Creative App Engagement Strategies with Zinio's Mirela Cialai

what is up app nation it is Steve P Young founder of app masters calm the place you go when you want action-packed content in the app business because we I talked to some phenomenal people that get to meet at event and I get to hear their story I'm like oh come on and share your story so that we can all for me I'm just trying to learn from these phenomenal guests so that we can all collectively learn to get there and today I've got a problem I guess that I once met a dad Justice mobile street a great event that I got to host as well I saw her presentation I said really you got to come on and share this content with my podcast and she agreed so without further ado let me introduce the guest her name is Marella chai Lai she's a director of mobile marketing at Zinio go check him out it is Zinio com zi n io comm Marella welcome to the show thank you so much Steve I'm super excited to be here and I really appreciate the

invite I'm always I'm always thrilled to join industry events and it was fantastic to meet you adjust and I really appreciate being invited on your case I really hope I'll be able to provide valuable information to the listeners well it's so timely because I've been wanting to talk a lot more i've been shifting my conversation of the podcast to more of the retention that's what we're gonna get into so tell me about how you guys approach retention from a company perspective it may be a little bit overview of Zinio as well yeah sure so let me start with an overview we were founded in 2001 in San Francisco and we are the world's first and one of the largest digital news stands we have a portfolio of over six thousand magazines in digital format which are being distributed your online newsstand and our mobile applications for iOS and Android to date so in 18 years we delivered over half of billion magazine issues your customers from 200

countries wow that's a lot of content we work with pretty much all the major media publishers geographic time the economy's GQ folk wire and I could go on and on I would say the ones that I also read religiously in terms of what I'm doing you know I started with I joined zinnia almost a decade ago and throughout this throughout my tenure at II know I've been responsible for driving global marketing strategies and leading business development efforts world worldwide and currently I'm the director of mobile marketing and I'm focusing moaning engaging mobile readers around the world and basically help them discover the most exciting and inspiring stories and to go back to the second part of your question in regards to attention I would say we are we have a very exciting promotional calendar you know we're trying to excite our customers with fantastic promotions energy however we do have quite a lot of challenges and I would say maybe our biggest challenge in

user attention is to get more users to enable push notifications for our iOS app as we all know push is one of the most effective channels to engage and retain app users however the push strategy in iOS has always been handicapped by the fact that Apple user is an opt-in approach for push permissions which means that an app has to ask a user for permission before they can start sending push notifications as opposed to Android where you know from the start is an opt-out approach everybody is opted in until they disable push so in the initially the way we approach push opt-in in iOS edenia was by simply showing the Nathan the iOS native push opt-in form to pretty much everybody so everybody at the moment they install the app would so show them the 90 form would you like to opt in for push I mean later obviously we realize that we need to change the strategy because first of all there are limitations to how many times you can display that native inform I

believe Apple only allows it once yeah bi I think if he's hit know right like you don't see it again so yeah by like were you just immediately popping up that iOS default prompt right when people like installed the app is that what you guys are doing also something important to mention is the fact that

not only you cannot show that for more and once but also the opt-in rate would obviously be very low because you haven't yet prove your value to the users okay they have no reason to be label push from the first session so we started testing different strategy targeting users at different times based on their in a behavior and we adapted the message based on their behavior so rather than just showing directly than native inform we started by displaying as in your creative with promotional action and say yes I would label push at that point we would be linked with an ad if they would say no in a few months you know hopefully that we would catch them at the right time when they're happy with the experience and they're most like did you what did you ask them like hey wanna be notified any time National Geographic has a new issue yes or no type of thing like what were you asking them one of the segments were users who

just purchased on your subscription to a magazine so yeah in that case would be would you like to sign up to be notified when new issues of your subscriptions will be published the value in this case was obvious any subscriber would want to know when they can read their next issue and another segment would be users who search for specific magazine let's say somebody was interested in cosmopolitan so the message they would see in that case would be would you like to be notified when Cosmopolitan is on sale so we found that approach to work quite well and opt-in rate has increased doubled or even tripled in some cases the other thing that I want to get into as well is from a push notification perspective are you guys doing anything else beyond that like email marketing or I don't know what other retention metrics I know you know when I talk to the guys at peak they were talking about retargeting ads for people within the

seven day you know day 7 window to try to get them back into the app and make sure they understand it right so are you guys doing anything else to make sure that people come back into the app yeah so besides email marketing is I would say one of our strongest performing channels yeah we definitely have a very strong push notifications we also have enough marketing we're doing

on-site messaging so we're not doing much in terms of retargeting currently on our own is something that we're going to look at in the future I want to get into the email marketing piece a little bit and talk more about the strategy behind that so how do you guys try to approach it I know the I come from the online marketing world sometimes a lot of my friends are from there and so there's different types of tactics that we all use there what do you have word of you guys notice to be the most effective in terms of like email marketing and making sure your clients and your customers actually open the email with any other channel testing is the best approach you know that's the message that's the subject lines creating it in in terms of what has performed best for us probably it's not going to be a huge surprise but heavily discounted offer yeah so I would say what one of our most campaigns in terms of the revenue

delivered the engagement the user engagement is our quarterly campaign where we use a code a promotional code which customers would apply to get the

discount we've tested also with these different approaches where we just try to discount the offer from the start so when they click on the cover they land on the subscription already discounted versus giving customers code I would think so I'm glad and I was like no I think the code word for better well it's sort of like you know analogy where it feels like it's more real in a way like you're getting a coupon so it's like a a code yes I get it it feels like a real discount where this is just like on sale like okay let's say like great you know but really I think what we try to use in the online marketing world is sort of like scarcity too so like hey yeah I'm sure you guys do this but like 48-hour sale right like you got to act and so there's that sense of urgency are you guys doing that as part of this huge discount yes when you mentioned sparsity you know we're running out of Andorian that would never be also what worked

really well for us are the messages so in the beginning you know and whenever we we made a mistake then we would send those we're sorry here's the correct link or whatever and then we at some point we started doing eventually and it actually really works the the open rates and the other thing I want to move on to is are you doing any type of drip campaigns because I know in the online marketing world once the user signs up there's usually a drip campaign that says hey welcome to Rolla here's what you know our top magazines and then the second day hey have you enjoying blah blah blah and third day you know there's just like sequence of emails that are automatically dripped to a new customer try to get them to engage with the app where you know later extra

reminder with the activation campaigns you know without going to too many details because obviously you know this is all public but like what it's sort of the thinking the overall strategy like hey we want to make sure people understand X Y & Z so that we can X Y & Z and that they come back to LA blah blah so what is sort of like the high level stuff strategy with the activation email sequence also here's how to

completely change so you know sort of help or even our existing customers readjust the changes so part of our strategy here's you know here's what's new here is where to find your magazines so it's mostly about providing value I would say one of the things that I know is very popular in the online marketing world and people have recommended this to me is to get users to engage with an email because you don't want to be like the Google promotions tab and so you want to make sure people respond to your email and so one of the things would be to be like hey what are you most interested or what do you love most about the app and things that we that I've deployed is kind of just being like what are you most interested in a you know this National Geographic or you know sports whatever it is be did it and I just want to get a response because we're trying to trigger Gmail than thinking like hey

this is a personal friends like me mirela we know each other and people are engaging alright I want to talk about what you talked about the event as well with apps or reviews you know you went through sort of like a fire remember correctly you know some changes within the platform which led to some you know less than positive reviews within the app but then you're able to fix so we

tested I think we tested about 20 different segments and with different creatives targeted and with different times based on their behavior and the the winning creatives so the last creative proved to be the most efficient was a very simple one where we're simply asking would you rate us five stars that was it and we targeted a small percentage of each of those segments and after I think of five months of running the experiment we looked at all the numbers and identified the three talk segments the ones that deliver the highest percentage of five-star ratings and then for those three segments we just ramped up and sent the message to the entire qualifying audience and that's what helped us recover and you know address the decrease in average rating and we bounced back from two point one stars stole 4.5 stars yeah you guys are huge right now I mean I think it's even higher than that as I'm looking in the episode right now but yeah the when you

were talking about the data like how how did you know this segment was gonna be the highest likely to leave a five star rating is that through like something like adjusts or some type of platform like that marketers intuition okay that's all saying the way we try to identify who could be the most happier you know happiest customer it's gotta be somebody they just made a purchase okay the first segment was recent purchasers second segment it's gonna be somebody that has a lot of sessions okay let's identify the people that had 15 plus sessions in two weeks okay another segment and so on we just looked at you know what we looked at the offense in our app and what were the most popular events gotcha deem the other thing I want to move on to as well is I like the messaging that you put into place like would you be willing to leave a five star so you're sort of leading the customer to be like

would you want to rather than be like how would you rate us it's like you know that was actually the first question so that was the first creative we tested we're basically asking them hey how do you feel about Xenia and there is also okay but then we were trying to find ways to improve the performance and gradually we got to this last creative that was basically leading on that so the answer would you rate us five sir you