User-Driven Engagement at its Best: How Vodafone Uses CleverTap to Accelerate Retention and Revenue

At CleverTap, we maintain ongoing conversations with our customers to discuss how we can better help them solve their mobile growth challenges. Seeing the innovative approaches they use to solve their diverse use cases is extremely rewarding.
To share their experiences and insights with the broader mobile marketing community, we will be highlighting these awesome marketers throughout 2018.
Last week, I chatted with Aditi Mohanty, who manages user retention at Vodafone. As most of you may be aware, Vodafone Group plc is a British multinational telecommunications company, headquartered in London. It offers services in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. On a global scale, Vodafone ranks fifth by revenue and second (behind China Mobile) in the number of connections (469.7 million) as of 2016. Vodafone owns and operates networks in 26 countries and has partner networks in over 50 additional countries. It had a market cap of approximately $75.5 billion as of February 2016, the eighth-largest of any company listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Hi Aditi. It is a pleasure chatting with you today. I look forward to highlighting some excellent nuggets on mobile marketing and how the telecom sector is benefitting from the new trends in this space.
Hi Almitra, it is great to see CleverTap highlighting use cases that mobile marketers across the globe are solving and helping businesses build brand loyalty and drive revenues.
As you know, CleverTap helps us solve most of these challenges and I am excited to discuss how we use your marketing platform to increase user retention and power engagement.
Data-driven marketing is still evolving and hence we can learn a lot from each other by sharing information and building a community of mobile marketers who not only focus on top line but also continue to adopt a customer-first approach to user engagement.
Thanks Aditi. I am sure this blog will add a lot of value to the larger marketing community. Before we delve deeper, can you tell us more about your role at Vodafone and what defines success for you?
Sure. I drive the efforts around mobile app strategy and monetization for our prepaid business. Out of all the smartphone users, 70% use data and we work to make sure that number goes up. To continue the growth momentum, we strive to increase our unique user count by 500% and downloads by 250%.
The key success KPIs for my group are:

1. Increase revenues from the prepaid segment of users by almost 2.5X
2. Drive notification engagement rates by more than 2X-2.5X
3. Reduce app uninstalls significantly
4. Run win-back campaigns to get users back into the app

A platform like CleverTap that helps us create a robust mobile marketing strategy is crucial to the success of our business.
That sounds exciting and challenging at the same time. So what business problems were you looking to solve and what did your existing marketing technology stack lack?
The MyVodafone App has over 1M+ downloads. Acquiring new customers is 5X more expensive than retaining existing ones. So it is critical that we engage with various segments of users – dormant, active and uninstalled – to either increase retention, drive the app usage or make them install the app again. This helps to keep our acquisition costs low and increase customer lifetime value.

1. Minimal marketing automation and manual efforts: Our initial marketing approaches to retention and engagement were mostly manual. We would send reminders on recharges, missed deadlines, manual offers to encourage users to login to the app and increase their usage and eventually drive retention. However, with the user base that we have, it is impossible to scale and create marketing campaigns that give optimal ROI. Another angle we are looking at is to send automated offers and refresh them using real-time customer insights.
2. An omni-channel strategy that needed enhancements: We leveraged disconnected email marketing and SMS systems which helped to send the messages but did not help build a strong omnichannel strategy. The ability to traverse a user’s journey across the app was something we wished to use but our existing systems didn’t enable us to do so. We are excited to say that we have successfully implemented this and seeing amazing results as well.
3. Reduce app uninstall and cap user churn: The inability to reach users at the right time and via the right channel with the best offer led to users uninstalling the app and causing users to churn.

So what are the CleverTap features that you as a mobile marketer have found useful for meeting your current business KPIs?
We have been early adopters of the product and use a plethora of features that range from customer insights to personalized user engagement. The ones that are core to our success are:

1. Flows: We use Flows to see where and how the users enter the app from and what paths they take that lead to app installs or uninstalls. We then minimize the friction points and optimize the conversion paths that lead to customer success.
2. Cohorts: We use granular metrics to see if one segment of users re-charges and if only a small section of users returns over a period of time. This helps to measure app stickiness and the reaction to users on certain offers. We can then optimize our offers and build better marketing campaigns.
3. Uninstall Tracking: Since one of our KPIs is to measure app uninstalls, we use the out-of-the-box uninstall tracking feature to keep track of our uninstalls and churn rate. It also helps us to run targeted win-back campaigns and measure success in real-time.
4. Trends: Trends help us to measure metrics on key campaign days – how, why and when the app launches peaked. We also look at the hours and days when there was a huge spike in re-charges or uninstalls. Also the drill down of events allows us to break them down by user properties and get granular data points.
5. Pivots: We are able to see which cities drive the most users to our app and what the visit patterns look like across the week. The day that is most likely to support transactions is selected and we send notifications on those days to optimally monetize our marketing campaigns around recharges, offers, etc. Additionally, we can actually exclude users who show certain patterns and only send messages to them based on their likelihood of re-performing that event.

