Dive Brief:
- Localytics worked with photography community EyeEm to identify users at risk of leaving the app and used those insights for a reactivation campaign that saw a 67.3% lift in the reactivation of high-risk users.
- The effort included identifying high-risk users through patterns and characteristics of user behavior historically correlated with user churn, and then engaging those users at critical stages in the user lifecycle with content.
- "With EyeEm's predictive churn management campaigns, we realized a much larger than expected lift in retention of users identified as high churn risks,” Zac Aghion, director of product at Localytics, told Marketing Dive. “We believe this was a result of the approach EyeEm took towards communicating with these users.”
Dive Insight:
Aghion added EyeEm benefited from the campaign to rescue high-risk app users beyond the immediate results to shift how EyeEm approached content marketing based on user behavior. He explained, “They used the predictive churn segments as an opportunity to move away from one-off campaigns and towards orchestrating an ongoing, evergreen journey that automatically engages users with personalized, contextual messaging as soon as they become flagged for a certain level of churn risk."
Aghion also pointed out retaining users an issue with app marketing no matter the app size, category or business model, and that Localytics research has found that 20% of apps are only used once. He described downloads as a “vanity metric in the absence of the retention figures to back it up.”
“For marketers looking to boost retention like EyeEm did, they must first define the problem,” Aghion said. “What does churn mean for your app: No activity whatsoever? No purchases? None of some other specific action? Over what period of time? From there, marketers need to preemptively engage at-risk users with relevant, timely and engaging communications. The impressive results from this case study with EyeEm show how dramatically these tactics can turn the tide on user churn.”