BetterMe Doubles In-App Purchases and Boosts Retention by 22 Percent

BetterMe.world has created a variety of fitness and health apps that have been installed by 100 million users globally. Their flagship app, BetterMe: Home Workout & Diet, offers a holistic approach to weight management by offering personalized workouts supported by real coaches, meal planning, and fitness challenges. By asking users about their goals, habits, and preferences and collecting biometric data, they’re able to deliver personalized fitness plans to a diverse audience.

When creating a fitness app, ease of use, communication, and personalization are paramount. The fitness app market is growing at a lightning speed of 31 percent annually, which means that competition is abundant. To engage and retain users in this competitive, high-churn market, fitness apps need to be able to nurture strong brand connections and provide a wellness experience that extends beyond the app interface. That entails connecting with users and providing value in their daily lives.

As a mobile-first company, creating a mobile-first communication strategy was an intuitive part of BetterMe’s evolution. Unlike more traditional communication channels such as email, push notifications are viewed more quickly and make it easy for users to return to the app in fewer clicks. Mobile push is also well-suited to real-time workout and meal reminders, which are incredibly useful when encouraging users to follow through on their fitness resolutions.

Although the BetterMe team understood what they wanted from push notifications, finding the best-fit solution for their company took some trial and error. They experimented with a few different messaging providers, but weren't convinced that they'd found the right one. In search of a more robust, customizable, and cost-efficient solution, they set out to build their own messaging capabilities. BetterMe’s retention specialist, Yuliia Hryshchenko, reflects:

“We had a lot of ideas about what we could add to our internal system, but the process was more difficult and slow than we thought. In the middle of the process, we happened to hear about OneSignal, and thought, why not try it? We integrated immediately, and in just a few days, we saw such great results that we changed our plans.”

Part of the reason why BetterMe has stayed with OneSignal is because of the abundant personalization features and flexibility the platform offers. For a fitness app, leveraging biometric data in the right way is incredibly important to the app experience. Hryshchenko explains:

“We use personalization in two ways: first, to segment users, and second, to personalize the information in a message. When a user sees their target weight or their age in a message, it makes it more about them — and it’s more likely to work.”

BetterMe uses push notifications to share workout and meal reminders, promote different types of challenges, encourage habit tracking, share tips, offer rewards, and much more. By promoting upsells in a way that was personal and contextually relevant to each user’s behavior, they doubled their conversion rate for in-app challenges and doubled their total in-app purchases — a whopping 100% performance increase.

The ability to segment users based on specific app behaviors, preferences, journey milestones, and biometrics has generated even greater results than they’d anticipated from previous experience. “One of our goals in using OneSignal was to increase our retention rate. After starting to use OneSignal and personalizing our messages, our retention increased by 22 percent.” says Hryshchenko. That percent growth was on top of the growth they’d already been able to achieve by adding push notifications to their communication strategy years earlier.

With such a broad and diverse user base, the ability to streamline this personalization process and automatically trigger messages has also empowered BetterMe to scale up their communication without sacrificing control. Hryshchenko notes, “We like the idea that we can use automated messages for exact times, we have a lot of different ways to segment audiences, and this helps us see better results.”

Using OneSignal’s A/B testing feature, they were able to test what Hryshchenko describes as “the competence of the message.” By comparing message variations with different images, sounds, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, and copy, they were able to identify what specific elements were most effective in specific contexts.

When BetterMe started using OneSignal, they also gained access to a new communication channel: in-app messaging. In Hryshchenko’s words, “this was new for us” — but it soon became a core part of their growth strategy. Rather than relying on developer resources to create onboarding flows new features, they were able to communicate changes quickly and drive immediate engagement with in-app messages. “It’s good that we can easily announce new features and don’t need to develop a new screen [to do so]. We just create the cards with our designer and run a lot of tests.”

Like many popular lifestyle apps, BetterMe is free to use, but promotes in-app purchases to access advanced features and benefits, such as live workout sessions with a professional fitness coach. For this type of monetization model to work, it’s important to keep users engaged long-term, reduce churn, and provide an exceptional experience at every touchpoint. After adding in-app messaging to their repertoire, Hryshchenko also began experimenting with triggers to automate more of their communication strategy and hone their targeting abilities.

“In-app messaging also has triggers, so we started using triggers to offer users something they might find interesting based on their actions. If a user completes a workout, then they might be interested in another relevant type of challenge. If they track their calories, then maybe they’d be interested in the no-sugar challenge.”

After seeing such encouraging results in their main app, BetterMe.world plans to apply these learnings to other lifestyle apps they’ve created. For these apps, their underlying goals are the same: focus on boosting retention rates and increasing the amount of in-app purchases. To achieve this goal, they plan to repeat the same process they employed with their flagship app: add more segmentation, run more tests, add more triggers, and personalize their communication.

When asked about whether or not BetterMe will circle back to their plans to build an in-house messaging solution, Hryshchenko says it’s not even on their radar.

“At least for now, we’re not interested in developing our own system because we understand that creating something like OneSignal will take a lot of time. It’s just easier to have something that’s already made for what you need.”