Clue were already one of the world’s leading menstruation tracker apps when they first approached Phiture, helping over 11.6 million users across 180 countries better understand their bodies and take control of their reproductive health. To support their continued growth, Phiture were engaged to build a robust, holistic user acquisition strategy around ASO and ASA that would help increase visibility and drive conversion across key locales. The target was to incrementally increase monthly active users month-on-month and achieve significant user acquisition by the end of 2019 — as well as share our industry expertise with Clue’s growth team to help them independently manage ASO in the future. 

After 3 months of managing Clue’s App Store and Google Play Store listings, the team conducted a total of 8 experiments and recorded install uplifts of 7%, 6%, 4%, and 6% in the USA, Germany, Mexico, and Brazil respectively. For ASA, the scaling factors deployed by the team allowed us to identify which markets had high CPAs relative to the USA. With these insights, we were able to streamline spending and optimize ROI, driving CPA down by 35% in 2 months.

As much as we enjoy reaching milestones, the real value lies in learning how we got there. Above all, our findings revealed that there’s no one size fits all solution; a conversion driver in the USA might not have the same effect in Mexico or Germany or vice versa. We signed the engagement off by sharing a comprehensive experiment backlog with Clue’s internal growth team, highlighting all our results, conclusions, and recommendations, leaving them well-positioned to develop and launch their own mobile growth strategies moving forward.

Welcome Email Send Volume Increased Drastically

Within one day, daily email sends increased by over 600%. Projected over the course of a year, millions of additional new users will receive Welcome Emails because of this change.

Impact on Activation Metrics

Since playing tracks and liking content are two important metrics for SoundCloud to continually grow, the Phiture team focused on influencing new users to complete these actions early in their lifecycle. These Welcome Emails show an average uplift over control of 4.5% in Plays within 1 day and 4.2% in Likes within 1 day with 99% statistical significance.

The data shows us that by sending millions more Welcome Emails per year, an extra 507k users will play a track within 1 day and 315k users will like a track within 1 day. These are key activation steps that are highly correlated with longer-term engagement and retention.

This minor – but critical – adjustment in targeting logic is likely to make a massive impact on SoundCloud’s key metrics.

To identify a product-channel fit in order to best engage with the Burner user base and provide them with relevant content. In particular, the Burner team wanted to thoroughly test out Email as a new channel. Implementing the functionality natively would require significant time and resources on their side. Since Burner is highly focused on privacy, users’ email addresses are not collected during onboarding, so the traditional “push first strategy” did not necessarily apply.

The team at Phiture successfully identified that the optimal product-channel fit for Burner was a combination of in-app messages, newsfeed, and email. They were able to use in-app messages to enable a whole new channel (email), doing something that would normally need to be done in the product. There was high engagement with the in-app messages as a format and immediate validation that users wanted to receive more information via email. They were able to significantly improve email collection efforts through iterative optimization of the in-app message by 39% over the initial campaign performance. The email database can now be used to send informative and educational emails to users, further increasing engagement and retention. The engagement with the different cards and topics ranged from a low 5% to some cards that saw a very high engagement rate of 45%. This variation across different newsfeed cards helped us fine-tune content for our onboarding email series.

The newsfeed onboarding strategy provided additional value by providing insight into what users were clicking on most within their feed. In turn, this gave us an understanding of what topics users wanted more information about and what they were interested in during their first weeks with Burner. This insight helped to inform the onboarding email content, increasing the relevance of new-user communications.

Fishbrain were keen to increase their user retention rate and contacted Phiture to engage their team of retention experts. After conducting an initial audit analysis of Fishbrain’s user engagement and retention, the Phiture team worked with Fishbrain to implement a jointly-developed retention strategy.

During the Audit phase of the engagement, the team at Phiture used Amplitude and Braze to in tandem undertake a comprehensive analysis of Fishbrain’s current retention and engagement. They focused on finding key moments in user behavior that could help predict and influence retention rates. The close relationship and connectivity of Amplitude and Braze were of utmost importance during this phase of the project; The two solutions provide multiple data integration possibilities, including Braze Currents data streaming and comprehensive APIs. The use of Amplitude facilitated Phiture’s diagnosis of the areas for improvement, whereas the Braze platform enabled us to act upon these insights.

