Don’t be a User Loser: Actionable Acquisition and Retention Strategies from Top Brands

Speaker A: Welcome to the Moengage Catalyst Growth Maestros podcast where we delve into the heart of retail growth through the power of advanced customer messaging. Join us as we explore innovative strategies on how brands can personalize their messaging to fuel growth, uh, and to drive the best customer experience. I'm your host for today. Nick Ipple and I lead partnerships for North America here at moengage. And today we are very excited to have Reed Kuhn, the head of business strategy at, uh, Branch, joining us today. Hi, Reid, could you take a moment and introduce yourself as well as, uh, Branch to our listeners?

Speaker B: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Uh, so Branch is a mobile linking partner and also a mobile measurement partner. And so I like to describe this simply as two sides of the same coin. We do deep linking, which brings users into the app, um, or web. It's, uh, just how we engage with brands is through links. Then we're also providing all the post event measurement. When people go into an app or web, what do they do after that? And how do you attribute that back to the original touch point, regardless of where that occurred from SEO or from mobile, web or desktop, even QR codes, uh, there's a lot of channels that we cover and there's a lot of cool use cases that we have. And it really spans every single industry. Anybody who has an app can be our customer or will soon be. And we're doing all of that linking and measurement across every channel.

Speaker A: Very cool. And how did you get into this space? A little bit more about your personal background would be great.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, so I was a lifetime consultant. I actually have done, I like to say I've done all the consultings. Um, so I've done like big It, Accenture consulting. I was actually a scientific consultant for the military for several years for the Department of Defense, uh, weird science projects, things like that. Then post grad school, got into traditional management consulting and strategy consulting, where we were doing M and A advising, um, private equity consulting, and then eventually quit everything, moved to Silicon Valley and started fresh in the tech sector. And so that's where I got into retail and E commerce. And so I started at a startup doing price optimization strategies for E Commerce. Some of my bigger clients, uh, included Walmart, which I ended up then working for. And from there I went to ebay where I ran North America business operations. And so I had an interesting journey from being an outside advisor to going in house. And then here I'm back at Branch, recruited by someone I knew in the industry, uh, to come in and try to do consulting. But in a much more focused space. And so now I've had the opportunity to actually get into the weeds and become an expert in E commerce, but also beyond that, just mobile in general. And I basically am a strategy consultant for our partners.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Well, we're very excited to have this conversation today, and thank you so much for being on the podcast. I think, um, maybe we can start off with a fun question. Um, first, um, what app, uh, in your mobile device that you have that you think maybe is a bit unique or one that other folks don't have?

Speaker B: Yeah, good question. I love recommending apps and asking other people for what's a favorite trendy app? Uh, for me, it's actually an entire suite of apps. I have a whole folder that has every legal sports betting app there is for the state of Virginia, where I am located, how I ended up at Branch. And a bit of my life story is that I'm also a professional gambler, and that's because I do sports analytics. And I don't really say I'm a gambler because I don't take. I don't play games of chance. I don't play casino games. I basically just get in math contests with casinos, and that's how I look at it. And so I happen to be a, uh, UFC specialist. I consulted to fighters analytically, and now I actually just gamble on that, uh, running models, prediction models. And so I have all those apps on my phone, and I can usually tell when it's a big event on a Saturday afternoon, when my phone starts blowing up a little bit and friends and family are like, hey, we might be watching the fights tonight. Can you tell us who to bet on? Uh, so that makes, uh, a much more interesting Saturday evening than most.

Speaker A: Um, I think probably the audience wants to scrap the rest of this conversation and only talk about this. Very interesting.

Speaker B: It's out there. Phytonomics. Uh, I do share some of my stuff on Twitter. Um, I've written for ESPN for a number of years, um, and a few other outlets. So it's in there. It's actually how I ended up at Branch, uh, more specifically, not just the consulting background. It was a friend of mine who was still betting on my UFC picks and said, hey, this is really cool. Are you doing this professionally? I said, yes, but I'm still interested in having a day job. So let's talk.

Speaker A: That's awesome. Uh, very, very interesting, and what an incredible background. So let's. Let's jump right into it now and maybe refocus on, um, brands Itself. Um, so what are some of the most common mistakes uh, that you think brands make when it comes to user acquisition today?

