"Roti, Kapda, Makaan Aur Internet" - Basic Necessity Of 21th Century?

But you know what? You need Money to get the basic necessity!

Are you aligned with this? Let's listen to this playlist together while setting up the intro for this project

Paisa Hai Toh Badi Badi Baatein

Every body needs money, I don't have to explain that. Money is the fuel that ignites dreams. And that is why we all invest money. The strategies differ though, depending on the goals. But there is one thing that has been consistent with lot of investors is Trading In Stock Market. This is has proven game changing investing mechanisms for lot of people. Yes, it has it's own risk. There is only one way by which we can manage this risk :

MARKET INSIGHTS

Now there are a lot of apps that make trading easier, but to get the insight of where to invest, when to invest and how much to invest remains a gap in these apps. That is why people who know a lot about certain industries and companies tend to get higher ROI. But then what about them who want to stay updated?

There is huge chunk of people who want the insights delivered to them for their decision making on investment. How do they find this on their fingertips?

Enter

About Mint

Mint is an Indian Finanical Newspaper. It's an award winning publication, held in high esteem by business leaders, founders and policy makers designed to enable them with decision making around one of the fastest growing economies of the world.

Mint was founded in 2007. It is owned by HT Media group that also owns Hindustan Times. It is second largest and most read publishing agency after Times Of India. It recieves over 30 Million Unique Readers every month. Mint has relied on their unbiased and statistical approach of writing articles that will let their readers take an informed decision.

Mint is used by it's users in 3 forms :

1. Newspaper
2. Website
3. Mobile App

For this project, we will be focussing on Mobile App

Why Mobile App?

It is easily accessible - Getting insights everyday in real time
It has Value for money - Insights that drive ROI, is unmatched
Live dashboards - about the market treds and data. You can customize this to keep an eye on your favorite stocks
Notifications - You don't have to open app, the app tells you that there is a news for you. This way you stay ahead of the curve

Let's now dive a little deep to understand the product

Core value proposition for the users of Mint is very straight forward. The users are readers. Mint provides them content to read! As simple as that! To further break it down ;

• To provide users relavant and insightful information of market, businesses and trends around finance
• This information and insights help the readers take decision on their financial investments, especially about stock market trading
• The investors can also look at current trend in stock markets and get constant updates of the same
• The bottom line is to give the readers something very analytical (non biased) and interesting to read

Furthermore, the users can benefit from two buckets of content on Mint

What are the various touchpoints in the user journeys that allows them to read more and more on Mint? Have a look at this jouney map

Mint divides it's users into three parts in it's journey. At each step, the user gets to read more in depth and relevant articles.

1. First Time Users
   These users come across articles on Mint, mostly on website, through their own interests. They usually discover free articles and either led to premium articles in the same domain or led to download the app, which provides better readability and searchability.
   
2. Registered User
   These are users that have downloaded the app and have registered. The onboarding takes them through their preferences of news. So if somebody has preferred Sports, they app customises to show sports in it's quick read sections. We will deep dive on this later in the project. But then they get access to all free articles, get notifications on general and financial news and are led to read articles and news on the app.
   
3. Paid User
   These users are generally finance buffs, who want to get access to content that is analytical, fresh and insightful. This information lets them take decision on their investment strategies and help their awareness on economical world around them. They can read about trends before hand, and also can track the trends in real time. This information reaches them through notifications, in app summaries and an exclusive premium article section in the app.

Natural Frequency of users of Mint are :

Casual Users : 1-3 Times A Day
These users read only trending news, like US Election. They also take a Daily Roundup of the things that took place in the world in the day.

Core Users : 5-8 Times A Day
These users are keen on understanding where the stock market is going in the day. They will keep a tab on what's trending so that they can take trading decisions.

Power Users : >10 Times A Day
These users are all that core users have, but they don't stop when the market stops. They want to be ahead of the curve, so they research on companies in various industries. Hence the end up using the app more than 10 times a day.

Who Are Our Active Users?

As the core value proposition is reading and getting exclusive insights, active users are those who will experience this propositions again and again.

Having said that, it is also good to be clear about who are not our active users

• Users that only read headlines
• Users spending less than half time of the benchmarked average time to read an article
• Users subscribing for premium but not reading any articles
• Users renewing the subscription but not reading any articles

Let's quickly look at at the WHY behind this active user metric?

