Shuttl is one of India’s largest bus-aggregating platforms. It is founded by two IIT grads- Deepanshu Malviya and Amit Singh, who previously worked for Jabong. The company has around 450 AC buses plying on the roads of Delhi which is home to the largest number of vehicles among Indian cities. The company has so far raised $23 million in venture funding.

The Objective

Running a referral program is a very common way for consumers and SaaS products to increase their signups. In fact, more than often apps push large referral incentives to power their acquisition.

Like everyone else, Shuttl too extensively relies on referrals to power their acquisition.

However, there are some key challenges to address before launching a referral program:

Identify the right user

Prompting each one of your users to refer is obviously not a good idea. So you have to identify the attribute or action that a user, who is likely to refer, may have or done respectively. You could then nudge them to refer as soon as the user does the corresponding action.

Follow-up

We cannot expect the user to install right after we send the first message. We would have to do contextual follow-ups. Also, those follow-ups should terminate as soon as the user installs or performs the desired action.

Measure

Measuring is obviously imperative. But what are the metrics to consider? For the time being let’s agree with what Referral Saasquatch considers as the right metrics to consider while evaluating a referral program: Participation, Referral, Impression, Response, and Conversion.

Moreover, your referral program should have a solid, least time-consuming mechanism to evaluate its success.

Shuttl addressed all the above challenges to create a seamless referral program that significantly contributed to their growth.

The WebEngage Effect

Shuttl created two journeys. Both of the journeys are separate but interlinked and that’s the beauty of them.

Journey 1:

Let’s evaluate the first journey:

We had discussed previously in the challenge that the foremost thing to do before launching a referral program is to identify the user who is likely to refer.

Shuttl addressed that by launching an offer that allowed a user to gift rides to his friend while purchasing one for themselves. This automatically filtered the users who are genuinely inclined to refer.

Now, when the user feeds the number of the friend is when the Journey 1 is triggered.

The highlight of the journey is this- three API blocks in succession.

• The first block passes a JSON object that creates a new user in the WebEngage system. (replace it with your CRM)
• The second block passes a JSON object that creates a new event against the ‘new user’. This is the event that triggers Journey 2.
• The third API block adds the Shuttl credits to the user’s Shuttl Wallet in their backend.

Look at it like this, the user merely refers a friend and you subsequently engage with three externals systems via API call- CRM, Journey, and backend.

To a marketer, the ability to trigger an API call when the user performs an action is shot in the arm. It has myriad powerful use-cases.

Journey 2:

Let’s talk about Journey 2 now. We understood that Journey 2 is triggered by the first journey itself. The aim of Journey 2 is to nudge the very ‘friend’ who was referred in the previous journey. He has been offered free subscription by his friend but we also want him to install the app and use it. Hence, this journey:

If you notice, the journey is basically a drip but after every message, it checks for the following:

– ‘Friend’ installs the app
– ‘Friend’ should be a new user

Only when the above two conditions are true, the friend is exited from the journey and no such related message is sent to him.

Below is the simple chart illustrating how the entire process works.

The Result

Shuttl has productized referral which naturally generates significant subscriptions for them.

The number of referrals generated by the journeys was 11.2% of the total referrals generated by Shuttl. (We took the span of 2 months (3rd Nov-3rd Jan) to calculate the number.)

In terms of the overall acquisition, this was 3.6% of the total subscription by new users in that period. Total subscription means the subscription that they were garnering organically plus all the channels combined.

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The post How Shuttl, an urban mobility startup in India, uses Journeys to acquire more users through referrals appeared first on Webengage.

Mahindra Reva is a pioneer of electric vehicle (EV) technologies and one of the world’s most experienced EV manufacturers. Founded in 1994 as the Reva Electric Car Company, the company was a joint venture between the Maini Group of Bangalore and AEV LLC of USA. Since then, the company has remained focused on creating affordable electric cars through advanced technology.

The Objective

The process of buying cars has evolved over the years. A study conducted by Cisco found that 83% of consumers research online for information before the final purchase of a car.

When it comes to buying an electric car, online research becomes all the more important.

To quench their thirst of curiosity to know more about the electric car ‘e2o,’ its incentives, government schemes and savings; visitors on Mahindrareva.com delved deep into the site.

But their interest to know more about the car did not necessarily convert into booking a test drive, an action that is the next crucial step in the buying process.

A study found that test drives increased car sales closing ratio by 15%, accentuating its importance in the buying process.