Speaker B: Yeah, I take a very long view. So in what I've done in the past in consulting and even what I do on the side with the gambling, you have to take a uh, macro view. If you focus too much on the shiny ball in front of you, it's very easy to be wrong or just to reach the incorrect conclusion. And so with the work that we do, we're trying to help brands understand where is the value. And the value might take a long time to play out. So with acquisition, if you know that users are more valuable in the app and you don't send them there, you're losing something. But it's very easy to be distracted by, well, they converted, they bought something, they came back or they subscribed, uh, and think, well, this was a success for acquisition, but it's not really that successful if you don't then migrate people to the highest performing platform, which is usually the mobile app. So just taking too narrow of you I think is mistake that a lot of brands still make. Uh, it's easy to understand big companies. You have different teams, you have your web team, your app team, you've got paid versus own traffic, they're all essentially competing for the same KPIs. So you do have to take a holistic view of all of them together. And just coaching people on that view was a surprising part of what I do more routinely. Some people certainly get it already, but we have a lot of legacy brands, they've been around forever. It's maybe a bank or a retailer that's been around 100 years and mobile app is still very new to them. So just coaching people on how to think about the bigger picture and getting people in early, uh, to the highest performing platform. If you think about paid, for example, if you're paying for clicks or for installs, you've just invested some cost upfront. So on that very narrow timeline, LTV of a user is negative. You've just invested something into them. So it's not until you bring them back and turn them into a higher performing customer that you get the long term value. So take a long view of how you measure customer success, uh, and try to get people to the highest performing platform as soon as you can and measure, measure everything because you can't optimize those initial campaigns unless you're taking a long view on the measurement. Because, because you don't know if customers being acquired through a particular Channel are too highly incentivized. For example, they're using a coupon and then they're leaving. They're one and done. We had this problem at ebay all the time, uh, where it was one time shoppers who left and never came back. So unless you're taking the long view, you might realize um, those coupons were maybe poorly invested. Maybe we should be investing elsewhere.

Speaker A: That's a really insightful point I think. Yeah, I think many brands do get caught up in the initial excitement of acquiring ah, a user and sometimes overlook the long term value, um, and the importance of retention. Right. Um, it's definitely something to keep in mind uh, that the real challenges lie in harvesting that value over time. Right. Not just up front. Um, and where do most drop offs happen and how can they be fixed?

Speaker B: I would start right at the top of the funnel. So when you're first converting a user, regardless of what type of business you're in again you could be commerce or uh, streaming entertainment, even finance. Wherever that first conversion is, there is a moment of high intent when the user first interacts with you. Uh, whether they're subscribing or using a trial or making a first purchase, that is the moment to transfer them to the mobile app. And so your branch has a whole robust product suite around web to app banners and even QR codes on desktop where we're able to pull people in. There's also that follow up. So right when you book airline tickets for example, that is the exact right time to say congratulations. Make uh, sure you download this app so that you can stream entertainment on board. Or if you've just purchased uh, something in fashion and it says track your order in the app, those are the right moments to do that because the user is invested. They just did something, they just paid money, uh, they just signed up or registered. It's the exact right time to lean in a little bit because they're more willing to take that extra step. Now the golden rule of course in E commerce is never cannibalize anything. Don't get in the way of a sale so you don't force this up front right before they make that first purchase. You don't want to add your own bit of churn or your own drop off artificially. You wait until they've done something high intent and that's when you flip them over. So it seems very simple, uh, like marketing 101 is to let people engage and then pull them in further. And yet still people are getting this wrong. And it's kind of mind blowing. Um, but it is complicated and so I get that teams are competing with each other, um, trying to get points for that first customer conversion. Uh, I think you got to take a more strategic view.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a really key point. It's surprising how often brands miss that critical, uh, opportunity to move users to their app. It sounds like focusing on the initial conversion and guiding users to the highest performing platform can really make a big difference in the long term. Engagement and value. Yeah, you're right. With all the tools available, it's definitely something that should be a priority and sometimes isn't. Um, what are some standout examples of a great user acquisition journey that you've seen?

