3 min read

Pray.com Increases Listening Engagement With Cross-Channel Messaging

Use CaseEngagementReduce Churn
TopicsCross-Channel
IndustryMedia & Entertainment
Pray.com Increases Listening Engagement With Cross-Channel Messaging
Problem

Pray.com has a small Lifecycle team but a lot of content. They needed to find innovative ways to cultivate community, drive frequent engagement, and increase long-term member retention without stretching their resources too thin.

Strategy

Pray.com built a cross-channel strategy that uses a combination of email, in-app messages, and push notifications to engage members with relevant content at the right time. They also developed freemium-to-paid flows designed to reduce churn and drive revenue.

Results

With this cross-channel strategy, Pray.com was able to drive a 21% increase in open rates, 12% increase in average weekly listens, and 14% increase in send-to-listen conversion.

company
INDUSTRY
BY THE METRICS

14%

Increase in send to listen conversion

21%

Increase in open rate

12%

Increase in average weekly listens

Pray.com seeks to make prayer a daily priority for the company’s worldwide member base. The company’s mission is to create community among Christians who pray, helping members evangelize in their own way through the Pray.com community. As the number one app for daily prayer and faith-based media, Pray.com is always seeking new ways to engage with their audience—in fact, they are the first faith-based company in the metaverse.

Pray.com’s prayer plans and content is how they help bring faith to millions of Christians around the world. Accordingly, the team was looking to grow their customer engagement strategy to better meet their mission and goals. They also wanted to better understand and focus on what was inspirational instead of promotional. So they turned to Braze.

A Nimble, Experimental Approach

After implementing Braze, the Pray.com marketing team developed a nimble and interactive approach. Testing is at the center of the strategy, with continual adjustments based on which messages, content, and channels deliver the best results. The end goal is steady and incremental progress over time, using small wins to optimize campaigns and learn which content means the most to members. You can see this approach at work in three separate initiatives:

1. Reminders: This is an important function of the Pray.com app, driving engagement with reminders delivered via push notification. To improve results, Pray.com began testing headline copy to test was more engaging for members. They also experimented with the timing of the message, finding that customizing delivery based on the member’s time zone consistently saw higher engagement.

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2. New episode alerts: Pray.com used Canvas Flow, our customer journey orchestration tool, to better serve their members with the content they want. A popular function of the app is the ability to follow specific content creators, so the team created a unique flow to alert members when new podcasts from each content creator become available. Essentially, members enter a journey and flow through several check steps—like channel preference, which podcast they follow, etc.—to receive API-triggered push notifications directly fired by an upload via the RSS feed. In addition, Pray.com launches numerous A/B tests with different copy (podcast name vs. creator name, for example) to see which messages get more people listening.

3. Freemium-to-paid flows. This campaign targets members who have opted for a three-day free trial to Pray.com. To encourage the free members to switch to paid subscriptions, Pray.com uses mobile push messages to send a welcome series that features gated content, such as the popular “Bible in a Year” series. As members engage with more content, they are more likely to move from trial to subscriber. Subscribers are power users as well, so increasing subscriptions also reduces churn while driving more revenue.

As the Pray.com team expands their use of Braze features, they’re excited to experiment further with Liquid personalization and other dynamic personalization features, such as Braze Connected Content.

We focus on small wins to slowly optimize our campaigns. You don’t have to hit only home runs to win. You can just hit singles until the bases are loaded.

Pray.com’s Results: Reduced Churn, More Time and Tools for Creativity

By experimenting with different channels and content approaches, Pray.com was able to test content frequently and fine-tune its marketing messages, generating the incremental growth and building the community that met the company’s mission. This cross-channel approach drove a 21% increase in open rates, 12% increase in average weekly listens, and 14% increase in send-to-listen conversion.

Key Takeaways

  1. Steady, well-managed growth can have huge payoffs over-time.
  2. Marketers need solutions that keep them nimble and agile. When a market changes or new products and features are launched, marketers should be able to test messages and channels at the drop of a hat.

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