Driving Growth at Every Stage of the Customer Lifecycle

To build sustainable growth, Coches visualizes their strategy as a loop where gains from growth and retention can be invested back into their engagement strategy. Another way to think of this is considering a first-time buyer. Once a buyer purchases their first vehicle with Coches, they’re more likely to become the kind of buyer that returns when they wish to buy another car—or sell the one they bought through Coches. Thinking cyclically enables the team to approach the lifecycle holistically, where working on activation, retention, revenue, and referrals feed into acquisition repeatedly.

As a part of this cyclical approach, Coches prioritizes two cohort experiences: Sellers looking to part ways with their current ride and buyers shopping for something new or used. For both audiences to have the best experience possible, the team relies on personalized communication to drive engagement, ultimately increasing visits to their app and website. The more likely someone is to become a return visitor, the more likely they’ll convert into repeat customers or sellers, which boosts revenue.

What does this look like in practice? Well, if growth is your North Star, you need to know where the weaknesses—aka opportunities—are located in your strategy. The Marketing team identified common points where users were dropping off in the lifecycle and becoming inactive. To solve this, they targeted users in two lifecycle stages: Activation during onboarding and reactivation of users whose activity had lapsed.

Personalized Onboarding Fuels Long-Term Loyalty

For the onboarding campaign, they wanted to try to increase the usage of features by teaching customers how to better use the app, and by personalizing user experiences based on their individual behavior. To ensure every user could find everything they needed to get started, the team created an onboarding journey with Braze Canvas Flow that would be responsive to each user’s behavior. Working with their data team, they identified common behaviors of users who convert within the app. This data indicated users who engage with the app’s main features are more likely to find their ideal car or sell the vehicle they have. The orchestrated additional nudges for users taking a longer time to complete desired onboarding activities within the app.

Given that users frequently toggle between the website and app, Coches chose to message users across both in-product and out-of-product channels. They opted for email, in-browser messages, in-app messages, and push notifications, with the first messages encouraging customers to register and opt into the channels relevant to them.

For the next step in the Canvas, they carved out different paths based on individual users’ behaviors to drive users to take the appropriate action. For example, users received communications based on what they have searched for on the app and their primary mode of transportation. In the Canvas’ final stage, they send follow-up messages unique to each user that nudge them to perform the next desired step in their journey. This includes publishing an ad for the car they wish to sell or taking the plunge on a purchase.

Meet Your Customers Where They Are to Bring them Back

For the reactivation campaign, Coches looked to increase the number of returning users through a multi-channel approach. This meant using Canvas Flow to orchestrate a cohesive journey that brought users back through engagement on their most used channels. For the first step in the journey, they segmented their audience based on the channel they were most engaged with use Braze Intelligent Channel. Messages were then sent on users’ most engaged channel and were personalized by their last activity.

At the second stage in the Canvas, follow-up messages were sent to continue engaging users with recommendations based on their previous action. If users did not open the first message, they would also be sent a personalized follow-up to try to re-engage them with cars they’ve recently viewed. Coches found that sending messages cross-channel on both push and email—versus just push—was more effective.

Coches’s Results: Sustainable Growth Pays Big Dividends

With the flexibility of Canvas Flow in creating personalized and tailored journeys for onboarding and reactivation, the team has seen an impressive uptick in growth. The onboarding campaign has led to a 323% higher monthly increase in visits, 352%, and 533% higher lift in ad replies and ads published monthly, respectively. Meanwhile, their inactive user campaign saw a monthly growth rate of 1830% visits and 1500% conversions over push. However, when push and email were used together, the results speak for themselves. The company experienced a 2902% increase in monthly visits and a 2400% monthly increase in conversions. Meanwhile, monthly reactivated users increased by 2892%

Key Takeaways

1. Reactivate customers by speaking to what matters to them. Customers are more likely to come back when you demonstrate how you value their specific needs.

2. Unlock your creativity with clever automation. Look to create always-on campaigns and customer journeys that drive success and free your team up to what they do best—use their creativity to uplevel your customer engagement strategy.

3. Think cross-channel. If you want to engage users in your app, don’t forget the channels they use outside of it. Pairing in-product engagement with out-of-product messages can help put customer eyeballs where you want them and drive desired activities like completing a user profile or downloading the app.