Speaker B: So I've been lucky to consult to literally over 100 brands in the last five years at Branch. Uh, it seems like every quarter we're consulting to dozens. So I have seen behind the curtain of a lot of great brands. And when I, when I give my coaching on what good strategy looks like and some criticism to legacy brands, it's. It comes from a place of love, I assure you. And not everybody is doing it wrong. So I have seen some awesome examples of adoption and we've been a partner to those. So when you imagine any brand, just imagine what a casual user looks like compared to a power user. And I had a conversation with a streaming platform many years ago where they showed me a curve and they just said the number of times that a user comes in per month to stream video is a direct predictor of whether or not they will churn. It's a very simple churn model. Uh, and so this engagement model, they said, hey, if you can add one or two additional sessions per month, you will basically decrease churn by X percent. And it's a big meaningful number. And when you think about a big platform, each month they're losing a number of subscriptions and we have an opportunity to salvage a big chunk of those just through engagement. So we were thinking up all these ideas of features, um, that most users haven't used. Uh, or just how do you put content in front of people that is enticing at the right time and allows them to engage very simply with one click. And that just migrates people up that curve, that engagement curve, the number of sessions per month. And maybe it's a friend sharing content with them, or maybe it's a new episode drop, or watching a preview, uh, just completing an episode that you almost finished for that streaming company. They had all these different things and ways to entice people to come back they just couldn't link them to that content. There was always a broken step of going to mobile web, having to log in, then going and finding the thing that you were trying to get them to do. So. So that's just a simple story of a brand that was struggling with the same thing I think a lot of people struggle with which is how do I take my casuals and turn them into power users. And when you go upstream of that, you think uh, of first time acquisition. We're basically taking strangers and introducing them to our brand for the first time. And that's something that takes cost and you have ads for that and brand awareness, but also just paid channels and search. You have a number of tools there to do that. We once you have them, it turns into the CRM game. You have entire teams whose job it is is to engage with these customers as intelligently as possible. Uh, and gently also not be too aggressive and turn them off. So just like a few examples that come to mind of killer use cases and obviously being an app and mobile nerd, um, these are probably more advanced but Spotify with their viral loop, that is an entire strategic position that they have. They have openly said we want our users to share our product among their friends. And you can refer a friend, but you can also create your own playlist and share it with people. And it's all very seamless. They send you, they text you, they message you a link, you click on it and it immediately starts playing that song or that playlist. That is excellent user virality because it's all free. It's like literally free marketing is when your customers are doing your advertising for you. Um, other examples like in commerce, I think being able to add to cart from email is a vastly underappreciated use case. So when you get these emails from all the brands that you shop at and you see something that is specific to you, they're like, hey, based on your browsing history you might like this product or this is on sale. This is um, a new product drop and you click on it. You shouldn't just have one button that views the product, there should be multiple buttons there. Add to WishList, add to cart, save for later, uh, send to a friend. Because your email is essentially an extension of your app when it's done right and when you click on that, it just takes you directly to the checkout process. You just skipped multiple steps of potential drop off and you connected a user with. Yeah, I think I want that to directly into the confirmed purchase. That is what good Mobile marketing looks like. And so there's a number of brands in retail and even in qsr, quick serve restaurants, fast food chains that are doing this properly. Another, uh, more recent example was Starbucks. Just staying within the QSR field. They are now linking you to order from Google Maps. So if you're looking for where is the nearest Starbucks, you see it and among the options are view the website or see the hours directions. One of them is order. And if you click that, it opens the Starbucks app and takes you into the order flow for that location. That is super slick. Again, we're just finding ways to skip steps that are inherently, they have some non zero amount of drop off. Um, and now the latest and greatest I think that I've seen lately is cross app integrations where you, you have brands that have multiple apps within their suite being able to not only send users from one platform to the other very seamlessly in one click, but also being able to show information from both sides. And ESPN and ESPN bet just to go to my side hustle again. They're actually doing this very well where you can't do betting content, uh, on a media app for uh, legal reasons. So ESPN is showing you all the options for a particular game and if you click on it, you click on who you want to bet on, it takes you to the other app, opens it up, logs you in and lands you directly on that slip. This is just an excellent example of deep linking, but also cross app deep linking. We have a number of different industries at play here and they're all doing really, really cool stuff. Again, I don't want anybody to think my criticisms earlier of brands not thinking far enough ahead. There are some really cool use cases out there. And you never know if you see something that Spotify does or ESPN does. And even if you're in a totally different industry, there is no shame in stealing that use case because we do that all the time. We have playbooks of cool use cases that we show and say, here's your industry, here's what best in class looks like. And also here's what other people are doing and they're turning those casual users directly into power users and just maximizing LTV from the beginning. Um, so that's just a sample of some of my favorites.

