Vietnam boasts a vibrant startup ecosystem and is among the top 3 most attractive investment destinations in Southeast Asia. Fonos, a Vietnamese audio content startup, is one of the prominent players in this exciting landscape, enjoying an accelerated growth momentum since 2020. With subscription services covering 1500 pieces of original content, 200+ podcast channels, and 1200+ copyrighted audiobooks, it is the number one audiobook app on both Apple AppStore and Google Play Store in Vietnam.

The challenge of streamlined marketing and ongoing personalisation to engage busy users

Vietnamese users have high expectations from their audio apps — from supporting their upskilling, personal and spiritual growth, and to catching up on the news in various spheres and reading to their children.

Fonos offers all of this but found that more than two-thirds of its users are busy people. While the users come on to the app because they recognise it can meet their needs, Nguyen Hong Nhung, Head of Growth Marketing at Fonos and her team, saw that the users could stay longer and return more often. Fonos had the potential to become the go-to learning and content companion for customers round the clock. To achieve this, the Fonos team decided to use a powerful all-in-one solution that would help tailor personalised retention strategies and create new user behaviours.

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Because of its real-time Recency, Frequency, and Monetary segmentation features that underpin omnichannel, lifecycle marketing, and automated and personalised communication, Fonos sought CleverTap’s services.

“Fonos, right from its early days, understood the importance of focussing on user lifetime value as a way to achieve its goal of being a ‘daily companion’ to its users. CleverTap serves as a robust, unified engagement platform, empowering us to engage users contextually in real time and use automation for enhanced efficiency,” shared Nhung.

A foundation for tailored, end-to-end lifecycle engagement

With CleverTap as the cornerstone, Nhung and her team set out to build a data-driven strategy to maximise customer lifetime value (CLTV). This would be done in two ways: Driving subscription sales throughout the customer lifecycle (install, trial, renewal), while simultaneously boosting customer retention.

Nhung’s team kicked things off by segmenting their user base. They used CleverTap’s live unified customer views updated with real-time user interaction data, as the ideal starting point to segment users based on user type (Free/Subscription/Churn) and the category of the product (Audiobook/Ebook/Podcast). For enabling lifecycle-based engagement, CleverTap’s sophisticated Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) behavioural segmentation algorithm was applied. This creates segments of users based on how recently and how often they were active, as well as the value of their transactions.

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RFM segmentation offers multiple advantages. RFM takes the entire audience and maps them onto a recency and frequency grid, breaking them down into 10 distinct groups. It is fully automated and takes care of complex mathematical modelling with complete accuracy. Thus, the Fonos team saves hours of effort which would be spent on computing which users belong where. They also have access to the probability of a user transitioning from one segment to another, which can happen at any time during the lifecycle.

Equipped with this new, multidimensional, real-time overview of their users’ lifecycle stages, the Fonos team leveraged more of CleverTap to create laser-focused engagement.

Leveraging RFM-backed journeys and insights to personalise user experiences and maximise CLTV

From the moment the customers find and download the Fonos app, they engage with it in varied ways. Against this backdrop, Fonos’ main goal is to make personalised content suggestions in real-time, so customers can quickly discover what they need and maximise their usage of the app’s large library. Let us look at how the team used CleverTap to achieve this.

In the case of users who download the app and sign up, conversion-focused journeys auto-trigger campaigns to engage those who remain inactive post-sign-up with welcome onboarding emails. Similarly, tailored journeys win back users about to cancel their subscriptions by reminding them how much they will miss their most-used features. Users who forget or overlook spending their abundant credits are alerted with personalised messages on their preferred channels before the credits expire.

In this way, RFM segmentation ensures that along any tailored journey, the offers, and customised messaging reach the right user on the right channel, consistently improving the experience. CleverTap also enables the team to identify the ‘golden time’ of the day to engage users, further boosting effectiveness. The Fonos team is also able to streamline their efforts by tapping into deeper insights mined by CleverTap, such as by not focusing on users who use the app for less than 10 minutes a day in the first week as they are unlikely to turn into loyal customers.

With this integrated execution of tailored journeys and lifecycle messaging right from the onboarding stage to provide seamless personalisation, Fonos is seeing concrete gains. There is a significant conversion uplift between 5%-10% and an appreciable revenue boost of 10% for user groups where CleverTap segmentation and tools were applied.

“RFM segmentation has helped shape a far more effective strategy, supercharging our return on investment by boosting retention rates and maximising user lifetime value,” explained Nhung.

Nurturing customer loyalty through RFM-powered personalisation

The Fonos team also leverages RFM segmentation and valuable insights from CleverTap to engage loyal customers and persuade them to make referrals. Loyal users, for instance, are offered personalised content so they feel valued. Another approach that is currently working well is two-way conversations. Customers in the more loyal segments are asked for feedback, assured it will be implemented, and then engaged again to see if they are satisfied. High-value, at-risk customers are convinced to stay by offering them gainful, customised loyalty programs, while loyal customers are incentivised to provide referrals.

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“By leveraging RFM segmentation and stellar user database management, Fonos has transformed user engagement, increasing both app usage time and monthly active users. In today’s distracting digital landscape, user loyalty is the heartbeat of a thriving subscription business, fueling continuous growth and unwavering engagement,” added Nhung.

A data-driven success story

There is clear evidence that everything Fonos has done so far to increase user engagement is working. The email open rate of 20% is significantly higher than the industry benchmark. At 10%, the In-app message open rate is also at a great level. Crucially, since CleverTap, monthly active users month-on-month growth has seen a 25% jump with the absolute number increasing 6-fold over six months. Fonos accomplished this by intelligently harnessing data to engage the busy user in the right way at the right time.

“CleverTap’s CRM system, by providing personalised customer experiences, marketing performance optimisation, and measurable metrics to gauge the success of our efforts in real-time, has greatly aided our growth,” Nhung shared.

To learn more about how CleverTap can help your business create a tailored strategy for engaging users, visit them at https://clevertap.com/live-product-demo/.

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Photo by Christina Morillo via Pexels

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This article is produced by the e27 team, sponsored by CleverTap

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