Customer Experience Yields Massive Uptick in App Installs & User Activity @7Mind

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has stressed the importance of customer experience to marketers. In fact, most marketers are looking to create meaningful marketing experiences that serve a clear purpose and are extremely relevant to the user. In this blog, we will look at how 7Mind, a mindfulness app, witnessed a massive uptick in user activity, installs, and other KPIs they track during the pandemic. We will also understand how brands can prioritise the acquisition channel and ad spends with respect to ROI and streamlining campaigns based on how users react and engage with them.

Customer Experience Takes on a New Meaning with the New Normal

If there’s one thing that Covid-19 is teaching marketers, it is that customer service is king. Granted that customer service has always been the king, but now more than ever, people have the time, the choice, and limited resources to demand the best quality experience from brands. 

In other words, it has become mission-critical for brands to have a clear purpose and B2C strategy–one that can empower them to connect with their customers at a deeper level.

Talking from the perspective of the pandemic, Covid-19 has strongly impacted different verticals, especially the Fitness, Health, and Well-Being apps. There is a huge uptick in not only downloads but also in terms of engagement and daily active users. On the other hand, when it comes to apps such as Hospitality and Travel, there’s a 13% drop in the downloads and a four per cent drop in the daily active users.

The need of the hour is to not only drive user engagement with app downloads but also embrace a more holistic marketing approach to readapt your acquisition and retention strategies and engage users well.

How has Customer Experience Changed?

In this section, we will look at how customer experience has positively changed and what kind of strategies are driving organic user engagement:

• Enhanced communication: The communication modes, methods, and narrative have drastically changed–not only on the acquisition level (via ads) but also on the retention through in-app messaging and push messaging.
• Holistic approach: At 7Mind, they embraced a more holistic approach towards marketing that included both user acquisition and retention efforts. When you think of user acquisition, you need to think about how you can sell to potential users and what your brand’s expectations entail. Consider the following questions while embracing holistic marketing that’s acquisition-focused:

1. How will you prepare your user acquisition?

2. Which tools will you use?

3. What should you pay attention to while thinking about the values you want to advertise?

4. How will you select the value props?

5. Do you wish to go for volume or opt for quality?

6. When engaging with users, how do you not over-promise, and how can you exceed their expectations?

7. What does your conversion funnel look like? How will you define the aha! moment and do an in-depth analysis to leverage insightful learnings?

Top Strategies to Improve the Customer Experience

In this section, we will look at the top strategies and hacks you can embrace to improve the overall customer experience.

• Identify the right value at the right moment: You can use tools like Google Trends, Facebook Library, etc. to keep track of the values you wish to advertise, understand the traffic volume, analyse what your competitors are doing and stay up-to-date, gauge what is the expected volume for each of the value propositions while defining the user acquisition strategy, etc. For example, 7Mind was selected to advertise two key values, the trending keywords–meditation and mindfulness during the pandemic.

It is really important to align with the product and the CRM teams and sit together to understand the value props you want to advertise. Backing up the session with numbers and preparing from beforehand can help understand the shift in trends and allow everyone to work collaboratively, with agility, and using real-time data at hand.

• Identify the value props and align with the Product, CRM, and Design teams: You can drive holistic content to reinforce your value props. While selecting these values and backing them up of the numbers, make sure to look into what platform would perform well and how you can align the design and the content teams to come up with a holistic approach towards content marketing. This could include something as simple as putting a meaningful message into your packaging, for instance. Moreover, you can use a different design approach to attract varied target segments and get the most out of your content marketing strategy.

 “Always consider what is your product offering in terms of the content, or you risk over-promising to your customers–a big mistake as it can lead to user churn.”

• Define your aha! moments for each value: Remember that different events will have different churning points, so it’s important that when you’re rolling out campaigns with different values, do not take the results for granted. The same product might have different results, so make sure to analyse the conversion funnel, which is very product-specific. You should also analyse how long you have to wait for the user to convert because different products have different user journeys and may take varying timeframes.

“Make sure to be as detailed as possible to determine why at some point, users churn.”

• Support your user community: Focus on driving user engagement and retention by having dedicated ‘crisis content’–one that allows users to access valuable content on how to deal with the crisis for free. You can establish a rich set of resources such as ebooks, reports, blogs, podcasts, webinars, etc.

At the end of the day, measure the impact of your efforts, define the aha! moments, replicate your wins and document your learnings to stay on the path of success.