Speaker A: Those are some great examples. Um, I love the focus on transitioning users to power users. It's not just about getting them to download the app right, but about actively engaging them in ways that make them more valuable and more loyal. Uh, the specific tactics you mentioned too, like Deep linking and personalized push notifications or really do seem like key strategies to unlock that deeper level of engagement and drive those quality conversions as well. So transitioning, um, with acquisition costs rising, retention is more important than ever. So what are strategies that you have seen work best to keep users coming back?

Speaker B: Yeah, post acquisition again, you get your CRM team involved and this is their mission. How, how do we engage with people in a high value way, uh, and nudge them up that curve? And so all the traditional marketing tricks of how do we personalize, how do we target, how do we incentivize? Uh, there's other tools like virality, loyalty programs, even gamification. Uh, I saw CVS do a, like a 12 days of Christmas thing where they were basically training users through email that each day they could unlock a coupon in the app. And it trained them to click on that email each day. 12 days in a row of enticing coupons right around the holidays when everybody's out there shopping. Very, uh, clever gamification technique, uh, from email. So all those normal tools, like good marketing, should feel very relevant. And when it is relevant, it becomes invisible. And so that's the strategy of CRM, is to say, what do I know about this person? What have they done in the past? And how do I pair that with my favorite things that I have in my toolbox to show them or sell to them? There's a difference between commerce apps and companion apps. Uh, that's maybe my terminology. But any app where the primary purpose of a customer is to buy something, so that's all your traditional retail fashion, even fast foods, food delivery, those are commerce apps. That's the number one thing you can do in there, is buy something. But there's everything else that I call companion apps because really the app is playing a supporting role to you as a user and to the brand. Maybe it's how you manage your account. Um, maybe it's streaming. A lot of brands will force you to convert on mobile web because they don't want to pay the Apple tax. And then once you have that subscription, you're using the app. That's the service that you use. So it plays technically a supporting role. But then you've got finance, for example. You know, who doesn't have their main bank on their phone these days? Uh, because that's how you check your balance and pay things and transfer and all that stuff. It's also where you look for help. You know, you're actually circumventing chatbots and call centers. If you can access the information you need in the mobile app. So then the app plays a role of self service, which ultimately is cost reduction. If I'm a bank and I see a lot of people calling in for a certain reason, why don't I make that feature very easy to find? Then maybe I should even, uh, have my CRM team build a campaign around it and teach users that they can find this feature in the app. Then there's this halo effect of all these pieces working together. Me as a user, I'm realizing, oh, there's something I could do easily in the app. They just told me about it. When I click on these emails, it takes me directly there. That's a great experience. And the CRM team is now getting credit for it because they're getting the attribution down funnel. So all of this stuff works together. And it doesn't have to necessarily be something where there's dollars associated with each session. Like, I'm not buying something. It could just be I'm doing a high value thing.

Speaker A: Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. And now is there a, uh, I guess, you know, personalization is, is obviously a hot topic. Right? Um, and transitioning to personalization. Um, just a quick report, but according to a recent report by Accenture 51 of consumers say they're creeped out by, by brands knowing too much about them and producing ads they deem, quote, unquote, invasive. How do you avoid creeping users out when it comes to personalization? Knowing that obviously now consumers demand personalization.

