How To Become a Market-Leading App Through Modern Customer Engagement
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What is modern customer engagement?
Modern customer engagement is how brands relate to their switched-on consumers. It keeps pace with our busy lives. It’s multichannel, real-time, integrated, harnesses apps and web, and meets us where we are at the right time with a personalized message we’re likely to welcome, not ignore.
The modern consumer is time-poor and bombarded by messages all the time. They want to shop 24/7, from anywhere in the world, across a range of channels and they have a deeper connection to what they’re buying because they’ve explored the brand’s content even before purchasing. And, according to Oracle, they’re opinionated and they’re not quiet about it… “they’re 5.1 times more likely to recommend a brand after they’ve had a positive customer experience.”
Why is modern customer engagement important?
Because the old scattergun approach doesn’t work anymore. Consumers are in control and they want to feel seen. In a survey of 2000+ European consumers, we found that 62% expect brands to personalize their experiences. 53% also said personalization influenced their purchase and 41% are open to getting messages from brands several times a week.
What does relevance mean in customer communication?
We’ve found that winning customer engagement strategies:
- Are truly helpful and genuine
- Happen in the moment that matters
- Meet customers where they are
- Show a deep understanding of customers
- Find the right balance between human and AI input
- Embrace modern technology
- See customer engagement as a product feature
Showcase of top brands with market-leading apps through modern customer engagement
To better share how modern customer engagement can drive market share (even without large investment budgets), we’re spotlighting Fastic, Wetter, and HelloBetter.
Fastic – The world’s largest fasting community with 33M+ app downloads
One of the most popular fasting, health, and fitness apps in the world; Fastic has grown to 4 million users in 4 months with 12.3m registrations on a .97 Euro cost per install; earning 655.3k ratings with an average of 4.7 stars. (They get such high ratings by waiting to ask for a rating when the user has reached a milestone and is likely to be in a great mood.)
Their overall marketing strategy hinges on customer engagement, namely through:
- UGC
- Hyper-personalized comms
- Rewards
- Gamification
- Goal-lead interactions
- Community divers
We are first-party data-driven. We get a lot of information from our users. [So], we really configure our communication to be, like, really personalized for every use case and for every user. And to play into this, we have the happy moment…We identify moments in a user’s journey where their intrinsic motivation is higher… and then act in real-time based on that, give them achievement, congratulate them… because these moments are those which the user is more likely to interact with your brand than just if you send it out in [a scheduled] send out, for example.” – Tim Boerner, CRM Manager – Fastic
Their introductory offer with MoEngage accounts for 15% of all revenue from their CRM each month. It includes reminders and uses an omnichannel, multi-day strategy that boosted its performance by 25%. Add to that, personalized pricing, which more than doubled the CLV of users inducted this way.
Additionally, their welcome-back campaign with MoEngage increased subscription purchases by 35%, and having a semi-permanent clickable natively in the app boosted performance by 30%.
It is through campaigns like these that Fastic came from nothing to grow into one of the largest health and fitness apps in the world with only 31.1m Euros of marketing spend and a focus on push notifications.
Wetter – Leading weather portal in Europe with 41.8M+ app downloads since 2010
Their goal to be the preferred weather app (over Alexa or Google) is closer than ever before. With help from MoEngage, they’ve moved their approach to growth. They looked at the gaps between customer expectation and their service and were product-led; identifying what customers want from a tool like Wetter (that they’re hiring to do the job of telling them the weather).
From marketing to product to UX to dev, they looked to create the ideal experience in a competitive marketplace. Using push as their main channel, they thought about what users want from a weather companion, sending alerts that fit into their lives. The goal was to hyper-personalize and automate journeys – putting in some smart insights like only advising of weather changes, not all weather patterns. This change led to a market-wide retention increase of 7.5% in just one week.
We are starting, using this product-led approach and; going from use cases and not from customer journey funnels, [we looked to create a] new product. Like, when we are speaking about the push notifications, it’s not something like marketing activities… [which tell you to] please open the app. [It provides you] actionable information and goes through your life… outside the app and connects with you as a person.” – Marina Hertle, CRM Manager – Wetter
Their post-onboarding welcome journey increased sessions by 15% by targeting users who have the app and push on but haven’t seen the app’s best features. Across 7 days, they get push notifications designed to make them fall in love with Wetter.com. Users’ paths are matched based on the relevance of the current weather. For instance, the first push you receive after downloading will tell you about pollen screens when September and October arrive, and the first push will be rain radar.
They use smart tools like MoEngage to create simple hypotheses based on the idea that they must engage modern users by using messages that influence their daily lives. And it’s worked. They’re growing faster than ever before as Europe’s #1 weather solution with 41.8+M app downloads.
