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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

💡 Where marketers should look for ideas to help improve their onboarding flow.

🎬 The key components of user onboarding flow.

🎨 The key types of messages that can be tested in creatives.

👥 What extended onboarding means – and how to segment users for extended onboarding.

💭 How to think about multiple channels – and which user segments they are appropriate for.

🎯 How to think about automation – and what user segments to target with it.

🙅‍♂️ When you should not automate your onboarding messaging.

KEY QUOTES

Why you should frontload the value prop

What I’ve seen as a successful experience during my time at a small gaming studio and Snapchat and most recently at Firefox, what drives more value to our business to provide users with immediate access to your value prop. 

Taking a holistic view of onboarding

So extended onboarding is the concept of using the power of your own channels to connect users and leverage them with push in app, an email based on where they are left. 

A happy mistake

So instead of sending the test for certain user buckets, that push notification was sent to an entire user base. That was really funny. It turned out to be the most successful campaign on our mobile engagement team. Because you wouldn’t think that, just one keyword, thank God it wasn’t a funny keyword, it wasn’t something like to test but it was a product name, so just a single product name that drove users attention. So even dormant users, they came back to our app, they opened the app.

The last bastion of the push notification

And for the lapsed & dormant ones, churn and like, you don’t really have faith that you can bring them back. That’s where you have to use the power of push notification, because you don’t have anything else. They wouldn’t open your email, they wouldn’t check out your app and to see the really cool reach in app messaging, your push notification, the time, you can test different times like you can test like early in the morning, late afternoon to see if they are actually engaged with the pushes at of different times.

Be cognizant of red flags

If you have a high uninstall rate as a result of any of your messaging/channel related campaigns, you should not be automating that.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I’m very excited to welcome Miray Alanlar to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Miray, welcome to the show.

Miray: Thanks Shamanth. I’m so excited to be here. We will be speaking all the cool things about onboarding, retention and, basically, super excited to be here today.

Shamanth: Indeed. Yeah. Certainly excited to have you just to talk about all the things that are your superpowers that I’ve heard from so many people around a lot of your work. So definitely excited for us to dig into all things onboarding. All things first 1 to 7 to 30 days of a user’s journey. So to start off, Miray, can you tell us what are the key elements of an onboarding flow, when you say onboarding, what are you talking about? What should the marketer look at and think about as components of an onboarding flow?

Miray: So I would recommend marketers to team up with a product team to first analyze user reviews, so user reviews are a great resource for you to leverage your messaging strategy. So look at things like what users like most, what’s their frustration, to come up with that messaging strategy, and you can always test different messages during the onboarding. So you can say very generic things versus very provocative things you can test different numbers of onboarding cards. So you can test like one card versus six cards, three cards versus one card. And you can test different creatives. So you can test creative with more human interaction or human passion versus creative with a little lighting and, colors, and calls to action. 

So those are all things you can test during the onboarding. But

What I’ve seen as a successful experience during my time at a small gaming studio and Snapchat and most recently at Firefox, what drives more value to our business to provide users with immediate access to your value prop.

So let’s think about an example, if you’re SoundCloud prompt them to check out the first playlist, even in the onboarding cards. If your Dropbox gives users a clear signal to sign in, so you can sign in right now. Then you are in the onboarding phase, you can create your first doc at Dropbox. 

So those are all great things that you can do during your onboarding. But what I’ve seen is also really meaningful for every business, no matter which vertical you’re in, to extend your services and your value prop for your most loyal users, aka the ones that have an account or have signed into your account and services. So, the most important thing here, again, is to make them create an account or sign in or sign up during the onboarding experience before users shift their mindset or leave your app after they first try your app. 

So you have to take advantage of that 10 to 15 seconds of attention by the time they are installed. So you can again, be as creative as you want to, as bold as you want to during that first 10 or 15 seconds.

Shamanth: Sure. So what you’re saying is you make people do something during the onboarding, rather than just tell them something. And so they are invested in that app, that makes a lot of sense. And this is also something – we had another episode on onboarding from Samuel Hulick of UserOnboard.com, he’s hilarious, by the way. So anyway, this was also one of the things he emphasized, which is like, a lot of onboarding experiences talk. But I think the most effective ones, make you do things and that certainly is what I’m hearing from you as well. And, you mentioned that the creative messaging helps users understand an app and what it does and gives them clear instructions. So within a creative, what are some of the things that you have seen to be effective?

