About VoiceClub

It’s 2024.
Traditional text-based communication has given way to a more immersive and intimate interaction: your voice. 
VoiceClub, an innovative audio-based social platform – backed by Better, Blume, and multiple other Angel VCs – has emerged as a pioneering force in the evolution of digital communication. It is an on-demand audio consultation platform for love, astrology, legal matters, careers, and more.

Features of VoiceClub

• Audio Rooms: VoiceClub provides a platform for users to create and join audio rooms, which enable individuals to have group conversations, share ideas, and engage in discussions, all in a voice-first environment. 
• Voice Profiles: This feature allows individuals to introduce themselves, share their passions, and connect with others through the sound of their voice, fostering deeper and more genuine connections.
• Voice Messages: VoiceClub’s messaging system centers on voice messages, allowing users to send audio messages to their contacts or groups.
• Real-Time Translation: To bridge language barriers and promote inclusivity, VoiceClub offers real-time translation for conversations in multiple languages.

Key Features Used:

1. Journey Designer
2. Push Notifications & in-app

Company’s Objectives

For VoiceClub, it all boils down to retention.
Very early on, the team figured out that if you want to build a platform that lasts for a very long time and actually has a meaningful impact, you need to have retention as your north star metric.

Earlier, the team used multiple other platforms but wasn’t able to interact with its users the way they wanted to. And, so, upon exploring, they found WebEngage.

Their company-level objectives were as follows:

• Increasing click-through conversions
• Increasing the amount of calls and texts on the platform
• The long-term goal was to have a very high-retention platform
• Week 4 or Week 5 retention rate to flatline at a minimum of 30%

VoiceClub’s Challenges In Driving The Objective

On the company front, since talking to strangers is a delicate topic, the team struggled to encourage users to talk to someone since people don’t prefer opening up unless they’re going through something.
The main challenge that VoiceClub faced was user engagement, retention, and monetization on the platform. The key issue was getting users to add money twice on the platform:

1. Better User Onboarding and First Impression: VoiceClub observed that users who added money for the first time had a better understanding of the platform and its value. However, the challenge was to make this initial experience compelling enough to encourage users to explore further.
2. Monetization Strategy: The platform’s model relied on users paying to access its features and benefits. To retain users, it was crucial to convince them of the platform’s value proposition and encourage repeat payments.
3. User Retention: VoiceClub noticed that users who paid a second time were more likely to remain engaged and retained as long-term users. The challenge was identifying how to motivate users to make that second payment.
4. Perceived Value: VoiceClub needed to demonstrate the actual benefits and value that the platform provided to users. Convincing users that their second payment would be worth it was a key part of the challenge.
5. User Engagement: Encouraging users to explore and engage with the platform’s features was essential. Users needed to see how the platform benefited them, which required effective communication and user education.
6. Retention Strategy: Developing and implementing a strategy to improve user retention by addressing the challenge of getting users to pay again was critical.

Why Did VoiceClub Pick the WebEngage Startup Program (WSP)?

Relationships are at the heart of everything the VoiceClub team does. Based on that sentiment exactly, WebEngage approached the VoiceClub team with proactive relationships, conversations, and more.
The audio-platform team appreciated WebEngage for honoring the association with its tenacity and its perseverance.
Moreover, with the WebEngage Startup Program, VoiceClub could leverage the WebEngage dashboard and platform for free, allowing the team to experiment with all its features.

The Retention Game

“Day-one retention is a must because nothing else matters at the end of the day.”

As Paraag Mishra, co-founder, rightly says, “You might grow to acquire a billion customers and activate a hundred thousand of them, but it’s futile if you can’t bring them back.”

To enable this sentiment to have the platform’s users come back is why VoiceClub picked the WebEngage Startup Program.

Results?

To know more about how Startup Campus managed to achieve its objectives, download the detailed Impact Story .
To begin your journey with the WebEngage Startup Program, apply now.

With over 30 million readers worldwide, Vikatan aims to deliver exceptional reading experiences at scale and build an experience-driven company.

Adopting the right marketing automation platform that meets Vikatan’s expectations

To engage its readers, Vikatan decided to adopt WebEngage’s marketing automation platform to:

• Deliver authentic reader experiences
• Boost mobile and web app engagement
• Minimize app uninstalls

Goals

• Deliver an authentic reader experience by incorporating readers’ feedback
• Minimize app uninstalls to reduce churn

Challenges

• Real-time reader engagement at scale
• Lack of app uninstall data and trends

Solutions

• Hyper-personalized, genre-based engagement using Relays

The Customer Success Manager suggested the teams at Vikatan leverage Relays in order to deliver real-time communication to its readers.

‘Relays‘ is a series of workflow-based communication that helps them engage their readers based on the occurrence of a Business Event.

The team created genre-based segments to send targeted communication to its readers through Relays.

• Automated, real-time reader engagement at scale

The Product and Marketing teams at Vikatan wanted to understand the root cause of app uninstalls. And to do that, they looked at their readers’ app install/uninstall data on the WebEngage dashboard. On analyzing the uninstall trends, they decided to reach out to readers who uninstalled the app. After running a survey with these users, it was found that a majority of their readers uninstalled the app after the app crashed on their devices.

To immediately encourage these readers to upgrade their apps and continue consuming the content, Vikatan has created a multi-channel engagement journey using the WebEngage Journey Designer. 

