Viber is a cross-platform voice calling and instant messaging application owned by Japanese multinational company Rakuten. Offering free and secure calling and messaging to anyone anywhere on all major devices, Viber helps to keep conversations safe and private with end-to-end encryption and robust security features as well as providing entertainment content, local news, and more for their users.

When it came time for Viber to upgrade their customer engagement strategy, they looked for an all-in-one solution that could manage their messaging, help them gain valuable insights about their users, and retain users that had already downloaded their app. That’s when they turned to Braze.

Keeping Users Engaged

Prior to Braze, Viber relied on in-house customer engagement tools that didn’t allow for triggering or automating communications based on customer behaviors. It also included some unreliable workarounds for contacting customers. With this in mind, Viber looked to upgrade to a platform that could help them more efficiently communicate with users, improve the overall user experience, and better retain those users over time.

And in addition to their engagement and retention goals, Viber wanted to:

• Offer users content relevant to their interests and behaviors

• Gain the ability to check daily recurring campaigns

• Target users based on past activations

• Trigger a communication bot for general education and troubleshooting

Data-Driven Campaigns

Upon adopting Braze, Viber set up A/B tests within Braze based on three different levels of user activity, ranging from very active to inactive. With these audience segments in place, the Viber team compared slide up banners (powered by in-app messages) with other outreach to get a sense of which audiences responded best to different messaging. At the end of the test, they saw that banner messages worked much better for active users who frequently open the app, but not as well for inactive users. For those users, other messages yielded the best results, because they encouraged users to open the app and engage.

Viber also leveraged a localization strategy, personalizing messaging to users in different languages based upon location. In the Braze platform, they can see how many messages are sent and converted based on language, giving them an indication of which audiences are engaging most.

Finally, Viber utilized the Braze platform’s reporting and analytics capabilities, in part by using Braze Funnel Reports, which allows their team to see what led a given user or user group to convert based on their history.

Viber Results: Increased Retention

Since switching to Braze, Viber has seen up to a 13% increase in conversion among active users depending upon region. They’ve also seen a 50% rise in conversion with IAM-powered banner messaging versus their previous format.

Additionally, the marketing team at Viber can now create triggered communications, set up targeted campaigns themselves, and iterate and react to audience behaviors and campaign results faster than ever, freeing up valuable time for their development team and data analysts.

Final Thoughts

Brands that help people stay in touch should always be looking for better, more efficient, and more human ways to communicate with their users. With Braze, Viber gained that and more, improving user retention, data analysis and campaign reporting while also learning more about their users and alleviating unnecessary work for their internal teams.

Excited to learn more about how your brand can better understand your users and provide them with highly-personalized experiences based on their behavior? Check out our guide Exploring Data Management and Customer Engagement.