TextNow

As the saying goes, “the first impression is the last impression,” which means onboarding is a critical factor in an app’s retention strategy. Users that engage with the core app experience early in their lifecycle are more likely to become loyal users, and retain long term. TextNow wanted to ensure that newly onboarded users understood how to use the app and get immediate value.

TextNow defined successful onboarding as getting users to send their first message or make their first call within the first 12 hours after registration.

TextNow used our Lifecycle Engine to set up three engagement campaigns. The Lifecycle Engine enables app managers to build personalized lifecycle campaigns in one visual timeline across any messaging channel, such as push notifications, email, in-app messages, app inbox, and more. By employing a combination of mobile automation tactics, the Lifecycle Engine is instrumental in onboarding new users.

Once new users completed the registration, they qualified for the campaigns. When they took the desired action — making a call, sending a message, or returning to the app — they were considered successfully onboarded and moved on to the next stage of lifecycle campaigns.

With these three lifecycle campaigns, 
TextNow saw outstanding results:

– The first campaign converted 25 percent of users. That’s a 3.7 percent lift in users who initiated a phone call, as the result of the push notification.

– The second campaign converted 44 percent of users. That’s a 1.2 percent lift in the number of users who sent a message, as the result of the push notification.

– The third campaign converted 79 percent of users. That translated to a 3 percent lift in day seven retention, as the result of the push notification.

Put in perspective, these lifecycle campaigns had a significant cumulative impact on retention. In terms of day 15 retention, there was a five percent lift in the number of Android users and a four percent lift in the number of iOS users who returned to the app. Those are big wins for TextNow.

As TextNow moves more users towards in app milestones, it can increase the number of users converting to paid subscriptions. More onboarded users also means higher retention and more potential app revenue.

Converting new installs into active users is hard. To do it at scale, you need a great technology partner.

Leanplum’s easy campaign automation solution enables engagement with millions of users in real-time. By setting up lifecycle campaigns just once, you can onboard every new user who installs your app, at scale. This decreases the drop-off rate in the beginning of your funnel, and increases the chances of users coming back to take actions (like subscribing) that drive ROI. You can also A/B test these campaigns against one another to continually optimize for performance.