# App Growth Strategy: Reactivation Campaigns for Maximum Impact — Jackson Shuttleworth, Duolingo App

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mplRJHyNn60
Duration: 15 min
Language: English
Words: 3069
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/mplRJHyNn60

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[0:00] hello I'm your host David Bernard today's conversation is shorter than usual and will be featured in Revenue cat state of subscription apps report each episode in this series will explore one crucial metric and share actionable insights from Top subscription app operators with me today Jackson shuttleworth group product manager retention team lead at dualingo on the podcast I talk with Jackson about dingo's datadriven approach to retention how social connections dramatically improved reactivation and why letting users set the prefer notification time backfires hey Jackson thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today yeah thank you for having me dude so I'm really looking forward to talking about

[0:42] reactivation and keeping users in the app and getting them back when they've left but for context duelingo is such a huge company I did want to give listeners just a little insight into what you work on dayto day so duelingo I manage our retention efforts this sits within the growth or at duelingo so this is focusing on how do we grow our user base specifically focusing on daus and so within retention a lot of this focusing on the most habit forming features in our app so you've probably heard of the dualingo streak this is what I spend a lot of time every day thinking about how to better optimize

[1:16] with some of the other teams Under My Umbrella focusing on things like notifications push notifications emails things that are both helping keep the user in the app and that's what we focus most on is how do we get you to never churn but then once we do churn or once the user does churn how do we get them back into the app as quickly as possible because you learn that the longer the the user has been away the harder it is to get them to come home so in the report we're not going to share usage metrics we are going to be sharing subscriber metrics and subscriber

[1:47] reactivation metrics but what's going to be fun chatting with you is that you're not as focused on the subscriber reactivation which it focused on the user reactivation and ultimately that's Upstream of the subscriber reactivation if you ever have a hope to win somebody back to your subscription you first need to win them back to the app so let's shout about that like what's your philosophy around how to get people back into the app the the easiest way to retain a user is to not let them turn to begin with and so a lot of the features that you'll see on dualingo are really focused on building that daily habit

[2:22] even and and we've run so many experiments on our streak even things that have users spending one two days away from the app make it significantly more difficult to get them to come back in two or three days later so a lot of our focus is getting users if they can use the app each day to use it every day I will say that again this team does manage things like notifications emails this is a lot of our power um just have taken a few days off getting them back in the app we send a series of seven notifications if you for each day that you don't use the

[2:57] app and so you take a day off we send send you notification second day off we sent you notification at seven days we turn off our practice or Miner notifications which are our most powerful notification because the additional value we get of continuing to reach out to you after seven days is significantly lower I honestly even by day seven the efficacy is has dropped significantly and so that is sort of an insight into you can't wait till day seven to get that user to come back into the app you probably can't wait till day five if they're not coming back by day three or 4 again depending upon the use

[3:30] case for us that's for a daily use app that's definitely the case man it it is just going to be tough sledding to get them to come back for a lot of apps that aren't as focused on daily use which I think is a good portion of the folks who will be listening is a golfing app where you're going to go golfing two or three times a month or even a fitness app which maybe you're doing really well to be working out three times a week for the folks who have past that seven day Mark who are more challenging I feel like maybe that's more relatable to a

[4:01] lot of the folks who are are going to be listening to this how do you think about those people who have have been out of the app for seven days who are the kind of harder problem we think about it across a few different time scales and I'll say the first one is the first few weeks after we've lost you so we have like a progress report type email that goes out to users the fact that it's an email is nice because it gives us significantly more space for us to highlight elements of your progress report versus just to push notification where we're really having to

[4:30] rely heavily on you tapping into this to go back to an app that maybe you've uninstalled so here actually channel is important and so this is nice because it is a weekly progress comparison where week to week we say hey how did you do this week versus how you did last week if you've taken a week or two off obviously that's framed somewhat negatively but what you could do is and and there's all sorts of different copy that we've tested there's ways to draw attention to like hey have you taken a break come back and jump in ory hey man seems like a slow week how much you

[5:01] going to learn this week There's different ways to make that copy and messaging to users either a little bit passive aggressive or hopeful or like a challenge and this is really important what I'd say is like you got to test all of these different copy variants one of the things to do like we test so much copy like a disgusting amount of copy particularly with a lot of our notification type work and different users are different and you can have as many hypothesis as you want about what works you just got to test it a lot of it is just engagement metrics that we're showing you how much xp did you earn how

[5:32] much time did you spend in there and some of that's because it is more complex for us to show you more like hey you learned this word or you know like the feasibility of that is is is higher as we think about Roi what we've realized is that like just showing a user how much they've done and allowing them to infer and using copy to support it like hey look at all the stuff you've done it's much easier and honestly gets you know a lot of the bang to the buck for dual lingo where you're obviously using dualingo to learn a language make better use your free time it's easier

[6:01] for us to tell this Narrative of like you use dualingo isn't that obvious obviously a good thing this time you spent but I think you know there's a lot that you can do as for me the the the product manager to just draw attention to here's the activity in the a it is necessarily a good thing don't you want to come back and get more of that you can Frame data lots of different ways to make it seem motivating and I would challenge your listeners to like really look out because these users are J if they're not compelled by your message they're not going to come back so then

[6:33] moving on to the the longer time span so I guess that it was like the 7 to 30 day and then like after 30-day is I guess the next bucket yeah yeah so a few different things I'll say one thing that's that's hot on our mind is we do a a big year review type similar to like a Spotify wrapped where at the end of the year we're showing you stats and information about your learning and it's super fun I you know recommend anybody who's been on duelingo this year like go check it out even if you were a user who used it for a few days in April we can

