User acquisition cost is skyrocketing, and competition for ad inventory is ramping up. So why do the experts from Walgreens, Rosetta Stone and Insert think you should be spending more, not less? Catch up on our marketing roundtable as we break down the true price of mobile app loyalty and strategies that drive enduring user engagement.


In a market where acquisition costs are going off the charts, savvy marketers are spending more than ever on landing users. VentureBeat research, graphed from thousands of practitioners and billions of monthly users, has found that many conventional companies are actually spending north of $20 per user, with some spending up to $50.

What do they know that the mobile developers, trying to scale their numbers quickly with cheap user acquisition at the $1 to $3 level, don’t?

The answer is that loyal user acquisition strategies generate fewer downloads — but up to 7x the number of active, registered users.

That’s a difference between 5 percent conversion to your registration if you use low-cost user acquisition strategies, versus 35 percent conversion. “And that can be the difference between losing $50k to 100K a spend, or gaining 50 to 100k a spend,” says Stewart Rogers, director of marketing technology at VentureBeat, “It is literally that much difference.”

Loyal users also make 90 percent more frequent purchases, have 300 percent more spend than other users, and are 5x more likely to choose your brand for future purchase if you’ve worked to engage them.

But loyalty needs to be earned — and there’s no tried and true recipe. Over and over, specific techniques that work brilliantly for one app will fail miserably for another; even within a single application, what works for one segment might fail with another. Is it a walkthrough of app features for the first-time user? Driving users directly to registration? Waiting on registration until they’ve had a positive experience?

Even when you land on the right combo, what works this year might bite the dust next year.

All that said, you need to apply three common, key ingredients to get to the loyalty and results you’re looking for: personalization, contextualization, and experimentation.

“Number one is be personalized,” says Benjamin Weiss, mobile product manager at Walgreens. “Sometimes at Walgreens we like to call that just ‘be personal.’ To be very personal and be in the moment — and that’s also very contextual for us.

But, he says, don’t get too caught up in the idea of personalization, or analytics that go into deciding which of your hundred offers to show them — your primary focus should be just what’s going on in their account and what’s relevant right now.

Being personal also means respecting the customer first and foremost, adds TJ Hunter, senior director of consumer marketing for Rosetta Stone. The problem is that when you’re in the moment, looking at usage patterns, things too often get lost in translation.

“You have account usage data, but you really haven’t humanized it in any way, so it really doesn’t lead to a linear communications story or a conversation,” explains Hunter. “So always think about what the customer journey should look like, with respect to the problem that you’re trying to solve or how you’re trying to augment the subscriber’s usage in the app specifically.”

Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Join Hunter, Weiss, Rogers and Insert Founder Shahar in this essential roundtable as the dive deep into the three key ingredients that drive massive engagement for any app — and the underlying strategies for Walgreens’ and Rosetta Stone’s success.

Don’t miss out!

Access this VB Live event on demand for free right here.

In this VB Live event, you’ll learn to:

  • Leverage in-app personalization to build loyalty
  • Proactively seek and secure high levels of customer satisfaction
  • Increase customer retention rate
  • Raise revenue per user
  • Implement strategies that increase LTV and increase ARPU

Speakers:

  • TJ Hunter, Sr. Director of Consumer Marketing for Rosetta Stone’s Consumer Division
  • Benjamin Weiss, Mobile Product Manager, Walgreens
  • Shahar Kaminitz, Founder & CEO, Insert
  • Stewart Rogers, Director of Marketing Technology, VentureBeat
  • Wendy Schuchart, Moderator, VentureBeat

This VB Live event is sponsored by Insert.