions that will get them back on track to becoming frequent, long-term customers. Unlike new users, who are a black box, it s likely that you already have useful information about dormant users, including their past activities, preferences, and perhaps even what caused them to go dormant in the first place. Leverage this data to re-engage these users with intelligent communications that offer incentives or showcase new features. Dormant users have likely forgotten your app s value proposition remind them of what inspired them to download your app in the first place. For example, an on-demand transportation app could target a dormant user who is traveling to a new location and offer a discount code for taking another ride. This shows the value of the on-demand service for users who are travelling, while also providing a monetary incentive. Mobile marketing automation makes it possible to target, personalize, and deliver a campaign of this nature to users who are most likely to convert. Understanding user behavior as it is changing in real time is important for dormant users, but it s also critical for optimizing every step of the customer lifecycle. The only way brands can automatically account for a variety of mission-critical factors when messaging consumers is through mobile marketing automation. 15

16 The Mobile Era Requires Better Communication

17 The Mobile Era Requires Better Communication Remember, your app is always just a few seconds away from being forgotten or simply uninstalled. In the Mobile Era, consumers demand intelligent, personalized communications throughout their customer journeys. Brands that deliver non-relevant messages that show no understanding of where a user sits in the customer lifecycle are sending spam. This type of messaging is a quick way to lose revenue and damage brand perception. Delivering relevant messages that delight consumers will add to the overall user experience, as well as help brands achieve business goals. Communication automation supports a strategy of targeting any stage of the customer lifecycle, ensuring that messaging is unique to the individual and sensitive to a user s past, present, and potential future behavior. 17

18 Kahuna is a pioneer in communication automation, dedicated to empowering businesses to grow and thrive in the mobile era. We enable a new level of authentic engagement between brands and their customers wherever they are the web, , mobile, social channels through personalized communication at scale. Powered by big data and machine learning, we help create delightful experiences for every customer with the perfect message, delivered on the right channel, at just the right time. Kahuna is trusted by Yelp, Overstock.com, The Weather Channel, and hundreds of other leading brands. Headquartered in Silicon Valley and with offices in New York, Kahuna was founded in 2012 and is funded by Sequoia Capital, SoftTech VC, Tenaya Capital, and others. Want to learn more about Kahuna? We d love to hear from you. Here s how to get in touch: Contact us: Visit us: