The holiday season presents a great opportunity to engage with your app’s users, and bring new ones on board, with seasonal messages and campaigns that give them a real reason to open or download your app. But how do you do this most effectively? The key is to anchor your app marketing campaigns in a solid CRM strategy. Here’s how…
Why a CRM strategy matters
Before we jump into how you can leverage seasonality in your CRM campaigns, let’s start with the basics. CRM is one of those acronyms that’s used so often that it’s easy to forget what it means: Customer Relationship Management. It’s all about managing your relationship with your customers – in this case your app’s users – and speaking to them in a way that makes them feel valued and understood, whether that’s via email, push notifications, in-app messages or SMS. The keys to achieving this are segmentation and personalisation.
Segmentation leads to personalisation
The first step to personalising your communications is to break down your audience into different segments of people who share the same attributes so that you can speak to these when you communicate with them. For an ecommerce app, segments could include:
- People who have not yet made a purchase
- People who have made a purchase in the last three months
- People who have made a purchase, but not in the last three months
Having defined your segments, it’s much easier to see how you might target messages to each group differently. This is where personalisation comes in.
Personalise offers to maximise engagement
Looking at the segments in the example above, you can now start to personalise your comms to each one. Here’s what the offer and the comms could look like for each segment:
- People who have not yet made a purchase – an offer of free delivery on their first order, or a reminder that they can spread payments over several months, toin order to give them the final push they need to convert.
- People who have made a purchase in the last three months – an offer of a 20% discount, framed as a gift, a thank you for their continued loyalty.
- People who have made a purchase, but not in the last three months – the same offer, but rather than framing it as a reward, frame it as an incentive to encourage them to shop with you again. In this way, the messaging can be personalised, even if, for two of the three segments, the “offer” is the same.
The benefits of personalisation are well documented. In fact, 52% of customers say they’re likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t tailor communications to their needs. Personalised interactions aren’t just a nice-to-have—they’re essential for building customer loyalty, and driving engagement and increasing revenue.
CRM tools to manage segmentation and personalisation
There are lots of CRM tools serving different needs and price points available to help you manage segmentation and personalisation. Some of the most popular ones include OneSignal, CleverTap, MoEngage, Braze and Iterable.
Within each of these tools, you can create tags and segments of your audience. This will enable you to identify their common characteristics so that you can target more personalised comms to each segment. The ability to segment your audience is a powerful lever to improving not only the customer journey to purchase but also activation. Here’ what that would look like: Here is an example journey you can set up via your CRM tool, leveraging segmentation and tags, to improve the activation rates of your app users:
- People who have not yet signed up to the app – send a welcome email. The first tag would be for people who have signed up.
- Next, send an email encouraging those who have signed up to take out a subscription, and create tags for people who take out a subscription and people who don’t.
- Next, email those who have taken out a subscription with messaging around the benefits they get from that, and those who haven’t with an offer to encourage them to subscribe.
These tools will also connect to tools in your app’s existing tech stack, so you could connect your CRM tool with your in-app analytics tool, something like Mixpanel, Amplitude or Google Analytics, which will then allow all the in-app actions, or “events,” that are captured in your in-app analytics tool – someone creating an account, or making a purchase, for example – to be transferred over to your CRM tool. This avoids the need to set up tags for events in the CRM tool that are already being captured by the in-app analytics tool. This integration will allow you to have a full view of your users’ behaviour, giving you the power to leverage CRM to encourage further engagement with your product.
The benefits of using CRM strategies in seasonal campaigns
Anchoring your seasonal campaigns in a solid CRM strategy makes sense for all sorts of reasons. It makes your messaging more relevant and consistent, which in turn makes it more effective.
Relevance gets results
One size fits all messaging doesn’t work in the modern world. By segmenting your user base and creating personalised messages that reflect where they are on their user journey with you, you will make your users feel both valued and understood, and more likely to respond positively to you.
Consistency
There are multiple channels open to you to communicate with your app’s users. Using a CRM to manage your communications with them will make it easier to maintain a consistent tone of voice and brand personality, even while targeting different segments of the user base with different messages.
Effectiveness through personalisation
The more relevant your communications, the more effective they are likely to be in nudging consumers along the user journey and encouraging them to convert at each of your in-app conversion points. A study by Epsilon found that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalised experiences.
Building a CRM strategy for app marketing campaigns
To run successful app marketing campaigns, you want to be hitting users with messaging that makes sense for where they are on the journey with your app, whether they are a seasoned user, or brand new to the app.
Understand your audience
Understanding your audience is key to being able to build out the user journeys that sit within each of your segments. Using your in-app analytics tool in combination with your CRM tool, you can use demographic data, or behavioural data on how different users are behaving in the app, to build profiles that you can then build user journeys for, including key events that you want them to complete after installing the app, such as:
- Creating an account
- Taking out a subscription
- Making a purchase
Having mapped out the desired user journey, you can then develop campaigns to encourage users through each point on that journey.
