Strava shows us how to get personalised email marketing right
Retention is a huge challenge for most organisations. Getting customers is expensive, and if they churn, all that money you spent acquiring them just flies out the window behind them.
This is especially true for products that you don’t have to have, like Strava. Strava is an exercise data collection app primarily for running and cycling. Strava users have three different ways they could churn:
They could keep exercising, but use something else to track their stats.
They could keep exercising, but stop tracking their stats.
They could stop exercising altogether.
This makes a real challenge for Strava! Compare that to, say, an electricity provider. I may change providers (and do, often), but I’m not going to stop using electricity.
So Strava needs to keep its users engaged with its app, with the action of tracking stats, and with exercise in general. A tall order if ever there was one.
Personalised email
At the same time, it’s getting easier than ever to send personalised emails. This is a lot more complex than just putting someone’s name in a subject line. A well-designed personalised email can cut through all the other stuff in someone’s inbox, and deliver them timely, relevant content.
Strava do a great job at using personalised email to increase engagement and retention. One example is the summary email they send every month. The linked example is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a summary of my activity for the month of May. It has things like my total distance, total elevation, and comparison with the previous month.
There were two calls to action - to share my stats, or to login to Strava to get more detail.
This is great for a bunch of reasons:
It's directly relevant to me.
Like everyone, I have a narcissistic streak, so of course I'm going to open and read an email about my favourite topic - me! It’s not just a general update email, or something like that. It’s content that is 100% focused on my activities and accomplishments.
It gives me a really good reason to log back in to Strava.
A company like Strava really needs people consistently logging in to the app. Otherwise, those people are going to fall out of the habit of doing so. And if they stop logging into the app, they will be much more likely to cancel their subscription - either by falling out of the habit of tracking their exercise stats, or falling out of the habit of exercising entirely.
So in order to head this off at the pass, Strava is showing me (rather than telling me) the app's value, by giving me interesting data directly from that app.
It enlists me as an advertiser
If I have a particularly impressive month, of course I'm going to want to share that fact, so Strava gives me the ability to quickly do so.
But at the same time, once I do click "share," the information I share is subtly, but importantly, different from the information in the email. The email itself compares my stats to the previous month, and let me tell you, folks - it doesn't look good.
I exercised way less in May than I did in April. But if I click "share," the comparative information is stripped out. This is great audience awareness on Strava's part. If I'm going to share this information, I only want to share the good news of how much I exercised, not the bad news of the fact that I'm getting lazier.
You can see this by comparing the total distance from the email (the first number) with the total distance from the "share" button's output (the second number):
The real story is on the left, the sanitised one on the right.
See the difference? The figure on the right-hand side conveniently leaves out the change from the month before. And this makes perfect sense. I’m much more likely to share the fact that I cycled 54km, than the fact that my May distance was less than half what it was in April.
So good work, Strava. These kinds of emails take a lot of work and consideration, but if you do it right, they can really pay off by engaging your customers, making them stickier, and turning them into advocates for your product.