ROCKET strategy: retention in mobile apps

Who is ROCKET?

ROCKET is the first Ukrainian food delivery service. During the coronavirus epidemic, the team grew from 5 to 500+ people in UA (and this does not include couriers). ROCKET is represented in 28 cities of Ukraine and has been open in Cyprus, the Netherlands, Greece, and France for several months.

Now their mobile application looks like this:

In 2020, ROCKET application was installed more than three million times and entered the top ten most popular in Europe in the food industry. In 2020, the CRM team reached a 35% share of orders. They’ve set a goal of winning 50% of all orders.

Basic principles of the team:

• The user is the key person for whom all decisions are made.
• The ROCKET team does not believe in the promotional mailing lists and tries to automate the whole process.
• 20% of the budget and time is spent on hypothesis testing.
• Data is the king, so every marketer is trained in SQL and works with BigQuery and Data Studio. ROCKET competes among different marketing teams for the number of new and repeat customers.

Marketing insights with ROCKET mobile app

• The need to develop new user habits. People are increasingly ordering food at home, and at the start, you need to understand what you need. Therefore, various cuisine options in mailing lists and applications are offered. Based on this choice, communication is built in the future.
• App First. The priority is the mobile app, web versions do not exist.
• iOS & Android. Constant testing of the application because there are different operating systems and different phone models. The problem with correct displaying on all devices is big.
• There are no complete analytics for mobile applications, and they have to be modified.
• Mob Push and in-app-messages - ways to communicate with the user in a mobile application. They collect preferences by type of cuisine.

Application tools

• A/B-testing. The team learns to understand the goals and wishes of the target audience. Unfortunately, the behavior of users here is different from e-commerce. For example, the cycle from first to second order is smaller than in retail. There are also non-standard scenarios: people stick to proper nutrition but can afford cheat meals on a weekend. The suitable cuisine is tested for any of these times, and what to offer permanently.
• Automation. The team spend most of their time checking hypotheses and strengthening triggers with personal sentences.
• Data. A complex segmentation system is built in the application, considering geolocation, behavioral characteristics, reactions to channels, and individual messages.
• Data unification is the identification of a user through any communication channel and collecting information about the user in one profile.
• Referral program and loyalty program.

Retention-strategy

Marketing often spends a lot of money to attract a user. Therefore, the marketer’s task is to build long-lasting communication with the new user. The key strategy of ROCKET is to develop the relationship from the moment they install the app, to the final (churn), which they try to delay as much as possible.

At the initial stage, a person can install the app without filling in the data (email and phone), choose something but not buy. In this case, 50% of the database will be people who opened the app once, ordered nothing, and nothing is known about them. And this is a tremendous resource that needs to be worked with. In applications, all the promo mechanics and triggers are usually aimed at the phenomenon that the longer the client uses it, the more is sent, but ROCKET uses a different strategy.

Acquiring a new customer

First you need to convince the customer to make the first order.

• At ROCKET they collect the database through all the necessary channels. Therefore, any application must have onboarding, and the client must be told why his data is required, (for example, to show relevant content)
• Most often, marketers collect data separately at different stages of communication. In the diagram below, you can see an example of a contact database.

• 60% are emails, 19% are phone numbers, 1% are push. How to create a multichannel chain with this? One email is not enough, the phone is an expensive communication channel, so it is easier to collect everything immediately.
• Example of onboarding at ROCKET:

• All possible data is collected. Yes, your conversion can be a few percent, but 95% of people still leave their data, which allows marketing to choose the right channel and send the right message to the right person at the right time, which is why ROCKET uses all channels of communication:

• The team determines which channel the user reacts better to by testing all of them
• Welcome series. ROCKET has non-standard three emails in the welcome chain - the welcome series is designed for a month. Within 30 days, it sends 3-4 messages per week. Emails are intended to make the users familiar with the service, give promotional codes for free delivery, and offer different types of cuisines. This allows tracking users preferences and forming loyalty. Reactivation is triggered for people who have not ordered anything for a year. Every month a message is sent to them.

ROCKET believes in email very much. They have long tested the behavior of users in this channel and noticed that people who read emails, visit and make orders, spend more money, and have a higher check than those who read push and Viber.

Attracting a New Buyer

The user has already made one order, and now it is necessary to convince him to make a second order. What to do:

• ROCKET encourages first order: provide a discount coupon or promotional code to express gratitude
• Involving: triggers of abandoned browsing, abandoned checkout, abandoned card, offer to repeat previous order.

• Ask for geolocation: which city, personal and working address to avoid mistakes.

Re-orders (Growing Buyer)

A person has made a second order - this is a turning point. He already likes to work with the brand or not. At this stage, a lot of users go. What does ROCKET do with it:

Learn more. Ask more about food and favorite restaurants. To do this, configure triggers in 4 communication channels: push, Viber, SMS, email. They collect information about the interests of the user and the preferred channel.

Lifehack: nothing speaks better about the user behavior then what he adds to favorites or looks at;

Based on this information, personalized triggers are then set using event segmentation in our CDP.

• Involve. With the help of the loyalty program and referral program, user communities are created.

• Analyze. The channel to use with the specific client is the one that’s shown to be most effective with them

Retaining the loyal customers (Good Buyer)

After two orders, users fall into this category. All the best and personal offers should be aimed at them.

• You already know the client’s behavior at this stage. You can configure the remarketing in the mailing lists. If the customer has looked at specific categories, you can recommend related ones .
• Product recommendations - recommendations based on client interests and needs
• The history of orders is already known, and it is clear that of the new categories you can recommend. Also, through the priority channel, reminded of shares in favorite institutions.
• Known behavior in mailing lists. This helps plan the density of communication, sending in channels and budgets.

• To avoid annoying messages, communication is done once every three days. To do this, our platform adjusts the frequency of anxiety.

Minimization of Lost Buyers

With lost customers, ROCKET work on the following principle:

• If the client does not enter the application for seven days, the trigger will already start.
• If a customer stops ordering - you need to find out what happened during the last order. In ROCKET, they ask to rate the last order. If the client has not given a rating they’re reminded again, if the rating is low - call.
• If they stop reading the mailing list you should find another communication channel through reactivation.

As mentioned above, ROCKET does not believe in the promos but does not exclude them completely:

KPI

The key performance indicator for ROCKET is order completion. Different metrics are tracked at different stages of work with the user:

Thanks to this strategy, the number of repeat customers increased:

Conclusion

You always need to know as much information as possible about your client and their habits. Only then can you get great results.

Our CDP helps with the implementation of ROCKET’s strategy. Thanks to the functionality, it is not hard to implement such requests from the client. We will help you find the most necessary and helpful tools to create a quality omnichannel strategy.

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