How To Identify and Activate Your Mobile MVP Customers. Every marketing team dreams of identifying and activating this loyal group, although few take the time to really get it right. Step 1: Identify Your MVPs Start with segments As with any good marketing strategy, identifying your mobile MVPs starts and ends with segmenting. Segmenting also helps you better understand what customer data you should look at to gauge product success and growth. Pull out the MVPs Now that you’ve segmented your mobile customers, it’s time to pull out your MVPs. Gauging sentiment, the most important step As we explored above, there are many behaviors and criteria that make up a mobile MVP segment, but the most important metric of all is sentiment. Sentiment is the emotion behind customer engagement. Step 2: Activate Your MVPs Now that you’ve identified your mobile MVPs, it’s time to activate them. Your customers are human, and there’s no better way to make connections than by celebrating person to person. If you follow the steps and tips outlined above, you’ll be on your way to engaging with—and most importantly, learning from—your most valuable mobile customer segment in no time!
If you could talk to your most loyal mobile customers, what would you ask? How would you engage them? What could you learn from them? Every marketing team dreams of identifying and activating this loyal group, although few take the time to really get it right.
These customers, or your “mobile MVPs” as we like to call them, hold a ton of power and play a major part in the success of your business. Take the 80/20 rule, for example. This old sales adage still holds true when it comes to identifying MVP customers: 80% of your revenue tends to come from 20% of your total customer base. There’s even a popular theory that companies only need to identify 1,000 MVP customers to make their business successful. MVPs are the key to growth.
Identifying and engaging with your MVPs can feel like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be! This post dives deep into how to first identify customers who will fit your mobile MVP profile, and then shares tips to help you activate them in order to gather their feedback and to turn more customers into raving fans.
Let’s get started!
Step 1: Identify Your MVPs
Start with segments
As with any good marketing strategy, identifying your mobile MVPs starts and ends with segmenting. The deeper you’re able to segment your customers by their in-app actions, the closer you can get to understanding which actions trigger MVP status, along with building customer profiles to identify future MVPs. Breaking your customers into segments will help you understand MVP behavior, sentiment, and more in order to nurture similar actions across larger groups of your customers.
Segmenting also helps you better understand what customer data you should look at to gauge product success and growth. Whether you look at customers by individual or by org, there is plenty of data to consider.
- What’s the profile of customers using our mobile app, and how do we currently segment them?
- What are the most valuable in-app actions our customers take?
- How do we define “customer loyalty” and what makes a customer loyal?
- How many new customers do we adding in a given period? How many customers do we lose in the same time period?
To help you answer the above questions, you’ll likely need to pull some data to use as a starting point. Consider capturing the following mobile customer data points to start:
- Mobile customers broken down by tier or loyalty level (if they already exist)
- Counts of iOS and Android customers
- High-level in-app actions or engagement points
- Demographic data (e.g. industry, location, age, gender, etc.)
Pull out the MVPs
Now that you’ve segmented your mobile customers, it’s time to pull out your MVPs. As noted above, MVPs take actions that set them aside from your general customer base. Although the profile of an MVP looks different at every company, there are three major areas MVPs typically stand out in across all industries:
- Registration: Completing an action like signing up for a newsletter, downloading content, signing up for free trials, joining loyalty program, etc.
- Engagement frequency: The higher the frequency, the likelier the customer is to be an MVP
- Advocacy: When a customer takes a brand advocate action like sharing positively on social, referring friends, etc.
If a customer registers for a high volume of engagement points, interacts with your company at a high frequency, and advocates for your brand throughout the social circles, it’s likely that they may fall into your mobile MVP segment.
Don’t forget cohort marketing!
If you’ve already taken the above steps in segmenting your mobile customers but are still struggling to identify the mobile MVPs, cohort marketing is a great tool to leverage. Cohort marketing relies heavily on a marketing team assessing its goals, so it’s important you spend a bit of time reviewing the most important and high-value actions offered in your mobile experience. Once your goals have been revisited, you can leverage them in a cohort marketing exercise to find the customers that fit, better identifying your mobile MVPs.
Many marketers have dabbled in some form of cohort marketing, but here’s an example exercise you can use specifically for mobile:
As you can see above, Cohort 3 has come closest to reaching the goals the marketing team has set, so they are most likely to be the cohort of MVP customers.. They are registered, convert frequently, come back average, and advocate average. Companies can get much more granular with these weightings, but even when working off of a yes/no for registered and then low/medium/high for the other categories, this framework helps you identify the cohort of your customers that gets you closest to the goals you’ve set.
Gauging sentiment, the most important step
As we explored above, there are many behaviors and criteria that make up a mobile MVP segment, but the most important metric of all is sentiment. Let’s spend a bit of time talking about what makes sentiment stand out, and what you can do to measure it for mobile.
Sentiment is the emotion behind…
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