Learn how you can Unlock Limitless Customer Lifetime Value with CleverTap’s All-in-One Customer Engagement Platform.
To help marketers learn the frameworks and tactics they can use to drive growth for their brands, we host CleverTap Quarterly (CTQ) — a virtual event that brings together customers and industry leaders in an effort to share proven strategies for success.
At our latest CTQ this January 13, 2022, we took notes on what was shared and what takeaways you can use immediately in your marketing campaigns. Below, we summarize the first CleverTap Quarterly for this year.
“I’m extremely proud to say that CleverTap is now beautifully emerging into becoming a holistic retention cloud solution for the industry,” said Sunil Thomas at the CTQ, and explained three reasons why:
“This is my first CTQ since taking over the chief product officer role,” said Anand Jain, our Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, “and there’s a lot cooking on the product side of CleverTap. To start with, 2021 was a happening year on the product front.”
As for what’s coming in 2022, he shared: “There are certain horizontal themes that will run across the breadth of the CleverTap product. These include individualization, recommendations, experimentation, AI, machine learning, and collaboration.”
Then Sumantu Mittal, VP of Product introduced Direct Call, our industry-first, in-app voice capability on the CleverTap retention cloud. CleverTap Direct Call enables businesses to grant and embed in-app voice directly into their apps.
“Direct Call is for you if you need to make calls to your customers to complete, fulfill an order or a transaction, or you wish to generally enhance your user engagement via voice calls,” said Mittal. “More importantly, it makes in-app calling completely privacy compliant as there is no need to disclose caller or receiver telephone numbers or any personal data.”
David Allison gave an eye-opening keynote regarding connecting with customers. In essence, he said that demographics don’t work as well as valuegraphics — the values that drive how people live their lives.
To explain, he said: “There are only 56 core human values that drive all of our decisions, behaviors, and emotions all around the world… If you use values to understand what’s similar in a group of people, they’re eight times more effective. That’s an 8x for every dollar an hour that you spend trying to talk to your target audience, engage them, and get those folks to make the decisions you’d like them to make.”
Source: Valuegraphics
Allison shared how these universal values can be grouped into clusters.
But how do you find the values of your target audience so you can communicate with them more persuasively? Short of buying his book or directly hiring David Allison and his team, you could simply ask these three questions the next time you send out a customer survey:
“So, you see the theme here,” said Allison, “it’s about why. If you can get people to start telling you why they make some of these decisions, you’ll start to see patterns and themes. And those are the values that you can then start to target as you’re starting to talk to your audience.”
Read more about David Allison and Valuegraphics and watch the session video.
Gaming company Mobile Premier League (MPL) dramatically increased the efficiency of their new user onboarding, which resulted in an uninstall rate of 58.65% (compared to the industry average of 62%). In addition, the referral program they used yielded the highest average revenue per user, as well as the highest loyal user / install ratio, at 4.73%.
Their SVP of Product, Sishir Kolli talked about the challenges his company faced, particularly in terms of entering new markets, such as the U.S. It came down to trust, he said. “U.S. audiences have to trust us as a brand name that’s new to them. So we brought in games specifically for the U.S. market — games that players in the U.S. would identify with.”
He went on to describe how their approach to retention looks more at revenue retention than user retention. “If we’re able to retain each cohort over a period of time and generate incrementally higher revenue, this brings in additional money that we can spend on marketing or growth, ensuring that the platform will grow over time.”
He also came to realize that it’s important to go after the right cohort of users rather than all users, because not all users are the same. “Thus we want to target those users who are already deriving good value from our platform and who would potentially engage with us over a long period of time,” he noted.
In terms of adding more value to each user’s experience, he described their uplift model which uses various data feature sets to predict how likely they are to retain a user based on a certain incentive. The difference in the probability between providing an incentive or not is the uplift. “This way, we are able to clearly see what incentives we want to give to those users who are likely to derive the most value out of it.” And iterate this approach over time, based on the data.
Learn more about how MPL approaches engagements and has increased their conversion rates, watch the interview.
The IntelliNODE feature is the new continuous testing and experimentation framework for our journeys. As Gupta described it: “There is a need to better orchestrate and experiment with journeys. And through this feature, we enable marketers to combine instinct with intelligence that’s built right into the platform.”
Using IntelliNODE, CleverTap customers can continuously evaluate multiple paths in the journey and send users to the winning path, maximizing conversion opportunities. We enable experimenting with up to seven paths and five nodes.
Gupta continued: “Built on rock-solid machine learning algorithms, IntelliNODE helps you create the most-optimal paths, experimenting with different channels, different messages, different time delays, analyzing each path of the user journey based on the goals that you set, adjusting the user distribution in favor of the best-performing path.”
CleverTap IntelliNODE is available for all our customers in the new campaigns UI beta. To learn more, watch the demo.
In a very short time, the Press Sports app has been able to grow to 250,000 registered users in 70 countries, creating more than 600,000 posts. What’s their secret?
To start with, the app meets an unserved need by providing a way for athletes and coaches to connect with one another and share their accomplishments.