Miray: So first you have to make sure you have a backlog of ideas where you could test first and get some learnings right. So again, with creatives and messaging, you can press the most provocative one that has a very strong element of product value, urgency and reward. You can call them in your creative as well as in your messaging. 

And you can say things like you will have a better experience or we will actually genuinely improve your experience while not being super annoying, so those are really important elements that… you can blend in your creative and your messaging. But what I think, what is more important right now and something I’ve seen across again, there is a vertical is something called extended onboarding. 

So you don’t want to stop testing and finding your best onboarding experience so that less people turn but you also want to extend your value prop – I mean, educate users, like continue, reward them and provide the best experience based on their life cycle.

Shamanth: Yeah, that makes sense. And when you say extended onboarding, can you unpack that? And tell us what that means? And ideally, if you have an example, that would be helpful in helping people understand the specifics of what that means.

Miray: Totally, totally. So extended onboarding is not a really new concept. It’s basically a way to understand your segments and nature of your users to nurture them accordingly. So it’s a continuous onboarding experience, with users throughout their life cycle. So you are not stopping to tell users what’s going on within the app, right? But you are, prompting them to an app with, an in-app message, email, a push notification, creating an experience with your north star  metrics in organization and you are basically creating automation to continue to educate users, automation to keep them engaged, automation to bring them back if they’re gone during the first 30 days of app install. So it’s basically an

Extended onboarding is the concept of, using the power of your own channels to connect users and leverage them with push in app, an email based on where they are left. 

But again, you have to be really mindful and you don’t have the luxury to blast users with annoying messages. So you have to be really mindful about their usage and tailor that usage to it a unique offering with the right channel at the right time, instead of again, saying something generic, oh, come back and we miss you. So the first thing that comes to my mind is to have that holistic user journey and looking at each user bucket and speaking of that holistic user journey and, basically an extended onboarding. I think I would love to share with you with your audience to see what user journey looks like before you create your extended onboarding experience. So, I am going to start sharing my screen and please let me know if you can see my screen Shamanth.

Perfect. So, this is a user journey, right? Like before we think about our extended onboarding experience, those are the things that we can take into consideration. So, the user journey here is basically your different user buckets. So, there are different segments of users, right? The ones that are coming from paid acquisition, the ones that are coming with blog posts, or word of mouth, right. So you create different user buckets, then I believe your MMP can help you to do that with different deep links. 

And, and you have the buckets, right? Like, who are my active users and who are going to be churning within the next two weeks. So once you have that, and now you are talking about what’s really left in your pockets? So your existing activated users, so the ones that are actually highly active, perfect, right? They are opening up the app, maybe seven times everyday, maybe every two days, three days, that’s perfect, but the ones that are going to be stagnant, out of those active, those are the ones that you have to think about your reengagement – like your campaigns, tailored to those unique groups, because, again, there’s going to be huge part of those who will be churned in the next couple of weeks. 

So, once you have that user map, and each user buckets, everyday as a marketer, you need to run the queries to see how many of them are on those buckets, and if there’s any immigration in between those buckets, try to prioritize your strategy to see what’s most important to make sense or run. So, yeah, that’s really important. And that’s the biggest part of having a robust extended onboarding experience. Once you have this, buckets and basically user map is to plan and track every day. So I’m gonna stop sharing, and I’ll see what you think about this.

Shamanth: Yeah, that is very helpful and having that be visually clear. And for what it’s worth, for those of our listeners who are going to be on audio, we will share a screenshot of what you were just showing, I will post that in the show notes, so they can follow along. So we will definitely do that. And I think that’s definitely an astute way to think about the different buckets of users and target them. And, when you’re targeting these different types of users, different buckets of users, a marketer will have very different channels available to them. You can target them via PNs, app messages, emails, and of course there are retargeting ads. How do you recommend thinking about these multiple channels? And how do you recommend making sure they don’t conflict with each other?

Miray: So I think for me, if I am a new hire to a role or a company, the first thing I will say is start testing channel by each segment and start to integrate them with automation as a first test to understand which channel is actually working best for each segment, because we know very generic things. So, I mean, you cannot drive users back with in-app messages for dormant user segments or for the ones that are not in your app. 