For Free Users, the product earns through ad impressions. Now ad impressions cannot be shown to the user if they are only checking out the headlines. The user needs to spend time to read inside the article. This will allow the company to put impressions of ad between the paragraphs of the articles.

For Paid Users, the product's job is to provide insights. If the user does not read the article completely, the insight value does not get delievered. Hence this would bias the customer to not renew the subscription.

Hence, from both the users' point of view, the active user metric of reading at least 1 article for the benchmarked time to read that article, only makes sense.

We know what to track for an user to let them be an active user. Why don't we look at WHO are our Ideal Users?

ICP

The Anjaan, The Khabri, The Jaankaar and The Dhanwaan are the people who use Mint for various purposes. Now the goal of this project is to figure how can the product engage them. But before that, we have two things to cover

a. Who Am I Engaging?
ICPs? Yes, but we also need to how do I segment their behaviour to design their engagement.
b. What Is The Right Way To Engage?
We will look at some frameworks that will optimise the engagement strategies.

User Segmentation

Since we have looked at the core charateristics of the ICP, let's see if we can segment them according to Usage of the product.

Usage Based Segmentation

This product is something that has it's active user metric set to daily, as we saw earlier. Hence this product won't be segmented according to the frequency of the usage.
Recency will always be either today or no recency.
And the monetary is set to subcription amount which is equal to all the users.

Hence all the other methods of segmentation will not be implemented.

Moving on the question of right way to engage!

Engagement Framework

Engagement Campaigns

Let's move on to designing a few engagement campaigns based on the segmentations and framework mentioned above.

Campaign 1

Campaign 2

Campaign 3

Note : My Editor started to go crazy, as this section is becoming bigger, it is hanging up. I lost my last 30 mins in this and hence not overloading with images from Whimsical about the campaigns.

After engaging users, we now need to look at how to retain users.

Retaining Users

To look into retention, we first need to look at how is the current graph of retention. Graph that basically tells that if there were 100 users at Day 0, how many users retain by Day 7, Day 30, Month 6, Month 12.

Since the data of Mint is not available publicly and neither it's competitors. I had only 2 factors to consider to draw this graph.

1. Data from User Interviews
   I spoke to 15 users who have used the app in last one year. There is a trend that shows up
2. Industry standard of Digital Content Publishers aka Media
   Various sources and studies have mentioned that the retention rate is around 80% in media industry. But when it comes to Digital News Subscription, the retention falls down to 60%.

Now looking at both the factors, this is an average data that we derive

Now let's plot the graph according to the ICPs retention rate

We see an overall retention of 45% according to the amalgamation of the factors mentioned above.

Which ICP drives the best retention?

As we can see in the map, it's the ICP2, aka, The Khabri.

The Khabiris drive the retention as they are hungry for knowledge. They are ready to put in time to read about things that they don't know.

Summarizing factors for retention of :

In case of ICP 1 and 4, aka, The Anjaan and The Dhanwaan, let's see their factors for retention

Now the safest ICP is The Jaankaar, as he the closest to the average too.

Churn & Resurrection

Churn is the users that have left the product and are not users anymore. Again through customer interviews, we found out few top reasons why do users churn away from the product.

We will be focussing on volutary reasons. As they are something that can be solved. But to solve that, we need to know few behaviour changes that a user inculcates after going through bad experience. Let's identify those.

Negative Actions To Look For

1. Power Users Becoming Casual Users
   They use the app less and less very quickly. For eg, someone using the app 20 times a day, suddenly goes down to 2-3 times a day. Not a good sign
   
2. Subscription Not Renewed
   When somebody pays, it validates the value proposition. When somebody has paid once but will not pay again, it means there has been some kind of incident that makes the user not pay again. This user is on the verge of churn.
   
3. Core or Power Users Not Reading Complete Articles
   This either means the user wants to close the app as soon as possible or has lost interest in our content. This repeated behaviour shouts "unsatisfied customer"
   
4. Negative Reviews
   Who will write negative reviews on app stores? Only the customer who is really pissed off. This is a case where the user has already churned but wants you to know that he is gone!
   
5. No clicks on notifications since a week
   This is a classic behaviour where the risk of loosing this user is higher. The user is not interested in any notifications to open the app.
   

Now how do you solve for this?

Resurrection Campaigns