Marketing Automation for the OctaZone mobile training app

Overall, we are satisfied: we were able to establish communication with customers. We didn’t have regular communications via mobile push and email channels, and now, thanks to the platform, we do. We see that our messages motivate customers to pay for subscriptions and continue training. We also see an increase in revenue.

We are now starting to create dashboards that can demonstrate the efficiency of communications. Even now, not long after we launched push notifications and emails, we are able to see from indirect indicators that our customers have started to train more. This shows that they are using our product and will continue to use it in the future.

Sending different communications from a single window. We were looking for a platform that would allow us to send mobile push notifications and emails from a single window. Mindbox gives us this opportunity.

Focus on e-commerce. Initially, we were searching for automation software designed specifically for mobile apps – however, it turned out that all platforms are focused on e-commerce. Mindbox is also geared toward working with orders, products, and categories. In other words, these are areas that we don’t work with.

Due to this, we have to come up with "crutch" solutions. For example, we need to transmit information to the platform about how many times a client trained during the previous week. This kind of entity doesn’t exist in e-commerce, so we had to invent something.

Cost. When it came to other platforms for working with e-commerce, we chose Mindbox due to its affordability.

Integration is not self-service. Unlike in Mailchimp, you can’t just sign up, quickly integrate your product with a single developer, and get started.

We spent a lot of time negotiating with Mindbox before integration. First, we talked with the Mindbox sales department, and then with the managers. On top of this, we were given introductory master classes and virtual tours of the platform. Consequently, this delayed the launch. What’s more, in a startup environment, deadlines are especially important — we could die at any moment, and we have very little time.

The interface isn’t intuitive. We usually sort out work with any service inside the company, but in the case of the platform, we couldn’t set up communications ourselves and hired the EMAILMATRIX CRM Marketing Agency.

Visualization of communication sequences. It’s convenient to see what the mailing workflows look like on the platform and in which order push notifications and emails are sent.

We have connected the platform for two key tasks: customer acquisition and retention.

At the stage of customer acquisition, we separate our advertising content, providing each audience with their own message and offer. Then all customers "land" in a common funnel. In the future, we plan to bring each audience to a separate page in the App Store. This will allow us to personalize communication even at the acquisition stage.

We tested which interval works best for sending push notifications. There is no significant difference between a small interval of about 15 minutes and a large one (for example, a day). Nevertheless, we noticed that the more frequently we contact the customer, the more effective, albeit only slightly, the communication becomes.

OctaZone chose this strategy because they believe that customers have a high motivation to train and they do not perceive these messages as spam.

It’s not exactly an abandoned cart message, but it looks like it. The idea is to get in touch with the customer, so that in a month they’re able to see the results of their training and choose to renew their subscription.

According to the metrics we're seeing, reminders have a very high open rate. People open push notifications, which helps them use the product and achieve their sports goals.

Right now, we’re only collecting feedback in mobile push notifications, but we’re not processing it as we’re waiting for enough data to accumulate. We plan to divide all feedback into blocks, which will let us see what customers leave feedback about, how often and what they complain about, in order to come up with solutions and improve our app.

In addition, we ask customers for feedback through a standard Apple pop-up. We show this after three workouts. This helps to quickly respond to any problems in the app. For example, we sometimes receive information that a function doesn’t work on a particular phone model, or we're asked to implement a new feature. We send these reviews to the backlog and correct them, and then inform the customer about it.

Configuring mechanics on the platform is convenient thanks to communication workflows. They are more flexible than just triggers. For example, they allow you to create complex communication sequences with several mobile push notifications or emails on one screen.

Without communication workflows, it would take me 4-5 times longer to set up, for example, a chain of push notifications and emails.