Learn how you can Unlock Limitless Customer Lifetime Value with CleverTap’s All-in-One Customer Engagement Platform.
Last month we hosted our inaugural CleverTap Quarterly showcase, where we shared market insights, introduced our latest product innovations, and gave a sneak peek of what’s coming up in our roadmap. We were also joined by outstanding speakers from PlantSnap, Viu, and Circles.Life who shared their results with our platform and insights into their marketing success.
For all of you who attended the event live, thank you for joining us! Here, we’re recapping the event highlights and sharing videos of key presentations.
How does an app get to a million users in 90 days?
By starting with 10 million users.
It’s a sobering truth — 90% of app users churn within 3 months. Retention has long been a challenge for mobile brands, and the global pandemic has only made the industry landscape more volatile.
Customer behavior has fundamentally changed. Many are working from home, juggling professional responsibilities with caring for loved ones, supporting their children’s homeschool or remote learning needs, and managing their households — all while attempting to maintain their physical and mental health. Shopping and consumption patterns have shifted tremendously, as have play and entertainment, as the world embraces ecommerce and streaming media.
COVID-19 has forced companies to rethink how they connect with their customers. 87% of consumers say they need to trust a brand before making a purchase. Trust requires relevance and individualization. Your customer experience and communications must always build and reinforce your audience’s confidence in your brand.
The current state has also made Total Cost of Ownership a critical consideration for brands. Delivering the kind of experience that drives up CLV and revenue growth requires a specific toolset: comprehensive customer profiles and behavioral analytics, sophisticated segmentation and individualization, and powerful lifecycle marketing capabilities.
One-off tools quickly get expensive, not to mention the cost of siloed data, adopting separate tools, and managing multiple contracts. The benefits of an all-in-one solution like CleverTap are significant, not only from a monetary perspective but with the efficiency and effectiveness of a single integrated platform.
Speed of innovation remains one of our top priorities, with multiple feature releases each month and continuing investments in our infrastructure to increase speed and scale. We’re very excited to present our latest releases and hear your feedback.
Our platform is built on five pillars:
Deep Analytics and Insights
We’ve believed in real-time insights from day 1. Many of our core features, including Funnels, Cohorts, Trends, Flows, Uninstall Tracking, and Real Impact are built to help brands learn from real-time customer behavior and build actionable personas.
Now, we’re driving towards a 20/20 vision of Audience Intelligence: building a 360-degree profile view that feeds from everything — from social media to offline channels and point of sale devices.
We’re also building Configurators so that you can set business rules and self-computed data elements on user profiles. For example, set a profile variable that defines the day of the week a specific user tends to order food delivery.
Powerful Segmentation
Only when you’re able to break your audience base into user groups are you able to engage with them effectively. Our industry-leading segmentation capabilities currently include psychographic, behavioral, and demographic segmentation, alongside AI and ML-driven segmentation with Live User Segments, RFM Analysis, and Intent based Segments.
Our next phase will include even more dimensions to enable diverse use cases. We want to learn more complex business rules derived not just from transactional information, but through context like browsing behavior, lifecycle stage, and affinity towards certain actions.
Look-Alike Audiences will provide a way to reach new audiences who are likely to be interested in an action because they’re similar to other customers who have completed that action. With User Anomalies, you’ll be able to plot a bell curve for the best, worst, and average user action so you can see where user behavior falls, identify outliers, and offer timely interventions that improve engagement and retention.
Advanced Automation
Today, our platform offers a complete suite of marketing capabilities with minimal human intervention, including triggers generated by specific end-user or business actions, user journeys and recurring campaigns, and webhook and programming APIs.
Soon you’ll be able to use programmatic controls on triggers based on profile variable updates. For example, reward a ride-sharing app customer with a free ride when they’ve completed their 100th ride.
In addition, user journeys will get more granular controls per node, including best time and best channel, so you can optimize according to how individual customers behave. We’re also building to allow for scripting and dynamic content from webhooks to enable apps to accommodate online/offline scenarios.
Actionable Experimentation
We’ve long believed that solving user retention means providing a highly personalized customer experience both on and off the app. And that requires sophisticated testing and experimentation capabilities.
Life in the COVID-19 era has normalized somewhat, but with various geographies expected to go in and out of lockdown over the next year and beyond, there are significant shifts in market conditions that mobile brands must pay close attention to.
Consumers are now even more reliant on digital channels, checking their phones over 96 times per day. With so many people working remotely and social events on hold, out-of-home advertising isn’t getting as many eyeballs. Industries and channels are now more crowded, and there’s a growing disparity in brands’ ability to use data effectively to engage meaningfully with customers.
Today’s consumers expect brands to anticipate their needs and engage with them on an individual level. Building relationships with customers requires consistent brand experiences across touchpoints with highly relevant content that is contextual in the moment.
