Fabulous app improved user retention 2X by customizing its onboarding process via Firebase
Introduction
Fabulous is an app that helps users replace poor habits with healthy ones to improve their wellbeing. After customizing the onboarding process, the Fabulous team saw that users with the new onboarding flow returned to the app twice as often as those who installed the app but didn't have a customized experience.
Challenge
Smooth onboarding is critical for user retention and success. Custom messages work better than generic texts, and peer-to-peer communication helps to build engagement with tasks. Since the peer-to-peer approach is good both for app growth and for the app users themselves, the team's challenge was to combine this insight with the way the app works.
The Fabulous team also wanted to encourage app users to find and rely on "accountability partners." Co-founder and CEO Sami Ben Hassine compares it to working out at a gym. "When you have a friend going with you, it's more fun and you encourage yourself," he says." The Fabulous journey is exactly the same, so why don't you invite a friend?"
Solution
"Our new way of thinking, since we've seen Remote Config, is that everything can be changed inside the app, including pictures, text, and pages," Hassine says. The Fabulous team also uses Firebase Invites with Dynamic Links to create a customized onboarding process.
Users see "a big button they can tap to get the app invite," Hassine says. "It sends a custom email to their friends, telling them, 'Hey, do you want to partner up?'" If they click "Yes," Fabulous sends them to the store to install the app. When they open it, they see a customized screen that's based on their friend's invitation.The Fabulous team also leverages Firebase Analytics to create audiences "when we need to do experiments or to present a different onboarding for different groups of people," Hassine adds.
The Firebase-based changes delivered the healthy results the Fabulous team was seeking. "We saw twice the retention rate among users with customized onboarding flow than among regular users," Hassine says. "And it took us just one day to implement the customized onboarding screens."
Results
2x higher retention
1 day to implement custom onboarding screens
"We saw twice the retention rate among users with customized onboarding flow than among regular users. And it took us just one day to implement the customized onboarding screens."
- Sami Ben Hassine, co-founder and CEO, The Fabulous