Then, to grow their user base, they started mining the data to understand what their ‘sticky’ users were doing in the app that led to an enjoyable experience. The team discovered that when users connect with people they know, the experience improves. They also enabled the best content to go viral by creating something they call the Hype Zone.
Asked about dropoffs, Williams described them as: “A failure. Either the user didn’t have a great experience with the app or just wasn’t a good fit.” So, they continually test different journeys and campaigns to identify the right users, and then analyze the resulting metrics. It may not be something that’s complex or cutting-edge, but it’s a fundamental that’s key to their growth.
To learn why Press Sports considers retention and product king and how they plan to get to that next level, watch the video.
With the launch of Gmail Promotion Annotations — now in beta — you can highlight key information like promo codes, images, title, and codes, along with the subject line and preheader text at the top of Gmail’s Promotions tab.
Boost engagement metrics, such as open rates and click-through rates, by putting relevant information in front of your subscribers even if they don’t open your email. Add expiry dates to the promotional email giving your emails two opportunities to be seen: first, when it is sent and again, when it is about to expire—all without having to send it again.
To learn more, view this short session.
In this panel interview, we featured the success of beauty brand Mamaearth along with CleverTap’s new Fit for the Future of Retail framework, a report that draws upon the experiences of more than 100 customers around the world, in different markets, to gain a deep understanding of both the business side of the market and the needs of the consumers.
By understanding customers’ three principal objectives — increasing user retention, increasing user engagement, and increasing revenue — we built a framework that enables brands to achieve these 3 outcomes.
Brands spend a lot of money to acquire users, but an average of 70% will churn within the first 3 days, and 90% of these users churn within 30 days. “So if you think about it,” said Mamaearth’s Gupta, “unless brands are intentionally focused on retention rates, the cost of acquiring these customers is going to be tremendously high. And so this is one of the biggest challenges that marketers face.”
On the other hand, because of the pandemic, ecommerce has seen massive growth: During the first three months of the pandemic, 84% of buyers shopped online. This was almost 10 years’ worth of growth achieved in just 90 days.
Discover in detail how Mamaearth, 2022’s first unicorn brand, came to understand evolving consumer behavior and address it across the customer lifecycle to maximize customer LTV.
Watch the panel discussion here.
This session described the benefits of CleverTap’s new integration with MixPanel – a leading product analytics solution that lets product teams gain insights into how to best acquire, convert, and retain customers across the web and mobile platforms.
This integration combined with CleverTap’s smart segmentation and multi-channel engagement will allow customers to drive hyper-personalized experiences, improving retention and customer LTV.
And this integration is bidirectional, allowing for creating and importing multi-dimensional segments from Mixpanel to CleverTap and sending campaign engagement data to Mixpanel. This helps our customers to achieve deeper capital analysis that feeds right back into their future campaigns.
CleverTap is also working on an integration with mParticle, a leading enterprise customer data infrastructure company that makes it easy to holistically manage customer data along the entire product and customer lifecycle.
We’ll also be integrating with Amplitude, a pioneer in the digital optimization space, helping customers innovate faster and smarter by making critical data accessible and actionable for every team.
To learn more, watch the video.
In this fireside, Abbot talked about how his company views retention, because when it comes to key metrics, every company is different. For some apps, Day 7 and Day 30 might be critical. For Indiagold — a loan company that provides loans against gold — they don’t expect users to open their app daily, weekly, or even monthly. What’s important is to understand the frequency of their product and then adopt the right retention metrics.
“You have to really understand what retention means for you,” notes Abbot. “That’s why we focus more on the customer experience, because at the end of the day, retention is the result of providing a good experience.” He noted that instead of retention, his team focuses on LTV. In his view, the goal should be to only retain users who are delivering value.
“For example, would Amazon be happy with a customer who goes to their website 100 times a year but doesn’t buy anything? Our objective is to get customers to transact, right?,” he remarked.
For more on this discussion, including the key tools that Abbot says are needed for successful customer engagement — and what they allow you to do — watch the video.
In her closing remarks, Nackson, who heads the growth marketing agency Notable, noted deep divisions she’s observed between user acquisition, user engagement, and retention marketing teams. Her thesis is that each side of the customer lifecycle owns or develops key information, and that if those two sides are brought together, it would result in a much more complete, and therefore, accurate picture of a typical and high-value customer. It would also include a lot of valuable information about customers who fall short of the desired actions.
She disagreed with the idea that one marketer’s job is to attract new users through awareness and consideration, and a separate team’s job to then convert and create loyalty. This, she says, has been further muddled through the visual aid of a funnel where gravity seems to pull users from one stage to the next.
She went on to note that the customer lifecycle, as we now understand it, turns this on its side. “It forces us to consider that many of our users who might be taking the journey that we want, they’re only one step away from possibly falling into churn territory.” This is all the more true when things are in a state of flux — as they have been since the start of the pandemic.
This leads to the question that we’re all facing right now: what do you do when everything around you is changing and you need to decide how much of the path you’ve been taking is still valid or if it’s time to move in a different direction?
For the answer, tune into the closing remarks.