Amplitude was also used extensively during this phase to measure the impact of campaign experiments on downstream metrics such as weekly retention and Fishbrain’s north-star metric of ‘catches logged’.  Using Amplitude, we monitor these metrics, as well as downstream retention and engagement for users who received test campaigns versus control groups who were not exposed to the campaign experiments.

By synchronizing user assignments, experiment groups, and control groups between Braze and Amplitude using a webhook integration, they were able to compare users who had received (or been excluded from) experimental campaigns and measure the aggregate impact at the CRM channel and program level. This enabled Fishbrain to continually evaluate the effectiveness of their entire Lifecycle Marketing program.

In addition to running retention experiments, the team worked towards increasing push notification reach with pre-permission, retargeting and win-back campaigns. Phiture’s in-house app studio, Blender, was utilized for automated creation of HTML 5 in-app messages including surveys that were tightly integrated with Braze.

During the project, Phiture significantly improved Fishbrain’s email deliverability by creating a dedicated IP address specifically for Fishbrain email marketing and by implementing a comprehensive messaging series to boost the email domain reputation.

The project delivered a sustained, significant uplift over control in the Braze dashboard on leading ‘input’ metrics such as catches-logged and anglers-followed. Observing aggregate impact in Amplitude through the custom data integration, we saw an increase in weekly retention, peaking at week 6 with +50.6% uplift in W6 retention for users in the treatment group over those in the control group.

Email open rates from Gmail users increased by 1300% and there was a 14.9% increase in paid conversions within a day.

To cap off an all-round successful and hugely insightful project, Phiture was awarded the Best Retention Campaign of 2019 accolade at the App Growth Awards in Berlin.

The team at Invoice Simple approached us with the challenge of scaling the Apple Search Ads channel and improve overall performance by increasing the number of users purchasing a subscription and lowering the customer acquisition costs. They were also interested in how to A/B test creatives.

There was a great impact on performance after extensive testing was carried out. Thanks to a model developed with our data science team, we managed to estimate the best converting keywords for subscription as well as potential impressions per keyword per storefront. This model helped management adjust their strategic decisions on User Acquisition.

Moreover, the team increased the budget from a 5 figure to a 6 figure monthly budget, with the overall spend increasing by 50%. As a consequence of the higher scale, the team increased the number of subscriptions purchased by 51% while decreasing the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) by 6% over the first 60 days. The team helped establish CAC targets per market and remain within the established CAC targets per market increasing the Return-on-Ad-Spend for the client.

Our creative A/B testing showed a 13.4% increase in conversion rate from impressions to the first invoice completed. After applying these new creatives in the organic search results, the conversion uptick there followed suit and bumped the search conversion rate up by 15%.

The challenge was to increase the 49.7% push opt-in rate for new iOS users. Push opt-in is a critical metric as it directly affects every other lifestyle metric including activation, engagement and paid conversion. However, iOS users can only see the push authorization once. If this is dismissed, the only way to opt-in again is for the user to turn on notifications in their iPhone settings.

How to keep users consistently engaged with their content. The team at Blinkist was concerned that without guidance, users would feel overwhelmed and not know which book to start next.

The In-App Message had an impressive 90% CTR and as an immediate result of the Retention team’s work, Blinkist saw a 3220% uplift in instances of the recommended book being added to users’ libraries and a 4367% uplift in the number of users who began reading the book. This In-App Message also prompted users to consume more content in general. There was a 6.62% uplift in the overall book add rate and a 6.55% uplift in the overall start rate.

Blinkist continued to use the In-App Message template provided by Phiture to create new In-App Messages, promoting new content and features to their Premium user base. They observed similar impact – which is further testament to the efficiency of In-App Messaging as a channel.

Phiture accelerated users converting to paid subscriptions by driving an average 49% more paid conversions within 1 day. The first round of experiments resulted in a 6% uplift in new user activation. Further iterations resulted in an extra uplift in activation of 20%. Users who received these campaigns were retained by an average of 109% higher than control in Week 1. These innovative features re-activated thousands of deeply dormant users, proving that deep-linking to specific content is highly effective for activation and heightening engagement.