So you have a push notification for those and the ones that are active in your app, providing them a really rich experience with in-app messages is unique. But again, those are the norms, but having maybe multiple channels available to them is something that you need to be curious about and be testing and learning. So I will say, again, depending on your business goal, and if you have a data team that is actually matching your campaign IDs with your user IDs, and your user IDs with your third party in product data, then you’re very lucky. 

And you can, analyze the user profiles and get, like full lifecycle picture, to tailor that picture with your messaging strategy as well as your campaigns so that’s something you can do, but if you don’t have those resources available to you, you can always start testing each channel for much different segments and collect that benchmark, and maybe create an automation with emails, push and in-app included in it. I want to actually give you a funny example where we can see that a single channel has actually worked best for us once upon a time because the goal was to create a consistent messaging across different channels for a cross sell purpose. So we were thinking to launch a new product and to do that we thought: let’s just speak the same language in email, push notification and in-app messages. But unfortunately, the test campaign got out of control. 

So instead of sending the test for certain user buckets, that push notification was sent to an entire user base. That was really funny. It turned out to be the most successful campaign on our mobile engagement team. Because you wouldn’t think that, just one keyword, thank God it wasn’t a funny keyword, it wasn’t something like to test but it was a product name, so just a single product name that drove users attention. So even dormant users, they came back to our app, they open the app.

And we have seen a huge uplift on daily active users, weekly, monthly. It turned out to be the most successful campaign of all time, but unfortunately, that’s not a sustainable success because it was just one time of uplift across all of your KPIs. So again, having multiple channels to work for you is important and having that each channel tailored to each user is also important. So if you can do that, within the resources that are available to you, you are lucky and you can learn and scale.

Shamanth: Definitely, definitely. And you can’t always bank on sending a single message blast to everybody. And if you know, it worked, you guys were lucky at the time. It’s definitely not a repeatable sustainable practice. And, you know, during the onboarding experience, what are some of the messages or user touch points that you would consider highest priority for automation?

Miray: So I think again, you’ve got your Northstar metric, so if you think your product works better when user signs to an account, just try to automate that during the onboarding experience beyond the onboarding experience as well. But again, that should be really unique based on the data. So, like maybe I can show you the segments by strategy approach that I had with my team, when I was at Firefox, things that we can automate during the first seven days, first 15 days, 45 or 60 days and beyond. So, let me quickly share my screen with you, that is to give folks an idea of how they can create that segmentation by strategy approach within their organization. So I will be quickly sharing my screen again.

Okay, perfect. So here we have this segmentation, right? We talked about user mapping. But segmentation is a way to see the big picture for us to see things that we can automate, and strategies that we can take for each segment. So starting from the new users for Day 0 to day 7, this is, again, called onboarding activation, right? Anything that you tell in onboarding because they are talking about the most important action that we want users to take, we are automating that. So let’s look at the active users. Active users are between three levels like low, mid and high engaged users. And they are cohorted based on their activity level. So things that you can automate are different products and services or educational material that you have in your business. 

So you can always automate things like, oh, we have this product XYZ say, check it out and improve your experience or be a first tester or be an early adopter, things like that, right. Anything that gives users a more value out of your services and products, so they’re the things that you can automate. 

When it comes to a segment users that are also cohorted in three different layers, inactives, lapsed and dormant. So inactives are the ones that are, eight to 28 days, like the ones that are going to be churned in the first month. So, I think that group is really important that you want to bring those back to the active user segment with a churn prevention automation. So, what is churn prevention automation – it is something that they haven’t done in the last 28 days. But, they may be interested, right, again, it could be a different product and services as well as, something like, I think I’ve seen a very helpful experience from Uber Eats. 

I used to be, ordering from Uber Eats a lot, but since I think I became about to churn, so they send me a push notification this morning to show all the restaurants that are actually available for pickup in my neighborhood, the ones that are I assume that they haven’t opened yet because I know the big restaurant chains are, they’ve been, serving since the beginning of the shutdown because they have already have those, Postmates and Uber Eats like, integrated in their, services. So they’re already providing that but I wasn’t aware of one, the small ones or, more like family owned ones are doing that. So, they sent me a push notification this morning to go and check out the three specific ones in my neighborhood, and I clicked it and I became active.