And we all know, there is little use of imparting knowledge to users without it converting into action. Thus, the marketing team at Mahindra Reva had one major objective:

To increase car test drive inquiries coming through the website. Broadly, their aim was to boost vehicle sales close ratio by increasing test drives.

The WebEngage Effect

Increasing requests for test drives on any automobile website is a tricky affair; you have to be subtle in guiding visitors towards booking a test drive.

The website data pointed towards visitors bouncing off after spending considerable time on the site. And, that too without requesting a test drive.

We picked this pointer to design a campaign that targeted customers on their intent to leave the site. We designed a notification with a message enticing users to try driving the car.

Upon clicking the call-to-action button the user is redirected to test drive page as shown in below image.

The leave-intent tech tracks the movement of the mouse pointer. As soon as the pointer moves outside the browsing area, it triggers notification into action.

Through URL based targeting we ensured that the notification is only displayed on specific pages.

Alongside this, we targeted the campaign to a relevant segment of users. Segmenting on the basis of time spent on site, traffic source, type of visitor, to name a few.

The Result

In the 5-month time frame, the notification attracted 250K unique views and 15.5K clicks. That’s a handsome 6% Click Through Rate.

The users redirected to the test drive page through the notification significantly increased the number of test drive bookings.

As a result, after using WebEngage for over 5 months, the average monthly test drives booked through the site went up by 15%. The increase happened on the baseline of the average monthly test drives booked for the past year.

The Mahindra Reva case study substantiates a logical correlation that boosting leads captured for test drives invariably impacts test drives to sales conversion rate. The 15% increase in test drives eventually helped increase closing ratio for Mahindra Reva.

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The post How Mahindra Reva, India’s largest electric car company, uses Web Pop-ups to increase requests for test drive by 15% appeared first on Webengage.

Established in 1998, Carsoup is a one-stop online destination for buying new and used vehicles. Carsoup.com has partnered with more than 10,000 dealers across the US. It functions as a place for information on vehicle finance, expert opinions, also act as a search engine for buying cars, recreational vehicles, motorcycles, etc.

The Objective

As a part of its monetization strategy, Carsoup.com offers advertising packages on its site to sellers and car dealers. They used conventional ad units, pop-ups, and pop-unders for displaying such ads to users. Needless to say, ad-blockers played spoilsport. Moreover, users are generally blinded to such ad units. All of this, in effect, led to abysmal impressions and clickthroughs.

The WebEngage Effect

There are good ways to advertise and then there are better ways to advertise on your site. It is important that you choose wisely between the types of ads you want to display and how much incremental revenue you want to earn with advertising.

Pop-ups and pop-unders are intrusive to user interaction, they cause annoyance and considerably obstruct user experience. A good on-site ad should be able to cut through the clutter and deliver the ad message in a subtle manner. Moreover, it should reach a specific target segment & remain relevant to the audience.

Back to the problem at hand, to overcome the challenge posed by pop-up blocking technology (ad-blockers) the logical way is to circumvent it entirely. A pop-over ad (an overlay that does not open a new tab or window) does exactly that by remaining in the same window or web page as the user.

Using WebEngage’s Notification product Carsoup.com displayed advertisements to a targeted set of users. The ads pop into action based on a predefined set of rules. These rules are set using – visitor location, cookie information, device type (mobile or desktop), the source of visit (such as Google Ads, Ad Campaign, or Organic traffic), time of visit, type of user (repeat or new visitor), etc.

Take for instance this ad displayed on Carsoup.com to visitors coming from a particular geographical area (Atlanta, US).

Carsoup.com used Nielsen’s DMA (Designated Market Area) regions of the US to define the Market ID of visitors on the site. The DMA’s were converted to DoubleClick representation. Read more about it here.

With Cookie-based targeting, the ads were geo-targeted to visitors coming from Atlanta (The DoubleClick value 26 is 524 for Nielsen’s DMA, which specifies Atlanta)

The Result

Carsoup.com across all its ad campaigns in the past year registered an average CTR of 4%. Thanks to targeting capabilities of WebEngage’s notifications (popovers or overlays).

Comparing this 4% CTR with the data for online ads in the US, for the automobile sector in the past five years. The average CTR is 0.12%. That’s an enormous 33 times better.

The new advertising inventory using Popovers (overlays) performed better than pop-ups and pop-unders. It directly translated into increased advertising revenue for Carsoup.com and it goes without saying that effective advertising meant better ROI for advertisers. A win-win for all stakeholders.

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