Gamification in the most unexpected places

HOW ZINIO USES VIRTUAL REWARDS TO DRIVE ENGAGEMENT

According to recent research, there is a strong negative correlation between the number of sessions users have post-install, and user churn rate. The more sessions app users complete in the first 30 days after installing an app, the less likely they are to become inactive and eventually uninstall the app.

LESSON NO.1 IN USER RETENTION: More Sessions Means Less Churn

A recent report released by the mobile engagement platform Localytics, shows the likelihood of users churning if their number of sessions within the first 30 days post-install go below a certain level. According to this report 75% of new users who only have 1 session will become inactive and eventually uninstall the app.

This percentage will decrease if users have additional sessions, dropping to a 14% churn rate for users who have more than 11 sessions during their first month.

THE GAME CHANGING STRATEGY: Leveraging Gamification to Increase User Engagement & Retention

Gamification is by far one of the most powerful tools to engage your user base, and make the customer experience feel more fun and also challenging. As human beings we are naturally drawn to competing, and achieving milestones. Most importantly, people love to get recognized and rewarded for their accomplishments.

There are many ways users can be rewarded for their in-app performance, although given the limitations of the iOS platform as well as our own limitations (no ability to offer vouchers, exclusive offers, etc) we introduced gamification by leveraging digital rewards.

We approached the project by first assessing the average number of sessions per user per month. And based on this KPI, we defined our goal: to increase the average number of sessions / user / month by 1.5-fold.

After identifying our North Star metric, we proceeded to split our user base in 3 different segments, based on the average sessions per month:

First segment - less engaged users - received a campaign with a creative displaying a virtual “Bronze Medal” congratulating them for their reading habits, and encouraging them to keep reading to unlock the next level.

Second segment - users with higher engagement than segment 1 - received a campaign with a creative displaying a virtual “Silver Medal” again congratulating them for their reading habits, and encouraging them to keep reading to unlock the next level.

Third segment - most engaged users - received a campaign with a creative showing a virtual “Gold Medal”, in recognition of their hard work.

The initial results were far from what we expected...the conversion rate of users targeted with the campaign were significantly lower than the Control Group (random group of qualifying users who did not receive the campaign).

Our first reaction was obviously of huge disappointment, however we did not allow these results to deter us from reaching our goal, and we decided to run A/B tests with different messaging, to see if the results can be improved.

The change we introduced was to remove from the message any mentions of the number of sessions users had, and instead focus the message on their reading achievement.

The results were impressive, creative B has outperformed by far Creative A in terms of user engagement.

As a takeaway, we understood that our user base might not feel comfortable with their activity being “monitored” and us keeping count of how many sessions they had.

Instead, by focusing the message on their achievements, and their status as magazine enthusiasts, the performance has improved significantly:

• 10-fold increase in conversion rate for Creative B vs Control Group (users who did not receive the campaign)

• 2-fold increase in number of conversions for Creative B vs Control Group.

We will continue to iterate and test new creatives, different messaging and possibly find a workaround to deliver actual rewards, so watch this space...