I’ll be presenting a talk at the Facebook Developer Garage SF Wednesday evening. You can learn more about the event here. It’s hosted by Kontagent and sponsored by Intel. Most of the content for my presentation is drawn from my original article on engagement loops,
with new diagrams courtesy of my friends at Kontagent and a few new
examples. Without further ado, here are the slides (feedback welcome!):
When I work with startups on improving engagement, I really try to emphasize the importance of their most powerful lever: positioning.
In most applications, most of the time, customers return to use the
application not in response to a notification or event, but under their
own volition. These decisions are critical to the success of any
high-engagement product, and they take place entirely inside the minds
of customers. Companies have an opportunity to influence these
decisions, but only if they act well in advance of the result they are
trying to achieve. Unfortunately, it’s easy to lose track of
positioning effects when optimizing for a single metric.
This is
a common problem that results from viral-loop optimization. By copying
the exact same registration flow as every other successful viral app,
many viral apps completely lose their positioning. Customers can’t even
remember what apps they’ve signed up for, and become entirely dependent
on notifications to bring them back. This starts a downward spiral: as
more and more apps become indistinguishable, they send out more and
more notifications, which leads to increasing fatigue on the part of
customers. As notification channels get stuffed full of these messages,
customers tune them out (or platforms have to put in place dramatic
limits on access).
The solution for app developers caught in
this vicious cycle is to develop competency in positioning. Luckily, a
great example of the power of positioning fell into my lap recently.
Some friends of mine at EA tried to break my World of Warcraft addiction by walking a copy of Warhammer Online
over to my house. I dutifully installed it and played with them for a
little while. But pretty soon the lure of WoW dragged me back, even
though some of my friends stayed behind on Warhammer.
A few days
ago, I received a great email from Warhammer Online. It’s an example of
an excellent synthetic notification. Take a look at this screenshot:
This synthetic notification gets everything right: it has a compelling
offer and a clear call to action, it addresses me by my character’s
name, it’s from a well-known NPC inside the game, it even includes the
names of several friends who are still playing, and calls me to act on
behalf of my guild (yes, it’s called GUID). It then proceeds to list a
whole host of cool new features the Warhammer team has added since I
last logged in. Impressive.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work, at
least not for me. That’s because I have much too strong an attachment
to World of Warcraft. It’s the ultimate high-engagement product. And
yet, WoW never sends me emails. It doesn’t notify me of anything, not
even when my friends are logged in and about to start a raid. If I want
to know what’s going on, I have to log in and find out. It’s up to me
to decide when I want to do that. And how do I make that decision?
Somewhere buried in my brain is a list, called something like “Things
to do when you want to zone out and still have a feeling of
accomplishment and power.” At the top of that list is WoW. I’d only
ever consider going to #2 on the list if #1 failed me completely.
That’s how most of us are – we only ever consider the #1 provider of
any given service if it is available. Getting customers to see your
service as #1 for a given category is what positioning is all about.
(And manufacturing a new cateogry that you can be number one in is what
resegmentation is all about)
In
WoW’s case, its positioning is established by the gameplay itself. WoW
is a fun and addictive experience, and once it’s sucked you in it’s
pretty hard to stop. But that is not the only source of positioning:
brand advertisers have been using packaging and TV ads to do this for
years. And most web applications do their positioning right in the
first few screens of the app. This is why the registration is so
important. At IMVU,
we would routinely find retention effects that would stem from
registration changes and have impact days or weeks later. One example I
like to use is this: we added a YouTube video about IMVU
to some landing pages. It was not prominently featured, but it did
auto-play. We split-test that change, and watched the effects on
engagement. Customers who saw the video were materially more likely to
be active customers of IMVU ten days later.
The impact on
behavior was pronounced, even though the immediate effect of the change
was subtle. If I had to guess, I would say that if we had interviewed
customers in the experimental group, they would not have been able to
consciously recall the video they had seen during registration. But,
unconsciously, it had affected the positioning of IMVU in their minds.
Mission accomplished.
Anyway, for those of you planning on attending the Garage event,
please come say hi. And for everyone else, please consider leaving your
feedback – positive or negative – about the form or content of the
presentation as a comment to this post. Your help is always greatly
appreciated.
