Hacking a User Acquisition Strategy

Download challenges

One of Ribon’s acquisition strategies was to enable partner companies to reward their clients with tickets that were used in Ribon’s web or native apps to make free donations. The majority of Ribon’s users were in the web because partners used it the most to send the rewards. The strategy was to convert the users to the native app because it was easier to retain them. That’s where we found our problem: for some reason the users were not interested in downloading it.

Quick investigation

We did a survey with the web users and learned that many of them didn’t know we had a native app and those who found about it said that our download CTAs weren’t quite convincing.

Hacking strategy

At that time I was working with the growth team and our mission was to increase the downloads. The interviews helped us find a hypothesis to the problem and we decided to run seven quick and effective download CTA tests in the web app. Below are summaries of three of the best ones.

The floating download button

An important CTA we had was a floating button that users needed to click twice to get to the app stores. We changed it to a small single-click banner fixed at the bottom of the screen with a different CTA: “Earn more tickets! Get the app.”

Thanks to this test the absolute number of clicks the in button increased over 110%, reaching a conversion rate of 12% by the end of the following week. The number of clicks spiked at the beginning of the test (over 300% increase), but stabilized on a lower number because other CTAs we tested convert the users even sooner.

The home page banner

When a user finished their first daily donation, a banner was shown at the web app’s home page and we knew it had a lot of impressions. Since the banner’s content could be changed without coding, we decided to make it a download CTA and test which kind of copywriting speech could get us more clicks.

The first alternative tested said that users could get more tickets by downloading the app and it was surprisingly effective: the number of clicks in the CTA increased over 150%! In the following week we changed it to say that the app’s users usually donated more and felt better, but the number of clicks decreased back to the old numbers. We returned to the first one and the banner’s metrics rose again, reaching an average conversion rate of 18.5%.

The CTA in the first screen

In our research we found many products that had web apps with download CTAs for their mobile apps right at the beginning of their web experience. Following that lead we added a download button to the first screen users saw.

We were really careful with this test because we thought that maybe it could go wrong and the new users wouldn’t even want to start to use the platform. But after a couple days, we found this test had the highest absolute number of clicks compared to all other tests! Even though most users still preferred the web app, the conversion rate for this button reached almost 25%.

What about real acquisition?

By the end of February the acquisitions had doubled and reached almost 300 downloads per day.

We were really happy with the results and learned a lot about the user’s behaviour, about effective copywriting speeches and about the general product usability. As further improvements we understood we could try to increase the stores’ conversion rate, refine successful tests and even propose validated feature hypotheses to the product team.