That’s great. This really shows how customer insights can drive successful marketing engagement campaigns. Can you also provide some examples of marketing campaigns that you run and the ROI on those?
With CleverTap, we are able to:

1. Complete incomplete transactions:
   
   We had a big group of users who initiated a transaction but abandoned it midway. CleverTap’s Cohorts helped us to analyze and segment these users, based on user actions or inactions and figure out that 2 mins was our golden window of opportunity to engage them and drive conversions. After 2 mins, they were almost lost to us. We can now send them messages that are timely and remind the users to finish the transaction. It helps them see value in our offering and at the same time we optimize our chances of monetizing them. Our CTRs have been around 23.7% and conversions have doubled since we started using CleverTap.
2. Accelerate the user onboarding process:
   
   Acquisition and Retention are equally important to us. The popularity of our brand helps us acquire new users and as a marketer it is critical we give them a great onboarding experience so they complete the registration process successfully. CleverTap’s notifications helped to increase our CTRs by 15% and engagement by almost 3X. This helps create brand loyalty and long-term customer value.

It’s always great to see our customers derive so much value from our product! As a seasoned marketer who has extensive experience in the telecom space, what are the trends mobile marketers should keep an eye on to help differentiate themselves and stay ahead of competition?
Mobile marketing is evolving at a very rapid scale and the telecom industry is ripe for disruption. Over the past few years, we have seen very distinct patterns in consumer behavior and technology advancements that have helped us be the #1 player across various geographies. Here are some that I would like to particularly focus on:

1. Make data your friend: With the proliferation of apps and the easy access to internet, the amount of data that our users consume is mind-boggling. According to marketingland, mobile accounts for nearly 70% of total digital time. With on-demand apps such Hotstar, Netflix, you have a plethora of media options at your fingertips. Another staggering statistic is that Netflix uses almost 37% of Internet Traffic in peak hours! This engagement through data can give a lot of insights on consumer patterns and how marketers can use that to create stickiness for users – use data to to see how your users and prospects can consume more data.
2. Leverage Mobile marketing automation technologies: With scale, you need automation. You cannot create personalized experiences without a platform that can send messages in the user’s preferred language or time zone. If you are using deep linking, you need to use an automation tool to help amplify the embedded link across various geographies and devices; also based on user behavior and demographics. An NxN matrix is impossible and sub-optimal to implement manually.
3. Consolidate your martech stack for better visibility accelerated go-to-market: A solid marketing technology stack will allow not only the marketing organization but the entire company to optimize digital assets for the buyer’s journey from acquisition to engagement to monetization to churn. An effective marketing technology stack should use the best platforms smartly and optimize the individual potential of each technology, thereby creating a system that is greater than the sum of its parts. In its current form, the telecom landscape is prime for consolidation around enterprise-standard technology that would exponentially increase digital marketing revenues.

What is next for Vodafone? How do you see CleverTap helping you over the next few months to build a positive brand and drive monetization?
CleverTap’s features have been a game charger for us. We are a lot more informed about our user’s preferences and expectations. We are at a stage where we need to constantly innovate and create a competitive edge. We are very excited to explore Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and also CleverTap Journeys.

1. AI/ML: For a lot of folks, AI and ML sound as buzz words. But it is actually the need of the hour. The ability to predict the probability of revenue monetization gives a marketer the opportunity to tweak their budgets and campaigns and drive the most optimal ROI.
2. Journeys: Using automated segments to drive engagement strategies and then building an entire experience geared towards conversions would be huge for us. In fact, leveraging data to its maximum potential and building omni channel campaigns that help understand the users better is what we are very excited to do.

Thank you so much Aditi for the in-depth insights. It has been a pleasure chatting with you and we look forward to our continued partnership.
Thanks Almitra! It is great to share knowledge and mutually learn from other marketers on how we can build products that customers love and respect. Increasing customer lifetime value is not an easy job – but with the the right tools and the right mindset, sky is the limit.