Vietnam boasts a vibrant start-up ecosystem and is among the Top 3 most attractive investment destinations in Southeast Asia. Fonos, a Vietnamese audio content start-up, is one of the prominent players in this exciting landscape, with an accelerated growth momentum since 2020. With subscription services covering 1500 pieces of original content, 200+ podcast channels, and 1200+ copyrighted audiobooks, it is the #1 audiobook app on both Apple AppStore and Google Play Store in Vietnam.
The Challenge of Streamlined Marketing and Ongoing Personalization to Engage Busy Users
Vietnamese users have high expectations from their audio apps – from supporting their upskilling, personal and spiritual growth, to catching up on the news in various spheres and reading to their children. Fonos offers all of this but found that more than two-thirds of its users are busy people. While the users come on to the app because they recognize it can meet their needs, Nguyen Hong Nhung, Head of Growth Marketing at Fonos and her team saw that the users could stay longer and return more often. Fonos had the potential to become the go-to learning and content companion for customers round the clock. To achieve this, the Fonos team decided to use a powerful all-in-one solution that would help tailor personalized retention strategies and create new user behaviours.
CleverTap was chosen since it offered real-time Recency, Frequency, and Monetary segmentation to underpin omnichannel, lifecycle marketing and automated, personalized communication
Fonos, right from its early days, understood the importance of focussing on User lifetime value, as a way to achieve its goal of being a ‘daily companion’ to its users. CleverTap serves as a robust, unified engagement platform, empowering us to engage users contextually in real time and use automation for enhanced efficiency.
Nguyen Hong Nhung,
Head of Growth Marketing at Fonos
A Foundation for Tailored, End-to-End Lifecycle Engagement
With CleverTap as the cornerstone, Nhung and her team set about building a data-driven strategy to maximize customer lifetime value (CLTV). This would be done in two ways: Driving subscription sales throughout the customer lifecycle (install, trial, renewal), while simultaneously boosting customer retention.
Nhung’s team kicked things off by segmenting their user base. They used CleverTap’s live unified customer views updated with real-time user interaction data, as the ideal starting point to segment users based on User-type [Free/Subscribed/Churn] and Category of product [Audiobook/Ebook/Podcast]. For enabling Lifecycle-based engagement, CleverTap’s sophisticated Recency, Frequency, Monetary (RFM) behavioural segmentation algorithm was applied. This creates segments of users based on how recently, how often they were active, and the value of their transactions.
RFM segmentation offers multiple advantages. RFM takes the entire audience and maps them onto a recency and frequency grid, breaking them down into 10 distinct groups. It is fully automated and takes care of the complex mathematical modelling with complete accuracy. Thus, the Fonos team saves hours of effort which would be spent on computing which users belong where. They also have access to the probability of a user transitioning from one segment to another, which can happen at any time during the lifecycle. Equipped with this new, multidimensional, real-time overview of their users’ lifecycle stages, the Fonos team leveraged more of CleverTap to create laser-focused engagement.
Leveraging RFM-backed Journeys & Insights to Personalize User Experiences & Maximize CLTV
From the moment the customers find and download the Fonos app, they engage with it in varied ways. Against this backdrop, Fonos’ main goal is to make personalized content suggestions in real-time, so customers can quickly discover what they need and maximize their usage of the app’s large library. Let us look at how the team used CleverTap to achieve this.
Consider users who download the app and sign up. Conversion-focused journeys auto-trigger campaigns to engage those who remain inactive post sign-up with welcome onboard emails. Similarly, tailored journeys win back users about to cancel their subscriptions by reminding them how much they will miss their most-used features. Users who have forgotten about spending their abundant credits are alerted with personalized messages on their preferred channels before the credits expire.
In this way, RFM segmentation ensures that along any tailored journey, the offers, and customized messaging reach the right user on the right channel, consistently improving the experience. CleverTap also enables the team to identify the ‘golden time’ of the day to engage users, further boosting effectiveness. The Fonos team is also able to streamline their efforts by tapping into deeper insights mined by CleverTap, for example- not focusing on users who use the app for less than 10 minutes a day in the first week as they are unlikely to turn into loyal customers.
With this integrated execution of tailored journeys and lifecycle messaging right from the onboarding stage to provide seamless personalization, Fonos is seeing concrete gains. There is a significant conversion uplift between 5%-10% and an appreciable revenue boost of 10% for user groups where CleverTap segmentation and tools were applied.
RFM segmentation has helped shape a far more effective strategy, supercharging our return on investment by boosting retention rates and maximizing user lifetime value.
Nguyen Hong Nhung,
Head of Growth Marketing at Fonos
Nurturing Customer Loyalty through RFM-powered Personalization
The Fonos team also leverages RFM segmentation and valuable insights from CleverTap to engage loyal customers and persuade them to make referrals. Loyal users, for instance, are offered personalized content so they feel valued. Another approach that is currently working well is two-way conversations. Customers in the more loyal segments are asked for feedback, assured it will be implemented, and then engaged again to see if they are satisfied. High-value, at-risk customers are convinced to stay by offering them gainful, customized loyalty programs, while loyal customers are incentivized to provide referrals.
By leveraging RFM segmentation and stellar user database management, Fonos has transformed user engagement, increasing both app usage time and monthly active users. In today’s distracting digital landscape, user loyalty is the heartbeat of a thriving subscription business, fueling continuous growth and unwavering engagement.
Nguyen Hong Nhung,
Head of Growth Marketing at Fonos
A data-driven success story
There is clear evidence that Fonos’s initiatives have had a remarkable impact on User engagement. The email open rate of 20% is significantly higher than the industry benchmark. The campaigns drove an In-app message open rate of 10%, showing high levels of engagement. Crucially, since implementing CleverTap, MAU growth has seen an exceptional rise. The month-on-month growth rate saw a 25% increase. MAU has increased to 6X times over six months. Fonos accomplished this by cleverly harnessing customer data and insights to engage the busy user in the right way at the right time.
CleverTap’s CRM system, by providing personalized customer experiences, marketing performance optimization, and measurable metrics to gauge the success of our efforts in real-time, has greatly aided our growth.
Nguyen Hong Nhung,
Head of Growth Marketing at Fonos
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