Case Study: Better onboarding increases retention, doubles user LTV
Case Study: Better onboarding increases retention, doubles user LTV
Background:
Winner of Apple’s 2019 App Trend of the Year award, FlipaClip serves as the gateway to the artistic world of animation providing powerful and fun tools that makes frame-by-frame animation easy.
The app has become a run away cult-classic where the millions of organic users rack up truly impressive DAU-times, often approaching double-digit hours. This success can be traced back to the intense commitment the Flipaclip team has towards user experience, which has rewarded the team with extremely viral organic growth.
Joining in 2018, mobile industry veteran, Geoff Hladik, was brought in to help the team scale the business to the next level.
The Problem:
Why are users dropping out of onboarding, and what are the financial implications?
Although the Flipaclip UI is the easiest-to-use product in the industry, there is still a learning process to create effective animation. The app’s immense organic growth was offset by a steep retention curve: Geoff needed to improve retention.
After careful analysis, Geoff developed a theory: users were having trouble understanding the basics on how to use FlipaClip– they were failing to complete the onboarding funnel. He thought if the team could better understand where new users dropped out of onboarding, they could act to improve retention and monetization of these lost users.
“Animating takes time, and when you’re working in FlipaClip, ten minutes feels like one minute. So, once you’ve grasped the basic learning curve, you’re hooked.
However, when you’re new to the app, frustration can set in within minutes and people give up too early.”
Geoff Hladik, Head of Strategic Growth
The Solution
FlipaClip has been a longtime AdLibertas partner, so Geoff was excited to be an early adopter of AdLibertas Audience Reporting.
Geoff started to analyze his users based on their events and actions upon first installing. He began to hone in on the onboarding tutorial shown to new users as an early indicator: each user is presented with an onboarding tutorial with skip or re-playable options.
Geoff built custom audiences of users who; (1) skipped tutorial, (2) watched a percentage of a tutorial, (3) completed a tutorial, or (4) watched the tutorial multiple times.
After mapping each audience’s performance over time the results depicted a clear link between a user’s interaction with a tutorial, their retention, and revenue performance.
Above is a report Geoff built with Audience Reporting of LTVs based on the rate of tutorial completion: “Note a user watching >75% of the tutorial will add significant value, even users who have completed at least 25% of the tutorial are much more valuable than those users that haven’t.” – Geoff
What’s Next:
The results of the initial analysis proved Geoff’s hypothesis and put numbers behind the action: significant retention gains and a 2x improvement on LTV is achieved if users complete the tutorial.
This key insight led to an immediate action with the product team to improve new user onboarding opt-in rates.
“The beauty of Audience Reporting is we can quickly report on advanced analytics with accurate user-level revenue performance– this kills two birds with one stone.
We can break down audiences and funnels based on behavior and extrapolate quick learnings to help us build better products, faster.”
Geoff Hladik, Head of Strategic Growth
Interested to see how AdLibertas can help your app?