Overview

Mobile marketing platforms often focus on the campaign and journey-level engagement. CleverTap developed the Lifecycle Optimizer to create a view of the entire user base. As the name suggests, CleverTap Lifecycle Optimizer provides you with a guided and end-to-end solution for your retention flow.

Lifecycle optimizer enables you to :

• Define lifecycle stages to understand users.
• Connect with users to influence movement into the next stage.
  To move users forward, you can run engagement experiments, measure their impact, and apply the winning variation to all users in a stage to optimize the lifecycle.

The stages for Lifecycle Optimizer are:

1. Map users to lifecycle stages based on qualifying actions to understand the entire user base.
2. Experiment and iterate with different approaches and roll out the winning Journey.
3. Engage users with relevant, timely messages to move them to the next stage

You can choose from two frameworks to achieve your retention goals: AIC or AARRR.

Lifecycle Optimizer Steps

The steps to optimize a Lifecycle:

1. Setup Lifecycle
2. Create Engagement
3. Test, Iterate, and Rollout to All Users in a Stage

Current Retention

Let us begin by viewing our current retention. This is a good starting point because it shows the current state of your retention. We can benchmark all our improvements against these statistics.

Select Lifecycle Optimizer from the main dashboard. The key metrics overview displays the current retention state.

You will see the following trends with some presets. You can modify these presets by clicking edit.

Setup Lifecycle

To set up a lifecycle model:

1. Select a Framework
2. Define Lifecycle Stages
3. Choose Preferred values

Select Framework

Select a framework and click Next.

AIC Framework

Brands that choose the AIC framework tend to focus on the type of user actions. The core action or conversion event represents the most desirable user action and is generally used by Social Networking or Ad-based apps.
This is a 3-stage customer lifecycle framework.

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Note

This table is indicative. You can edit this stage with data points within the framework to suit your business needs.

AARRR Framework

The acronym AARRR stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue.
The AARRR framework is based on customer lifecycle stages. You choose this framework if you look at users and their progression through defined stages to view clear revenue conversion events, and is generally used by eCommerce and Travel apps.
This is a 5-stage customer lifecycle framework.

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Note

This table is indicative. You can edit any stage within the framework to suit your business needs.

Setup Lifecycle

Define Lifecycle Stages

Here you choose events that qualify users for each stage of the lifecycle. You can choose multiple events. Events are considered from the latest step.

AIC Events

AARRR Events

Setup Lifecycle

Choose Preferred Values

The preferred value is the time period on which your model is based. The default value is 12 weeks. This period can be edited. However, changing this default value will also change the model accordingly.

Select "Qualify users for different stages of customer lifecycle based on these preferred values" and save the setup.

You can save the model as a draft or click Publish to publish the model.

Setup Lifecycle
Lifecycle Optimizer Steps

Create Engagement

You can create engagement tailored to each stage.

1. Select Lifecycle Optimizer.
2. Under Engagement Snapshot, click View Engagements.
   The Engagements page appears.
   You can create engagement for your model from this page.

Define Engagement

Define your engagement and roll it out to the selected percentage of users.

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Tip

Roll out this engagement to all users if you are confident that your engagement does not need improvement. However, if you wish to experiment first, you can experiment with a selected percent of users and then view the results. Rollout the engagement to all users if the results are satisfactory. Else, repeat the experiment.

Define Engagement Modes

Create a Journey to engage your users in the selected stage. For example, create a Journey to onboard all your new users. To learn more, refer to Journeys.

After you create your Journey, you can save it as a draft or publish it.

The journey operations available are:

• Edit - You can edit a current Journey.
• Stop - You can stop a Journey. However, a stopped Journey cannot be restarted.
• Rollout to all users - If you are experimenting with a Journey and the results are good, then you can roll out the Journey to all of your users.

To learn more, refer to Journey Operations

Journey Considerations

• Entry node is populated with the % of users in the stage.
• Goals are populated with the qualification to a higher lifecycle stage.
  For instance, if you're creating engagement in the acknowledgment stage, then the interested or converted
  users who move to the next stage.
• System Control Group cannot be changed

Engagement Stats

Click View Stats to view the engagement statistics.

• Distribution Across Lifecycle Stages
  shows the current percentage of users across the Lifecycle Stages.

• Change Over Time
  Shows the differential change in each stage.
  For example, if the Interest stage shows the user count at 17.41% on June 1st and 18.04 % on June 2nd, then
  the differential increase in user interest is : (18.01 - 17.41) / 17.41 = 3.33%.

• Inter Stage Transition
  shows how the users transitioned to a particular stage from each of the Lifecycle stages.

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Note

Hover over a stage in the chord diagram to see the user transitions.

• Into a stage trend
  Shows the trend of users who transitioned from other stages into the selected stage.

• From a stage
  Shows the trend of users who transitioned to other stages from the selected stage. If the model is set up
  optimally, the users must transition from a lower stage to a higher stage.

Lifecycle Optimizer Steps

Video Tutorial

For further information, you can watch the following video on lifecycle optimizer: