Mirela Cialai
Director of Mobile Marketing at Zinio
Where to hear and read about Mirela Cialai1 episode or test
Mirela Cialai is Director of Mobile Marketing at Zinio, the digital newsstand, where she leads engagement for mobile readers. The thing most worth learning from her is to match every ask, whether push permission, a rating or an offer, to the user's behavior and test it in small segments before scaling.
The winning creative was a very simple one where we're simply asking would you rate us five stars, that was it.
Creative App Engagement Strategies with Zinio's Mirela Cialai
Mirela Cialai: the story and the lessons
1Mirela Cialai and the retention problem at Zinio
Cialai leads mobile marketing at Zinio, a veteran digital newsstand. Zinio was founded in 2001 in San Francisco and carries over 6,000 magazines, with publishers such as National Geographic, Time, The Economist, GQ and Vogue. Cialai joined almost a decade ago and now focuses on engaging mobile readers.
In 18 years Zinio delivered over half a billion issues to customers in 200 countries, through the online newsstand and the iOS and Android apps.
She names iOS push opt-in as Zinio's biggest retention challenge. Push is one of the most effective channels for engaging and retaining app users, and Zinio already runs a strong promotional calendar. The gap is reaching users, not lacking offers.
Android opts everyone in until they disable push, while iOS apps must ask first. In her words, "the push strategy in iOS has always been handicapped by the fact that Apple user is an opt-in approach".
2How Cialai earns iOS push permission
Zinio stopped showing the native iOS prompt to everyone at install. The first approach showed Apple's opt-in form right after install, and the opt-in rate was very low. Apple's prompt can be shown only once, and new users had not yet seen any value.
The problem, as she put it, was that "you haven't yet prove your value to the users".
She put a custom pre-prompt in front of Apple's one-time dialog. Zinio shows its own creative with a promotional message and a yes button, and only users who tap yes see the native iOS form. Users who say no are asked again in a few months.
The aim is to catch them when they are happy with the app, which protects the single native ask.
She wrote each push ask around what the user just did. New subscribers were asked if they wanted to know when new issues of their subscriptions are published. Users who searched for a title such as Cosmopolitan were asked if they wanted to know when it goes on sale.
Behavior-based segments and messages doubled push opt-in, and tripled it in some cases.
3How Cialai lifted Zinio's app rating from 2.1 to 4.5 stars
She tested about 20 behavior segments to find the happiest users. Segments included recent purchasers and users with 15 or more sessions in two weeks, plus groups built from the most popular in-app events. Each got a small share of the ask first.
After five months the top three segments, those with the highest share of five-star ratings, were sent the ask at full scale. Platform changes had caused weak reviews, so the rating needed repair.
She picked segments by reasoning about happiness, not with a special tool. Segments came from in-app events and which of them were most popular. A marketer's intuition about who was happiest guided the choices.
She cut the rating ask down to one plain request. The first creative asked how users felt about the app. Zinio refined it step by step until it simply asked, "would you rate us five stars". Naming the rating made the ask easy to answer.
The rating went from 2.1 to 4.5 stars. She said, "we bounced back from two point one stars".
4Cialai's email playbook
Her best revenue email is a quarterly send with a heavy discount. The quarterly promo-code campaign is one of Zinio's best for revenue and engagement. Zinio also tested landing users on an already-discounted subscription against giving them a code, and heavy discounts did best.
She makes offers feel real with promo codes and deadlines. A code feels earned, while a marked-down price feels ordinary, and the code won the test. Scarcity such as a 48-hour sale adds urgency, a tactic borrowed from online marketing.
Cialai tests subject lines and messages instead of assuming. Email is one of Zinio's strongest channels after push. Zinio tests both the message and the subject line, with the aim of getting customers to open.
She says testing is the best approach for email, as with any channel, and that the best performer is not a huge surprise.
Her activation emails teach and invite a reply instead of selling. After a platform change, emails explained what is new and where to find magazines. A typical drip sends a welcome with top magazines, a check-in on day two, then more steps on day three.
A personal question such as "what are you most interested in, National Geographic or sports?" invites replies, which make Gmail treat the sender as a personal contact. She says it is "mostly about providing value".
She turned the email apology into a deliberate tactic. After errors, Zinio sent quick "sorry, here is the correct link" follow-ups. It later began sending such follow-ups on purpose.
No figure is given, but she says "it actually really works the the open rates".
Creative App Engagement Strategies with Zinio's Mirela Cialai
Zinio's mobile marketing lead explains how to earn iOS push permission with behavior-based pre-prompts, which email campaigns drive revenue, and how to ask the right users for ratings. Targeted prompts doubled or tripled push opt-in, and a segmented rating test lifted the app from 2.1 to 4.5 stars.
Cialai leads mobile marketing at Zinio, a veteran digital newsstand. Zinio was founded in 2001 in San Francisco and carries over 6,000 magazines, with publishers such as National Geographic, Time, The Economist, GQ and Vogue. Cialai joined almost a decade ago and now focuses on engaging mobile readers.
In 18 years Zinio delivered over half a billion issues to customers in 200 countries, through the online newsstand and the iOS and Android apps.
She names iOS push opt-in as Zinio's biggest retention challenge. Push is one of the most effective channels for engaging and retaining app users, and Zinio already runs a strong promotional calendar. The gap is reaching users, not lacking offers.
Android opts everyone in until they disable push, while iOS apps must ask first. In her words, "the push strategy in iOS has always been handicapped by the fact that Apple user is an opt-in approach".
Zinio stopped showing the native iOS prompt to everyone at install. The first approach showed Apple's opt-in form right after install, and the opt-in rate was very low. Apple's prompt can be shown only once, and new users had not yet seen any value.
The problem, as she put it, was that "you haven't yet prove your value to the users".
She put a custom pre-prompt in front of Apple's one-time dialog. Zinio shows its own creative with a promotional message and a yes button, and only users who tap yes see the native iOS form. Users who say no are asked again in a few months.
The aim is to catch them when they are happy with the app, which protects the single native ask.
She wrote each push ask around what the user just did. New subscribers were asked if they wanted to know when new issues of their subscriptions are published. Users who searched for a title such as Cosmopolitan were asked if they wanted to know when it goes on sale.
Behavior-based segments and messages doubled push opt-in, and tripled it in some cases.
She tested about 20 behavior segments to find the happiest users. Segments included recent purchasers and users with 15 or more sessions in two weeks, plus groups built from the most popular in-app events. Each got a small share of the ask first.
After five months the top three segments, those with the highest share of five-star ratings, were sent the ask at full scale. Platform changes had caused weak reviews, so the rating needed repair.
She picked segments by reasoning about happiness, not with a special tool. Segments came from in-app events and which of them were most popular. A marketer's intuition about who was happiest guided the choices.
She cut the rating ask down to one plain request. The first creative asked how users felt about the app. Zinio refined it step by step until it simply asked, "would you rate us five stars". Naming the rating made the ask easy to answer.
The rating went from 2.1 to 4.5 stars. She said, "we bounced back from two point one stars".
Her best revenue email is a quarterly send with a heavy discount. The quarterly promo-code campaign is one of Zinio's best for revenue and engagement. Zinio also tested landing users on an already-discounted subscription against giving them a code, and heavy discounts did best.
She makes offers feel real with promo codes and deadlines. A code feels earned, while a marked-down price feels ordinary, and the code won the test. Scarcity such as a 48-hour sale adds urgency, a tactic borrowed from online marketing.
Cialai tests subject lines and messages instead of assuming. Email is one of Zinio's strongest channels after push. Zinio tests both the message and the subject line, with the aim of getting customers to open.
She says testing is the best approach for email, as with any channel, and that the best performer is not a huge surprise.
Her activation emails teach and invite a reply instead of selling. After a platform change, emails explained what is new and where to find magazines. A typical drip sends a welcome with top magazines, a check-in on day two, then more steps on day three.
A personal question such as "what are you most interested in, National Geographic or sports?" invites replies, which make Gmail treat the sender as a personal contact. She says it is "mostly about providing value".
She turned the email apology into a deliberate tactic. After errors, Zinio sent quick "sorry, here is the correct link" follow-ups. It later began sending such follow-ups on purpose.
No figure is given, but she says "it actually really works the the open rates".