And for the lapsed & dormant ones, churn and like, you don’t really have faith that you can bring them back. That’s where you have to use the power of push notification, because you don’t have anything else. They wouldn’t open your email, they wouldn’t check out your app and to see the really cool reach in app messaging, your push notification, the time, you can test different times like you can test like early in the morning, late afternoon to see if they are actually engaged with the pushes at of different times.

And I’ve seen a really funky example from another utility app, I think I read it in a white paper. So their most effective time to send push notifications is 11pm. I’m thinking like, I don’t want to send anything at 11pm but they are basically using it as a game to create curiosity, oh, what’s going on at 11pm in my phone. That’s the time, you know, you are about to turn off all of your devices and sleep but you’ll see something about your habits that you can change – I think it was a habit tracking app. So it gives you a reminder for the next day, when you start your day. So those different timeline, and push notification can be automated for sure. But it could also turn out to be a really annoying experience for the ones that are already gone, they could delete your app. So you always have to make the analysis of, what’re the benefits versus what’s the harm, bad reviews, or uninstalls that are left as a result of this campaign. So those are the things that we can think about automating for certain user segments.

Shamanth: Yeah, no, that’s a helpful framework to think about – oh, what stage is a user in. If a user is in this bucket, then send this automated message. Right? If the user is lapsed, let’s send a lapsed user automated message, which has a certain goal. And I think that’s a very helpful and simple way of thinking about it. And are there things that you would recommend not automating?

Miray: So that’s, again, such a great question. I think it again depends on your organization, right? Because when you collect that benchmark and see what’s working and what’s not working, you will eventually understand, okay, that’s something that I shouldn’t be automating, because users left little bad reviews as a result of this campaign or they uninstalled right.

If you have a high uninstall rate as a result of any of your messaging/channel related campaigns, you should not be automating that

and if you are having a hard time to connect your different data pipeline. For instance, your campaign IDs from your third party marketing automation tools with your in app product, a tracking tool, you shouldn’t be automating as well, because you will lose a sense of what has happened as a result of launching this campaign. 

So you have to have connected data integration, the best technology available possible to your app, to automate things because otherwise, you wouldn’t make it through a benefits versus harm analysis. And if you haven’t set a common KPI or if you don’t have shared goals with product organization, that is also something that you shouldn’t automate your campaigns because the things that you’re actually creating couldn’t be really helpful for product organization. So if you’re driving usage to, I mean, as a result of automation, but they are about to kill that app, or they wanted to, or they’re not launching any new features or services for that particular product, then why would you automate users to a bad experience or to a bad product basically. 

So you have to have that clear understanding of what’s really important for the product with your product organization. And I think, what I also heard from I think, it was Lomit Patel, who was sharing during the COVID 19 webinar online and so, he said, which I found is also helpful and, you know, useful for the organization I’ve worked at – he said that we shouldn’t be really automating or creating, experiences for users beyond 60 or 90 days of inactivity, because they’re gone, they have left the products, unfortunately, the services that you have worked, so you need to find a better way. Like you need to use maybe power of push notification instead of automation, but maybe just a single channel, use with a really effective messaging or value prop, and you need to gradually bring them back because you also want to be mindful, because again, when they come to your app as a result of that campaign, and they’re still not happy about the product, they may leave a bad review. And you don’t want that bad review, right? So you shouldn’t also be automating for the ones that have gone for a longer time and they don’t have any in app activity. So, those are the things when you think about, when you consider what is the scenario that we shouldn’t be automating. 

Shamanth: Yeah. Yeah. Right. And it’s also important to point out because not everything should be automated. Because like you said, if you don’t have data integrity, if your data isn’t flowing the right way, or even if users have just gone for a long time that, you know, there’s cases where you shouldn’t consider automation at all. And you should consider having some sort of more manual customized messaging to reach out to a lot of these people. Miray, this has been very instructive to me certainly, and definitely for a lot of our listeners. I think this is perhaps a good place for us to wrap up. Thank you so much for being on the Mobile User Acquisition Show, honored to have you here.

Miray: Oh, thank you so much Shamanth. I mean, this has been also really, a helpful conversation for me to also, think about the concepts that I believe that are important and thank you so much for giving me the space to share these learnings with a lot of folks in our industry because I know your show is also important and and being watched for many professionals in our industry. So thanks for having me.

Shamanth: Thank you, and have a great rest of your day.

Miray: Thank you Shamanth, you too as well.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

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Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!