# Delivering Meaningful Content With Privacy in Mind: How We Drove Burner’s User Engagement and Increased Email Registrations

- Link: https://phiture.com/success-stories/burner-case-study/
- Published: 2020-06-23T13:40:39+01:00
- Author: Otas Temelis

# Delivering Meaningful Content With Privacy in Mind: How We Drove Burner’s User Engagement and Increased Email Registrations

![burner case study](https://phiture.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/cover_inside-
min.png)

39%

increase in email registrations

45%

CTR on top newsfeed items

---

Table of Contents

 * [The Challenge](https://phiture.com/success-stories/burner-case-study/#the_challenge)
 * [The Solution](https://phiture.com/success-stories/burner-case-study/#the_solution)
 * [The Results](https://phiture.com/success-stories/burner-case-study/#the_results)

## The Challenge

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.

“Phiture’s expertise in building custom in-apps helped us accelerate our retention
program. Their hypothesis-driven approach to testing and iterating made them a pleasure
to work with.”

**Greg Cohn, Co-Founder & CEO**
 **@ Ad Hoc Labs, makers of Burner and Firewall**

## The Solution

The Phiture team’s experience with building highly interactive in-app messages, 
high performing email templates, and hypothesis-driven channel testing meant they
were ideally positioned to find a strategy. The approach was carried out in two 
phases.

**1. Exploratory Phase**

Phiture’s Retention team experimented with in-app messages to collect users’ email
addresses, which proved very effective. This is something that would normally have
to be done in the product. The in-app messages were engineered to only recognize
valid email address formats and populate the user’s email address automatically 
within Braze. Phiture also tested Newsfeed as a channel to identify which topics
users found the most relevant in their first few days of engaging with the app. 
Staggered Newsfeed onboarding cards were used to slowly release and onboard users.
As they became more familiar with the app, they would receive information on more
advanced privacy topics.

**2. Execution Phase**

The team constructed an email onboarding flow based on use cases (personal vs business).
The order of screens for the corresponding in-app messages was also tested. The 
onboarding flow went through continuous iterations to significantly optimize the
efficacy of these campaigns and collect more emails as a result.

![burner case study](https://phiture.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/secondary-image-
min.png)

## The Results

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.

---

![burner logo](https://phiture.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/burner-logo.png)

Burner is the market-leading private phone number app — a second line for calling,
texting, and picture messaging in everyday situations. Burner is made by Ad Hoc 
Labs, Inc., a fast-growing startup based in Los Angeles, California.

**Client:** Adhoc Labs – Burner
 **Website: **[https://www.burnerapp.com/](https://www.burnerapp.com/)**
Services: The Phiture team designed, built, deployed, and iterated on all in-app,
push notification, newsfeed, and email experiments.**