As an example, a shopping app might create a campaign aimed at lapsed users (who had previously made a purchase but who had not been active in the last three months). Using insights from each customer’s transaction history, the app can identify products the customer has previously showed interest in or items complementary to their past purchase. The campaign then sends personalised reminders about these products, along with a seasonal discount, to encourage them to make their next purchase.
Define campaign goals
Your campaign goals are defined by the user journey and the in-app events you want different segments of your user base to complete, like creating an account or making a purchase, along with the KPIs associated with those events. Once you understand what the points of conversion are that you want to move towards, you can create the messaging for that. It’s important, also, to understand what your conversion rates are at those points, so that you can look at the levers you can pull to increase them, based on your CRM strategy.
For each conversion point, you need to ask yourself, have they done it, yes or no? The same for the next one. Then use different types of messages to target those who have converted, and those who haven’t at each point. For example, has a user converted to a paid subscription yet? If the answer is yes, the aim is to use your messaging strategy to keep them engaged and retained with your content. It could look like:
“Did you know your subscription gives you access to curated playlists? Explore it now and enjoy a richer experience!”
If the answer is no, the aim should be to convert them to a subscription, either with soft-sell messages highlighting the benefits of a paid subscription, or a harder sell, perhaps including a discount off the subscription fee. Here’s a great example of that from Spotify:
Craft personalised messages
The messaging you create for each segment, and for each stage of the user journey, should be personalised to where the user is on the journey and what you are trying to get them to achieve. The messaging should also be consistent across email, in-app messages, push notifications and SMS.
Automate messaging
Create automated messages that are triggered when the user completes an in-app event, such as a thank you push notification when a user makes their first purchase, perhaps accompanied by a time-limited offer of a discount on their next purchase. It’s another opportunity to engage with the user for a real reason – to thank them for their custom – and at the same time nudge them towards the next conversion point – the second purchase.
Remember seasonality
Your goals, and your messaging, should align with whatever offers you’re trying to push at that time of year. For Black Friday, for example, it could be limited-time promotions or discounts. The messaging may be similar to what you would use at other times of the year, but with a focus towards the season in question, like in the example below.
So for a Christmas promotion, an email campaign could feature an animation of snow falling when someone opens the email. For a push notification, the copy should reflect the seasonality, for example: “Last-Minute Gift Alert! 🎅 Get Free Express Shipping for Christmas! 🎁”
“Start planning your seasonal campaigns well in advance. Create a content calendar that aligns with key seasonal dates; this will ensure your messages are timely, well-thought-out, and allow for any necessary adjustments as the season approaches. By planning ahead, you can also incorporate A/B testing to experiment with different messaging strategies and identify what resonates best.
Remember to avoid oversaturation of messaging around seasonal periods where traffic across the board is high. Resist the urge to send too many messages and instead space out communications strategically to prevent user fatigue and opt-outs. Strategic timing is a crucial factor for communications to effectively boost app engagement.” – Ellie Hines, Product Growth Manager
Mobile CRM strategies for different user segments
By putting your CRM strategy front and centre of your messaging, you will be able to target all your app’s users with more relevant, more engaging messages that will encourage them to take the actions you are trying to drive towards. Let’s look at what that could look like…
The non-purchaser
For a user who has downloaded your app but not yet purchased, your primary goal is to encourage them to complete their first purchase. Your messaging here could use a push notification or email to target them with a 10% off Christmas offer or an extra Black Friday discount. Or it could be softer, more subtle, perhaps reassuring the user with a reminder that if they don’t like what they see when their purchase arrives, they can return it free of charge.
The infrequent purchaser
For a user who has maybe purchased once or twice before, a typical goal would be to get them to buy again. The messaging here could involve surfacing a complementary product that would go well with a previous purchase, like a belt to go with a pair of jeans, for example. This type of recommendation messaging requires a lot of data about the user’s previous behaviour, but personalising based on previous purchases can be a good way to keep infrequent purchasers engaged.
The loyal customer
For loyal customers who spend frequently in the app, the messaging might include an increased discount or free delivery to reward them for their loyalty, or a ‘Spin the Wheel’ game where they are guaranteed to win a prize, again, as a reward for their loyalty.
Conclusion
Incorporating CRM strategy into your seasonal campaigns will make your users feel that you are talking to them as an individual. By breaking your total user base down into segments of people who share similar attributes with respect to their user journey in the app, you can ensure that your messaging is relevant for each segment and that you are not targeting loyal users with generous discounts they don’t need (unless as a deliberate tactic to reward them for their loyalty). And that your messages are always working towards the conversion goals you have set for the users in each segment.
Follow the advice above and you and your app’s users can look forward to a happy holiday season.
