Hello! I’ll tell you about one of my four clients, Mofibo, but first I will tell you about a startup not far away from here—The Blue Planet, Den Blå Planet—, the big aquarium, a very typical startup story. They made this fantastic aquarium and they made a lot of fuss about losing the one billion customers or visitors who came during the first year. If you go out to the aquarium today, there are almost no people there. As I heard it, they have big hangovers in the marketing department because they didn’t get hold of any of the visitors’ data or email permissions or anything—they just went there and a lot of people had a really bad experience because there were people all over and now they don’t know how they can get them back.
For me, it’s really a typical story about a lot of companies. They have this startup process, you have developed your company and your product, you release it, you scale it, and all your resources go towards making it bigger and better and going out to more countries, more languages, more segments—everything, but efficient communication with your users comes at what stage?
When I meet startups, normally it’s two years after they started, they have this curve where there are no customers coming, then they’re gaining a lot of customers, and then at some point the customers are not coming that rapidly, and then they sink. “Oh, we have to keep onto the customers we already have,” but they forgot to get the email permission or the information about them that could keep on communicating. And then just one slide about customer engagement versus traditional loyalty and then I’ll come back to a case from Mofibo. We all want loyal customers, but it’s very difficult to figure out when a customer’s loyal, so you ask them, “Are you loyal to my company?” and you can figure out if someone’s saying “We love your company,” but it’s really difficult to use it communication-wise.
So we are seeing this new term, “customer engagement.” What you’re doing with customer engagement is you can see how people are loyal to your company, how they are engaging, if they open the emails, if they’re logging onto your website, what they’re doing, what information we have, and you can use your data sources to create an engagement profile or an engagement level. That’s a more data-driven way to figure out if your customers will stay longer than traditional loyalty.
You probably know Mofibo. It’s about… I think it’s one and a half, two-years-old. The concept is the customer pays 99 kroner/month, then they can read all the books they want online. When the customer has read more than 10% of a book, Mofibo has to pay the publisher. So you’re reading a lot—if you’re reading 11% of a lot of books, you’re very expensive to Mofibo. Also, the more recent the book, the more expensive it is for Mofibo to buy older books they have bought in bulk. If they can get people to read a lot of old books, it will be a good value for them and if you read a lot of the new books, it’s very expensive. So they have to make sure that the customer’s engaged, but not too engaged. If they have, for instance, an employed teacher, someone who can read books all day, it will be really, really bad business. So they have to make sure that people are sort of holding on, but not too engaged.
One more thing—when we started talking to Mofibo, they were about three, four, or five months old and they were paying a lot of attention to making their app work better and all that stuff. We said, “You have to make all these push email programs to keep onto a customer.” It makes sure that everyone—your product and communication at different stages. They said, “Okay, sounds reasonable, but that’s not where we want to place our resources. If you can do it or will do it for us, then it could be of interest.”
We said, “We believe so much in this business case that we’ll do it for free if we could get it up-site.” We discussed different ways and then finally they said, “If you believe in it so much, then we will pay you the normal way” and after five or six months, the board of directors decided that what we were doing was so important that they insulted everything and we lost them as a customer.
We have this customer journey. Pre-signup—where they enter the website and they have to give some different information. Free trial—the first 14 days, they don’t have to pay and we have to make sure they’re using products so they’d actually give us some money. And then we have to make them use a product and figure out if they stop using the product. Because it’s online reading, they have this app where we can track or Mofibo can track everything: how fast they’re reading a page, when they’re reading, when they stop, which sites—all this. And, of course, we can predict when people are dropping out, if they signed off and don’t want to pay anymore and the app is still active, then we try to reactivate them. We can save them and we can win them back.
What we have made is this, where the first thing is they create a profile and the very first thing we’re doing is we’re getting their email permission. Then they’re going to the next stage and, of course, some people don’t go to the next page, and then we have to send them an email saying, “Okay, you started, but you forgot to give us your credit card information. Please go back, give us your credit card information.” For every stage where they can drop out, we have push emails saying, “Please come back and finish what you started.” Then, of course, when they have proved—we have their credit card information, all the information, then we have to say, “First of all, welcome!” A lot of people forget, a lot of businesses are forgetting that when you have a new customer, you have to tell them you made a really, really clever decision to become a customer at my company.
And then when you have them, Mofibo—first of all, you should download the app, you should get a book, you should start reading a book, you should continue reading a book. When you’ve read the book, you should share the book, you should review the book, and then you should say that you like the book or whatever. And then every stage we are sort of getting people to the next phase, making sure that they come through all these because if they don’t, then there’s a very little propensity that they’ll pay after the first 14 days. And then we have this engagement model based on how well they’re performing and all that we could track have these different engagement levels. We track the engagement after 48 hours, after eight days and after 15 days. Based on which level they have, they get different information.
First of all, by having these different emails, we increased the conversion by 10%. And then afterwards, when they’re semi-active again, we have these segmented flows after 25 days, 35 and 50 days, and all the time we are making sure that they’re doing the right stuff and we can increase the engagement level. When they’re active or pre-churning, we try to get them to read a book and to trend after sign-off and three days before inactivation we have these different [inaudible]. We have all these different triggers holding onto a customer and making sure that they’re not leaving us, and if they’re not using the product, making sure that they’ll get back. Save period, after which ten days before inactivation, and then when they’re saved and then won back, we try to—our company, we’re still holding on to them.
The customers who are not paying—make sure that you have them in the loop because if you have their permission, you can communicate again and again.
Tomas Gorrissen, CCO, Responsive
One of my friends who worked at Berlingske, he said that they had sort of an idea at Berlingske where when we give your permission to Berlingske, you will become a lifetime customer. You’re not paying all the time, but they consider you a customer anyway, so the idea of just holding on to your permission and communicate all the time instead of saying, “Okay, we lost them and now they’re out and then we have to get them back again.” Also, the customers who are not entering your company—not paying—make sure that you have them in the loop because if you have their permission, you can communicate again and again.
These are just different segments in the beginning. Persons with no log-on history, log-on but no reading, have started reading but still not truly engaged, good start we want to confirm the Mofibo concept, high engagement, promote recommendations. And then we have different emails with different content, depending on the different levels of engagement, and there are these different mails that are unmerged. Also, we have another recommendation that can say which books are—which cheap books are most likely to read from page one to the end because we can also see the [inaudible]. If we have one of the expensive books and people are only reading a part of it and then stopping, then we shouldn’t promote it to other people, of course.
In the first five weeks, we have a total of 9,000 for the first five weeks we tested, and then we concerted and the control group—people who weren’t put through this, we just gave them the app, and then they could figure out themselves. The conversion in the control group was 40% and then this group where we could target the emails and engagement, as you can see here, it was week 32-34 last year, you can see the high engagement segment is increasing and the people have disengaged are declining.