Speaker B: Yeah, I totally get that. And I think years ago when I started realizing something I looked at on one website, that same product is following me around in ads on completely different websites. Uh, so I get it. And even at ebay, when we realized, if someone buys something, why are we still recommending that same product to them when they log in next time? Uh, there's creepy, but then there's also wasted effort, uh, associated with that. So, yeah, of course you don't want to turn people off, but you're also missing out on something if that's the response you're getting. So one strategy is, first of all, wait until there is higher intent before you do too much personalization. So when a user is already involved in a session, they should expect to see recommendations that are personalized. Uh, CRM has a little bit more leeway to be able to send you something like an abandoned cart email. I don't think anybody would be shocked from that. Hey, I was just shopping. I put something in my cart. I left, uh, and then I'm getting a follow up email. So that doesn't seem too creepy because I was already doing a high intent thing. Uh, in the bigger picture is that if you personalize properly, then it doesn't feel as invasive. It's just like really good marketing. It's just relevant marketing. M. This is, uh, the idea of surprise and delight. Like, I didn't expect to be recommended. This thing that I didn't even know I wanted, but I suddenly see it. I'm like, oh, wow. And that was leveraging prior session behavior. Maybe my user profile. Um, you know, there's, there's all sorts of ways of trying to curate products for people rather than the one size fits all. And I think we can all agree one size fits all marketing is absolutely yesteryear. There is no reason to be doing that. So some level of personalization is absolutely required. That's table stakes going too far. I get it could be a problem, but I think that just means you're missing an opportunity to tailor more specifically to those users, um, and just wait until they're on your platform to gather that information. That's the best time because then it doesn't creep people out. This is fair game that I was here shopping. If you were in a department store and you're shopping in a certain section, it's not creepy. If the salesman says, oh, you like this shirt? You know what? I have another one that's similar that you might like even better. Walk with me. That's the real world analogy of what we're getting with curated products digitally.

Speaker A: That's a really important point, Reid. It's a fine line between personalization and feeling creepy. Right. I think focusing on those moments of high intent like you mentioned, and in app experiences is key. You're right. Users expect a certain level of personalization when they've taken an action like abandoning a card. It's about being relevant and helpful without feeling intrusive. Um, are there, um, any user acquisition stats though, that you feel are overrated?

Speaker B: Yeah. So I mentioned how timelines can be hard. Attributing on a long enough timeline is difficult because there's drop offs and breakage in that sequence. And so you may not know how valuable that user truly was. So I try to avoid focusing on the initial conversion. Um, also something like average order value. So over and over, and I've got entire charts on this that I love to show off. Um, of the average order value on QSR brands and fashion and retail in general, the average order value is sometimes higher on Mobile web. In fact, in some verticals, it's mostly higher on mobile web than it is on Apple. And if you were to focus on that and say, wait a minute, I don't want people in the app, they're spending less. The key is that they are converting way higher in the app than they are on mobile web. So the average uh, session value or arpdao, like average revenue per daily active user is much higher on the app because conversion is so much higher. And then when you layer in lifetime value, repeat purchases, it runs away. So we have had conversations with retailers that say average order value is higher in the mobile web. I don't want to push people to the app. Uh, it's just the app is there if they want to be there. And we have to walk them through that math and say, all right, let's run a test. Let's track two cohorts of users and track them through time. One is in the app, one is on web and see who spends more money. And that's almost always, um, the deal closer right there is because the math wins. You just have to do the harder, the harder math, which is the lifetime value math. And it's for all the reasons that you would expect. It's because you do have a CRM team. You do have them sending emails and push notifications, trying to entice people back in. And there's value to that. And just being able to open an app, you're already logged in, your payment information is already saved. It is so much easier to complete that purchase cycle than it is when you're starting net new and you're on a orphaned browser. You're basically opening a browser cold. It knows nothing about you, you're not logged in. It's not able to even show you products that are relevant on that first attempt. So that is why the app is so much higher converting. And so you can't focus just on that initial shiny ball, which to me is usually average order value. Conversion rate is a better one. Knowing the arpdao is even better. But really LTV is the gold standard for how do you value each channel.

Speaker A: I think you really hit the nail on the head on that one. It's such a common trap to get fixated on those immediate surface level metrics. I think what you're highlighting is the importance of looking beyond those and truly understanding the long game. Right? The lifetime value, the true engagement patterns. And that distinction you make between app users and others is crucial. It's clear that prioritizing those high value deeply engaged app users and tailoring the CRM accordingly is a smart move for sustainable growth. Well Reid, this has been an incredibly insightful discussion. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and shedding light on some of the most critical aspects of user acquisition and retention. Your points. Your points about focusing on long term value, prioritizing the app experience, and understanding the nuances of personalization are definitely valuable takeaways for our listeners and to the audience. I hope you gain some actionable strategies to improve your own user journeys. Remember, it's about.