Our latest features further enhance marketers’ ability to access and analyze data and reach customers where they prefer to engage with relevant content and messaging.
Lifecycle Optimizer
This feature analyzes your entire user base in the context of specific lifecycle stages. This allows marketers to create tailored campaigns that effectively draw users into deeper levels of engagement.
Emotion Editor
This free AI tool helps marketers understand the emotions their campaign copy elicits so they can write emotionally persuasive content that converts.
Bulletins
These automated, individualized campaigns reach interested users with campaigns that promote business-side activity, like new product releases and back-in-stock campaigns.
Product Experiences
Test and create unique app experiences for specific user segments with a complete set of tools for design, testing, and employment.
Today we offer A/B testing for campaigns and messages, feature flags, product experiences, and more. We’re adding a testing framework for audiences like first-time users, as well as a framework to optimize content by testing colors and layouts.
We’re also building Multi-arm Bandit Testing, which uses machine learning to dynamically adjust traffic allocation to the best performing variations. And we’re expanding on the capabilities of our Lifecycle Optimizer to include milestone-based experimentation that helps marketers test for things like getting new users to take their first ride, complete their first product search, and more.
Effective Optimization
Our platform is built to give marketers a thousand ways to experiment — and choose the optimal result. Our Recommendation Engine, Lifecycle Optimizer, and Emotion Editor provide the building blocks for optimizing not only individual marketing campaigns but the entire customer experience.
Now, our goal is to give marketers the tools to create prescriptive journeys that encourage customers into deeper levels of engagement. Content Optimization will include emotion detection for copy, emojis, and images, as well as provide subject line optimization and recommendations. We’re also building for conversion rate optimization that effectively takes users from point A to point B, including recommendations for next user action.
All of these features are in our immediate roadmap and, as we continue to push the speed of innovation, you’ll see them become available in the coming months.
Plant identification app PlantSnap was born from a seemingly simple question: what kind of flower is that?
Google couldn’t answer, and the only solution was to search a library of plant identification books. So founder Eric Ralls created PlantSnap, a plant identification app with a database of over 600,000 plants, 350+ million geo-tagged plant images, and 40+ million app installs. Today, the app is available in 37 languages and used daily in over 200 countries. Ralls credits CleverTap as playing a major role in this success.
As PlantSnap grew in popularity, they decided to launch a freemium version of the app to ramp up new user acquisition. They netted 3 million installs in the first month alone — but the team didn’t know what these users were doing in the app or how to convert them into paid users.
“It’s impossible to run a big app without the proper tools,” says Ralls. Their growth strategy shifted from simply learning how users engaged with the app to determining how their brand should engage with users.
With CleverTap, Ralls was able to grow PlantSnap with 25 million new installs by the end of the summer.
But a new challenge arose: with winter approaching, a large portion of their user base would have no need to open the app until springtime. They added a social media component to grow their global community of users who could connect over their love of plants all year round. CleverTap made this dramatic shift in business model — from monthly retention as a utility app, to daily retention as a lifestyle app — seamless.
Watch Ralls discuss his journey with PlantSnap and how he uses CleverTap features like RFM Analysis, omnichannel Journeys, and Targeted Campaigns to grow his business.
Hong Kong-based streaming media app Viu operates in 17 countries with 40 million+ MAU. With a dual revenue model consisting of paid subscriptions and advertising to free users, Viu delivers a variety of content from Asia’s top content providers with local language subtitles, as well as original productions.
Given the highly fragmented and competitive streaming media (OTT) industry, streaming apps face some significant challenges. 64% of users are frustrated while searching for content, and 67% churn within the first two weeks.
To overcome these challenges, Viu splits users into different segments based on platform and user type across customer lifecycle stages. This strategy allows them to engage with the right users, at the right time, with the right content, on the right channel.
Tau shares the details of their approach and his experience with CleverTap’s omnichannel marketing capabilities, Recommendation Engine, and Bulletins in his presentation.
As Asia’s first fully digital telco and consumer company, Circles.Life seeks to empower consumers with innovative digital products and no-contract, data-focused mobile plans.
This customer-centric mission extends to every aspect of the company, from customer support to marketing.
What percentage of users click on a banner? How can we improve our UX/UI? How can retargeting campaigns be scaled through non-paid channels to reduce CAC? How can I increase customer engagement across my entire user base? These are just some of the questions CleverTap helps Wong answer.
Hear Wong discuss how she uses Funnels to grow revenue and improve the user experience, understand user intent and loyalty with RFM, scale retargeting campaigns with Journeys, and more.
Our sincere thanks to Eric, Aaron, and Jeanette for sharing their valuable insights and expertise. And thank you to all who joined and made our first CleverTap Quarterly event such a success.
Watch the full recap of the event here, and we look forward to seeing you at our next showcase in November!
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