Results

Vikatan has been able to engage and retain its readers using a data-driven, genre-based reader engagement approach. They continue to deliver authentic reading experiences to millions of Tamilians worldwide and improve its North Star Metric – Return on Experience (ROX).

ALTBalaji is a Subscription-based Video-On-Demand (SVOD) platform and is a fully owned subsidiary of Balaji Telefilms Ltd. Available across multiple interfaces ranging from desktops, laptops, tablets, smart-phones, game stations to internet-ready television, ALTBalaji marries state-of-the-art technology with gripping storytelling. They are one of India’s leading Over-The-Top (OTT) media players with over 100 hours of original content belonging to a wide variety of content categories.

The Objective

Conversion Goal – Increase Content (Video) Views

As India progresses steadily to the maturity stage of the smartphone era, the confines of closed-room television viewing have started to disintegrate. Fuelled by access to better tech and the proliferation of 4G mobile data, consumer behavior is evolving. Consumers want video-on-demand on their smartphones, personalized to their tastes and preferences, devoid of advertisements with full control over the multimedia experience.

This behavior is not unique to urban millennials or the generation Z brigade. It has penetrated deeper into older age groups with the emergence of multiple OTT players and new, varied content. According to Comscore, there are currently 70 million OTT viewers in the US alone, which will double in the next 2 years. The opportunity is ripe for OTT Media to shine.

ALTBalaji realized the high-intensity impact of content consumption early on. They wanted to drive User Retention and ensure that users who landed on their platform or downloaded their mobile app view the platform’s video content. For this, they enlisted the help of WebEngage’s Marketing Automation platform to create intelligent User Journey campaigns.

The WebEngage Effect

Here, we will be analyzing a journey that ALTBalaji ran to increase the video views for users of their Android mobile app.  

This journey has 2 event-based Entry Points

• On App Install
• On App Upgrade

Once a user installs/ upgrades the app, this journey gets triggered for them. The ALTBalaji team designed this journey for the sole purpose of maximizing platform video views. The journey employs a two-pronged communication approach to user engagement: Push Notification & Email.

The aim is to pitch high-rated content to users who haven’t played any video so far after installing/ upgrading the app. The base logic is to expose users to their content and create a need in the user to consume more content from thereon. Users would want to stay on the platform for longer and keep coming back in the long run to consume more video content.

Journey Breakdown

Event Trigger 1 – App Upgrade

Once a user upgrades their app, the system waits for them to play a video for up to 3 hours. If the user doesn’t perform the video play event in the stipulated time, then the system checks the user’s availability on the push channel. If the user is available via push notification, then the journey triggers a push notification to the user’s mobile device:

It promotes the platform’s flagship show to the user with a strong visual notification, highlighting the show’s exceptionally high IMDb rating.

Event Trigger 2 – App Install

Post app installs, the system waits for 5 minutes. On timeout, it carries out a check to confirm the user’s availability on the push channel. If the availability is negative, the same check is carried out again after a 30-minute gestation period. The system checks if the user is available on the push channel and serves a push notification to the user:

These were individually unique push notifications that went out in both entry points. Now, the journey unifies both entry points with an email campaign.

In case users originating from both the entry points are not available on push, the system waits for 1 day. On timeout, the system then performs a check for email availability. If the user is available over an email, then an email is sent to the users that looks like this:

In case the user is not available over an email, then the journey ends for them right there.

Now that the journey has been explained, let us take a look at some of the numbers for the month of January & February. This particular journey was started in February, which is why we will be directly comparing the stats from that month with the numbers from January.

The Result

According to certain research reports, apps are bound to lose over 77% of their DAU (Daily Average Users) in the first 3 days. ALTBalaji managed to counter this known issue with their elaborate User Retention strategy powered by WebEngage’s Journey feature. One month into running the Journey, the results started flowing in and retention numbers started climbing up.

The contextual, timely nudges deployed by the platform enhanced engagement on the back of intelligent triggers. This increased the possibility of user engagement. It also added more value to the overall experience by creating a relevant, guided flow for users. We studied the cohort performance to understand the effect on day-wise retention numbers. 

Defining the Cohort – Users who installed the app and played video content

• First event = App Install
• Return Event = Played Video Content

We analyzed the Cohort’s Retention percentage for the months of January (before starting the Journey) & Feb (after starting the journey). This basically represents the percentage of users who installed the app and came back on the respective days to carry out the return event, i.e. played a video on the platform.

• 30% improvement in D1 Retention MOM
• 51% improvement in D3 Retention MOM
• 77% improvement in D6 Retention MOM
• 75% improvement in D7 Retention MOM

The Implementation of Journeys was instrumental in increasing retention rates for the brand. 

• 1 month after starting the Journey to increase video play event after app installs, ALTBalaji witnessed a significant increase in the Day 1 to Day 7 retention percentages.
• By leveraging contextual nudges via Push Notification and Emails, ALTBalaji managed to increase user engagement intelligently and drive more users into playing video content on the platform.
• A control group experiment confirmed this, with the focus group managing to garner higher conversions powered by the WebEngage journey, as compared to the control group that wasn’t exposed to the Journey. The journey that they ran helped them get a 9.51% uplift in terms of their conversion event, i.e. Video plays.

“Keep them coming back for more”. ALTBalaji set out to emulate just that. And they’ve managed to crack the retention problem rather effectively with the intelligent use of Marketing Automation and contextual engagement.

Retain Your Users Like ALTBalaji – Let’s Start Together