User Growth: Lessons on How to Scale From Two Mobile Brands

As mobile app companies mature, the first metric they use to gauge their success is user growth. The more users the better, right? One problem: acquiring new users is expensive.
Depending on which source you look at, it costs anywhere from 5x to 16x more to build a long-term business relationship with a new customer than it is to simply cultivate the loyalty of an existing customer.
Because of the cost of acquisition, the hurdle remains: how do you acquire the most customers using the least amount of money (and the least amount of manual effort)? And how do you get a good ROI from your acquisition efforts?
These two mobile companies were faced with those challenges and found great success. Let’s find out how they did it.

Beblue Achieved a 96% Spike in User Growth

Beblue is an innovative cashback and customer loyalty app that has garnered a lot of attention in the fintech industry. Their users instantly gain a portion of their money back on purchases made at thousands of partner sites. This credit never expires and can be used at any of the businesses in the Beblue network.
Partner businesses gain access to a website where they can monitor sales in real-time and view customer habits, consumption trends, purchase frequency, and more. This real-time data allows them to create more effective marketing campaigns and win greater customer loyalty.
Beblue is currently available in 50 cities with 4 million downloads. The company plans to expand to more than 100 cities over the next three years. But the main challenge they faced is familiar to many companies: they needed to scale. 

To Grow Users, Increase Partners

In order to provide value to clients and users, Beblue needed to increase their app’s user base as well as their network of partner businesses. After all, what use is the cashback if it can only be used in a handful of places?
The beauty of it was they had something to offer that was quite valuable to partners. Beblue had detailed insights on customer profiles and preferences, which offered partner businesses the ability to monetize via targeted offline cashback offers. This was a powerful draw for potential partners. 
In order to offer that engagement aspect to business partners, the Beblue team needed an efficient way to both analyze consumer behavior and scale their personalized messaging campaigns. 
By implementing CleverTap into their product, they were able to give partners the necessary analytics and engagement options. But more than that, the tools allowed them to grow their user base and retain these users long after their initial download.

The Tools Beblue Needed to Scale

The key results of their increased scale speak for themselves:

• 96% spike in daily acquired users: Beblue launched marketing campaigns based on users’ geography and purchase behavior to activate new users, resulting in a 68% jump in active users. 
• 16% increase in partner businesses: The company sent personalized, multi-channel messaging campaigns triggered at the optimal time, significantly improving campaign CTRs and conversion rates.

What tools did they need to achieve those numbers?

1. Scheduled or Triggered Campaigns: Beblue sent automated push notification campaigns scheduled for a particular time, or triggered by real-time user activity, all to drive user engagement.
2. Automated User Segmentation: AI-enhanced segmentation allowed the team to engage each of their 2 million+ users with highly relevant messages.
3. Cohort Analysis: By tracking user retention cohorts, Beblue could identify user trends, analyze churn, and improve app engagement across the entire user base.

AXEL Doubled Their Retention Rates

AXEL (formerly StoAmigo) is a leading file storage and file-sharing service. They put all your files into one place, so you can access your data from any device, wherever you are, without compromising data privacy or security. 
Like most apps, they wanted to drive activation of new users, as well as engage and retain current users. They started by running customer acquisition campaigns through Google, which led to a tremendous increase in new users. But not all of them stayed. In order to ensure their marketing dollars were spent well, they needed a solution that helped them effectively activate, engage, and retain these new users.

Getting Social Boosts User Growth

For the business to scale, they needed to look beyond mere acquisition campaigns and generate stronger engagement that would grow the user base naturally. 
One strategy they use is running campaigns that prompt users to share, transfer files between devices, and invite friends onto the platform. The main KPIs they track for every campaign boil down to: number of shares, transfers, and invites sent out. Are people sharing or inviting others? Are they uploading files? 
AXEL needed to see which campaigns were working and which weren’t. Getting an accurate picture of the number of invites and then optimizing the sharing process were some of their top objectives. 
After implementing CleverTap into their process, the results came in:

• They saw a tremendous increase in all of their KPIs: file transfers, sharing, and invites. As of July 2018, they saw a 238% increase in shares, a 138% increase in folders created, an 85% increase in files transferred, and a 76% increase in new user invites.
• They also almost doubled the retention stats for day 1, day 3, and day 7 over three months in 2018. Retention for every cohort was significantly higher.  

The Tools AXEL Needed to Scale

By using CleverTap, AXEL gained the ability to make better marketing decisions since the tools give them much more data. 

1. Analytics Dashboards and Funnel Analysis: Prior to their latest user interface, AXEL’s new users took 3 minutes to from launching the app to creating a new account. But by using initial insights and funnel analysis to make the UI features easier to access, that time was reduced by 33%. 
2. Automated Segmentation: Another favorite is the automated segmentation feature in RFM analysis. AXEL’s Director of User Engagement Joshua Shorter shares: “Automated segmentation is one of my favorite features because it really allows us to target users who are proven to be the most active or target them based on their level of inactivity.”

In the end, user growth is a key metric for all mobile brands. But if you intend to grow users, it’s not just about acquisition, it’s about building long-term relationships with your users and giving them value from day one. 
And in order to do that, you will need data-driven, personalized engagement tools. When you can use those tools to add value to every user’s experience, then exponential growth (and retention) is within reach. 

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