HelloBetter – Global leader in validated digital mental health with 80k+ patients
They aim to cure their users as a mental health and therapy app. But how do they grow when all successful users leave? Well, trying to get happy users to refer others (even when compensated) didn’t work. And that’s because mental health is still stigmatized. Instead, they focus on ongoing prescriptions and healing interventions.
Unlike other apps, they encourage users to repair every aspect of their lives and then move on when they’re at 100%. With this approach, they’ve grown to 80K+ Patients (26K PDTx) across 10 programs with 6 regulatory approvals and 30 clinical studies. Their modern customer engagement strategy leans on AI heavily:
- Highly personalized patient journey – Starts from early awareness (high distress), pre-signup, activation, in-program, and aftercare, across platforms.
- Timely – Just-enough, just-in-time, behavioral-triggered communications that are cross-channel, proactive, and empathetic.
- Segmented – Real-time information sync across fine-grained patient journey segmentations
You don’t wanna be overwhelming. People are already stressed. They’re already burdened. If you then […] tell them you have to, then… they’ll switch off. They’ll zone out. So keeping people engaged is a bit of [a] subtle dance… where you have to give just the right dosage.” – Hanes Klopper, Co-Founder & COO – HelloBetter
So, they focus on the right message at the right time; starting with awareness campaigns that get into their intimate circles. In their influencer partnership with Carmushka, they got a 31% conversion rate in just 24 hours amongst women aged 25-45, especially mothers and doctors who have a high CLV.
Then they took a broader view on search, targeting more general searches to get a 28% increase in patient numbers and a 17% decrease in overall CPL.
Lastly, they worked with MoEngage to tighten the patient journey and turn visitors (with intent) into actual patients before they give up. With fact-finding emails, calls, and partnerships, they reduced the average time from email pre-registration to program activation from 50 days to 17 days. Patients now benefit from very customized, encouraging, and automated support processes while going through a lengthy activation process. It includes welcome and reminder phone calls prioritized by AI, partnerships with online doctors, and automated submission of prescription documents to insurance companies.
What 3 brand behaviors are success indicators?
Across these success stories; and all our clients generally, MoEngage finds that brands with these qualities quickly became a market-leading app through customer engagement:
- Insight obsessed – Brands should be obsessed with gathering the right data about their customers so they can truly understand them. Data can be overwhelming, and often marketers want data without knowing exactly what data they need. The right partner can help you focus your efforts on the numbers that matter to your business.
- Customer obsessed – There are tools out there, like MoEngage, that not only provide the data you need but highlight actionable information about customers you can then use in your engagement plan. So, with the right mindset and tools, you can and will obtain relevant information about what your customers want.
- Innovation obsessed – Once you have that data, you can build the right solutions (if they don’t currently exist) or signpost your product better so customers can engage with its most loveable aspects. This turns your product into a must-have.
Why is investment in modern customer engagement software important?
The right modern customer engagement software tool will help you create products that are more:
- Habit building – become a part of their routine
- Educational – teach them how to love you
- Retention-focused – become more sticky
- Real-time – send your marketing at the right moment
- AI & ML supported – harness tech to deliver smarter campaigns
- Dynamically priced – charge the right amount to the right people
- First-party data led – own your insights
- Localized – account for the nuances of different cultures
- Regional – take the right approach in each jurisdiction
How to choose the right customer engagement platform?
Each of these brands went through the same process to arrive at MoEngage as their preferred modern customer engagement software platform:
- Identify pain points & needs
- Identify gaps in your internal team
- Benefit match to the tools in the market
- Ensure data security (permissions, trusted suppliers, cloud-based, audits)
If your brand is insight, customer, and innovation-obsessed, you’ll find a natural partner in MoEngage, a leading customer engagement platform that empowers 1,200+ top brands.
What trends are growing in modern customer engagement?
But taking a forward-facing view for a moment, what trends are growing in modern customer engagement? Here’s what the marketing leaders at Wetter, HelloBetter, and Fastic think will enable brands of the future to become a market-leading app through modern customer engagement:
AI content creation & data analysis
It only makes sense that an insight, customer, and innovation-obsessed business would look to AI to power even more of their content and data analysis. With platforms like MoEngage, you can “go beyond campaign and product analytics with AI-driven capabilities that enable you to tap into insights, such as channel and time preferences or lifestyle affinities. Let your results skyrocket as you optimize customer journeys and predict their future behaviors.”
Relevant AI chatbot conversations
Weaving AI throughout the business will also help make chatbots more human and personalized. When they know more about your customers on a personal level, they can think about their questions in context. This will lead to better outcomes across engagement and retention while reducing customer frustration.
Behavioral psychology input
And lastly, modern customer engagement will focus more on the customer themselves. Not as a segment, but as an individual. Using AI-powered software like MoEngage, you’ll be able to leverage customer behavioral data and skyrocket your growth by 4X through automated marketing campaigns that take into consideration the real human user at the end of the funnel.
If that’s something you’re interested in exploring for your own brand, why not talk to us about your users today?
