Customer-centric Growth Strategies for Mobile-first Brands

The top of the funnel channels are reaching a saturation point. It is becoming difficult to both analyze the spend and map the efficiency. This becomes a daunting task, considering how differently the product and marketing teams function. While marketing takes care of the top of the funnel, organic acquisition and paid acquisition, product works on decks, product features, or user research. However, there is little overlap or communication between the teams, leading to less visibility and inability to effectively track capabilities.

On the face of it, attribution and measurement appear as a mask. We all saw Apple’s announcement stating Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) would no longer be a relevant or widely-used identifier. Similarly, Chrome announced shutting down third party cookies by 2022. Hence, it becomes of paramount importance to bridge the gap between product and marketing teams by adopting sustainable frameworks.

Tally Growth Lead Matias Honorato and AB Tasty Marketing VP Gregory Batchelor joined our Marketing Director Meagan White and Customer Success Partner Christina Harewood to elucidate new growth strategies for mobile-first brands.

Product: The Real Growth Engine

The core principles of a growth team are to reduce friction (in acquisition activation, retention, and monetization) and accelerate the value that the user gets from the product. Subsequently, the product emerges as the actual growth engine.

According to Matias, organizations should look for that aha moment to experience the product to help organizations move that emotional response higher on the product cycle.

“Having the core product value as a way to keep the best offerings and to expand market reach accounts for sustainable growth.”
-Matias Honorato

We can sense a significant shift in the marketplace and how companies are adopting this change. Salesforce acquired Slack recently. Slack revealed how the growth they generated through their product enabled them to grow organically. Affirm, a fintech company has garnered organic growth through its product rather than on top of funnel acquisition. Tally has also adopted this approach to touch user experiences and journeys.

Organizations recognize these market shifts by putting the end-user at the core of their product and business experience.

Value First, Monetize Later

The journey of successful customer onboarding and retention requires offering some value additive, seamless product experience, and finally monetizing the user. Personalization plays a huge role here. Both Matias and Gregory profess the efficacy and user-friendliness of Duolingo. The personalization journey begins after the user has created an account on Duolingo. It begins with picking the language one wants to learn, the time one can spare each day, the learning module, learning paths and more.

Before the user experiences the product, they show you an MVP of what you will go through. Duolingo pushes the core value proposition of their product to ensure that the product value is in the user flow before monetizing the experience. These actions assist in segmenting their audience to facilitate the right experience specific to users.

Experiment for Breakthroughs

Citing an example of Biotherm’s experiment with their app, Gregory points out how replacing the navigation button, placing their logo in the middle, shifting the menu to the left showed a 15% and 23% increase in the number of clicks and transactions, respectively. Unless they tried changing the user interface (UI), they would not have figured out what would work out for them. This denotes how making simple changes can create a considerable impact on conversions.

Pay attention to how users locate items for purchase and shorten the process as much as possible. A toy company circled the search and filter bars on their app. The filter bar to sort by price, popularity, and use of a different color scheme increased engagement. After the changes became live, the analysis revealed a spike of 197% in the number of clicks and an 18% surge in transactions.

It is these little things that make an impact.

Targeted Personalization for Better Conversion

Consumers want personalized experiences. They want brands to make them feel special. Looking from the experience optimization and personalization maturity, brands need to have a one-to-one instead of a one-to-all approach. Automating optimization, targeting, segmentation, synchronization, and one-to-one personalization is becoming smoother and faster with the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

“Marketing automation tools allow you to present custom content and unique experiences for unique users in real-time.User behaviors and attributes purely drive this.”
-Gregory Batchelor

They provide data points and insights such as page visits, views, devices, geolocation weather, abandoned carts, and more. So you can do a lot of targeting, segmentation, and run specific personalized campaigns for people visiting your digital channels.

For instance, CenterParcs wanted to increase their holiday season bookings by targeting customers in specific segments. So, they created a full behavioral campaign and targeted people that searched for Christmas or new year vacation through paid campaigns. They now pulled in existing data of people who had purchased something for around those dates and created for that segment of people a dedicated visual, homepage, personalized tab on the menu and delivered personalized content on the search results. This strategy led to a 19% increase in Christmas bookings.

Using AI for Informed Decision-making

As customers are becoming more sophisticated in interacting with brands, organizations must understand that one-to-one communication works both ways. The recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) analysis helps you establish meaningful thresholds for user inactivity.

“Using the RFM analysis, you can assign a score to users and create segments from champions to lost users. This gives you some insight into who is falling into these buckets, number of users, their ratio and how to nudge them along to keep them moving ahead.”
-Christina Harewood

Meanwhile, Flows, our omnichannel, supports push, email, and in-app to reach users where they are. So once you understand activities around the festivals, you can use a flow campaign. You can set up a push campaign based on the users’ interaction with that particular message and also send another one in a specific duration.

Marketing automation tools have made it easier for mobile-first brands to not only study user behaviors, but also customize and personalize their experiences, leading to more engagement and increased retention. Inferring from the various examples given by our experts, adopting a product-led growth strategy has proved to be pivotal in scaling businesses.