[7:08] still show you something and give you value and give you value pretty much immediately after reopening the app that is awesome and exciting and makes you laugh and makes you think like oh actually hey I could I could use that app again and so I think the more you can frame some of these Outreach moments even months later in a way that when the user comes back they're getting something delightful they're getting a little endorphin rush it is something fun and particularly if you can tie it to them again the user that's used the app for a few days in April isn't going to have a lot of really high value

[7:41] analysis we can give them we could still make it a super delightful experience and that might be what it takes to get them overd and using the app again and so I think the more you can tie it to Tides Outreach moments to either specific times of year specific information What can you deliver to the user in terms of value and not just like here's a product update much better performance though when we can actually attach it to something relatively personal speaking of of performance are there any campaigns that stick out in your mind that's especially effective like leading up to the summer after Co we said hey

[8:18] are you traveling this summer is there any like just knocked it out of the park kind of thing that you recall specific campaigns less so than there are specific times of year that are always really really important to us and and it's exactly as you said none of this should probably be all too surprising because we try to build our campaigns around the mental model that users have or I'm using our product so like back to school always very big people are going back to school you want to start learning again even like people who are not in school you kind of get that mindset of like going to class and so

[8:49] that's a really big time for us we make sure to Target that with messaging that resonate same thing beginning of the year New Year's resolutions we are dueling goes often learning language learning anything definitely a new user resolution that folks have and it's funny because that actually works quite well with our year at review type program where we're getting users back at the end of the year hopefully some of those users are sticking around at the beginning of the year where then they're making that commitment to hey I'm gonna learn a language I'm back on dualingo I'm just going to keep it up but again for us it's less the actual to me anyway

[9:19] less the actual creative and more how are we targeting the right times of the year with the right message how do you think about data and experimentation in relation to all of this I know I mean dualing of ly does a ton of testing so when you're thinking about these reactivating users and winning users back how do you think about it in terms of data and making it more data informed for dueling go notifications again be email or push are a critical part of our feature set and a critical driver of growth for us so we have machine learning driven systems that choose the right notification copy for the right

[9:53] user they optimize on their own I mean r PM it's really nice you just kind of like stick copy variants in there with AI we probably won even have to do that soon enough like yeah will stick and then it optimizes which is great and if once you have the kids you know or or the the size and scale to do that building a system like that is awesome never sleep on copy and with notifications it is like infinitely more important to constantly be testing because all it can rely on is that subject line and maybe some preview copy your push notification all can rely on

[10:27] is what's in the title and what's in the body you don't have the whole feature set that it's supporting it or the fact the users in the app already like it's just all copy it's all testing and so again depends on the size of your population but you can look at Open click through open rates open rates or click through rates again be it email or notification I mean you can get I would guess statting data pretty quickly but again I just see a lot of companies I don't know looking at notifications it's clear that like there there's some that like all right cool this notification worked

[10:56] let's move on I mean our practice reminder notification and we've been exper on that experimenting on that notifcation for six years for a PM that loves experimentation it's beautiful to see so really honing that message because again I said this earlier these users have churned you don't know what they remember about their experience there's a lot that you don't know about this user this is the user you need to experiment on almost more than any because it's just less like you like that you have a a good handle on what it is that they like all of our scheduling is smart although one of the funny

[11:27] things about our scheduling that we realized is that I think there's this desire from company when you start when you on board and you say hey when do you want us to remind you in the morning in the evening at this time what we realize is that you know if as soon as you set a time the likelihood that you were going to be free at that time for perpetuity which is what a lot of apps assume is just zero like you all have busy lives we all use these apps at different times of day and what was always a winner for us was scheduling the the next day's

[12:00] notification for 23 and a half hours after you practiced for the first time that day and so we basically just were always targeting when did you practice the day before the next day so there is a lot of and this doesn't seem smart although we've tested a lot of different strategies here and this is the one that continues to win any other top tips for getting people back one that's been an interesting thread for us to pull on is social in the app as it pertains to win backs duelingo has been investing in our app social network now for many years I think we're at like 55 or 60% of our

[12:38] users have a friend on the app and these aren't all like my mom for instance uses dualingo we we're friends in the app oh that's a great L back man mom in the app like hey Jackson yeah well whenever my mom lives in the street it cuts particularly deep so one of the things that we've again threads we've been pulling on is getting users to resurrect each other so if you have a friend who's been gone for months and months prompting the user to hey get them to come back and this is one of our best performing Resurrection campaigns or one back campaigns just because he it feels

[13:16] more personal it's not dualingo saying hey David come back it's Jackson saying hey come back and learn with me and then what's cool is now we have other features in the app so one feature we' recently launched punched as friend streaks it's a way for you to learn with somebody else now we have a social feature set that when you can get this person back into the app now that there's been a personal appeal made you can ease them into a more social experience with that person so it's a nice way to pair the outof app communication with the inapp experience but even for folks that it's like again

[13:52] the random person that you find on your leaderboard still a much higher clickthrough rate for there people that you've never met in real life even messages back messages from from those folks still perform better as we're wrapping up anything else you want to share yes if any of this sounds interesting for you to work on we are hiring actually we're hiring both for my team looking for a senior to lead PM who wants to work in Pittsburgh helping drive a lot of our retention efforts so again the streak excites you do that professionally and then the other area is we're starting to build a notifications team so looking for

[14:29] a senior to lead PM in New York who wants us to help build out you know an even smarter more robust and thoughtful notifications platform so this was a a very relevant discussion for us today and if you find it relevant to to what you like to think about definitely reach out awesome well thanks so much for joining me today it's so insightful a lot of really fun stuff thank you yeah of course thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. subclub

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