The following is a guest contributed post from Momchil Kyrurkchiev, the CEO and co-founder of Leanplum.
TextNow, a company offering affordable alternatives to traditional wireless plans and services, recently built an automated and personalized lifecycle campaign across several messaging channels, including push notifications, email, in-app messages and app inbox. The campaign encouraged and incentivized users to interact with their app, resulting in up to 79 percent conversion rates across
The TextNow app gives users their very own dedicated phone number and offers free unlimited texting, calling, picture messaging, voicemail, and more — including low-cost international calls. With over 60 million downloads to date, TextNow is on a mission to radically transform the telecom landscape.
The Challenge
As the saying goes, “the first impression is the last impression,” which means onboarding is a critical factor in an app’s retention strategy. Users that engage with the core app experience early in their lifecycle are more likely to become loyal users, and retain long term. TextNow wanted to ensure that newly onboarded users understood how to use the app and get immediate value.
The Goal
TextNow defined successful onboarding as getting users to send their first message or make their first call within the first 12 hours after registration.
The Campaign
TextNow used Leanplum’s mobile marketing platform to set up three engagement campaigns. These platforms enable app managers to build personalized lifecycle campaigns in one visual timeline across any messaging channel, such as push notifications, email, in-app messages, app inbox, and more. By employing a combination of mobile automation tactics, the lifecycle campaigns are instrumental in onboarding new users.
Of the new campaigns:
- The first campaign encouraged users to make their first phone call.
- The second campaign focused on getting users to send their first message.
- The third campaign simply asked dormant users to come back to the app.
Once new users completed the registration, they qualified for the campaigns. When they took the desired action — making a call, sending a message, or returning to the app — they were considered successfully onboarded and moved on to the next stage of lifecycle campaigns.
The Results
With these three lifecycle campaigns, TextNow saw outstanding results as the result of the push notification:
- The first campaign converted 25 percent of users. That’s a 3.7 percent lift in users who initiated a phone call.
- The second campaign converted 44 percent of users. That’s a 1.2 percent lift in the number of users who sent a message.
- The third campaign converted 79 percent of users. That translated to a 3 percent lift in day seven retention.
Put in perspective, these lifecycle campaigns had a significant cumulative impact on retention. In terms of day 15 retention, there was a five percent lift in the number of Android users and a four percent lift in the number of iOS users who returned to the app. Those are big wins for TextNow.
As TextNow moves more users towards in-app milestones, it can increase the number of users converting to paid subscriptions. More onboarded users also means higher retention and greater potential app revenue.
What this Means for App Managers
Converting new installs into active users is hard. To do it at scale, you need a great technology partner.
Specifically, you need a campaign automation solution that enables engagement with millions of users in real-time. By setting up lifecycle campaigns just once, you can onboard every new user who installs your app, at scale. This decreases the drop-off rate in the beginning of your funnel, and increases the chances of users coming back to take actions (like subscribing) that drive ROI. You can also A/B test these campaigns against one another to continually optimize for performance.
