Feature awareness best practices

1 - Define a clear marketing strategy around content sharing

1.A - It is fundamental to determine if the feature is a sharing or a gift feature.

• The sharing feature allows your users to share your content in an unlimited way every month.

The pro is to create a virality if your users understand and like the feature. They can share without counting.

The problem is that they don’t select friends and therefore your inbound leads will not be more qualified than an advertising campaign.

The perverse effect is to devalue the value of your content to your customers.

• The gifting feature allows your users to offer a gift in a limited way every month.

Your content that is normally accessible only to paying subscribers becomes a gift that can be offered to a few friends.

It is therefore important to define a gift quota per month per user and be transparent with your users on the numbers of gifts they have left.

The main Pro of gifting is that it enhances the value of your content to existing customers. It confirms to them that this content has a value for which they pay every month and that they can now offer it.

Also, as these gifts are limited, your user will select the friends most likely to be interested in the content. This pre-selection will guarantee the arrival of much more qualified leads than the average.

1.B - It is also important to determine which part of your user base has access to the feature: all MAUs (free and paying) or only paying subscribers?

• Giving access to the feature to your entire user base allows you to leverage a larger base and therefore create a stronger virality.

On the other hand, the gifting feature is not limited and cannot be used as an argument to convert free users into paying subscribers.

• On the contrary, limiting the feature to your paying subscribers is an additional feature to increase the premium offer and therefore to convert more free users to paying and engage / retain your existing subscribers with a gifting feature.

2 - Highlighting the “Gift” or “Share” button in your app and/or on your website

We advise you to implement these best practices on the web and on mobile to really catch your subscribers’ attention (i.e don’t implement only on the web when 70% of your users are mobile for example….)

• The design: we offer different templates of sharing or gift buttons to speed up the creation of the feature if you lack resources.

We note that it is important to put forward:

• an Original Design that matches your brand guidelines
• A button that is well visible and A/B different locations under the asset and sizes to really catch the eye
• A/B Test different wordings and use the ones that work best for you (i.e “Offer this to a friend”, “Gift”, “Share”, “Offer this”, “Send as a gift”, “e-gift”…)
• A clear value proposition: the gifting value should be easily understood and visible.

• Tutorial Walkthrough on the share/gift button also has an important impact to clearly explain the function of the new feature or to test the appetite of your users for the feature even before its launch. This consists of tooltips that appear only the first time a new feature appears to the user.

3 - An educational communication to your users

Objective: The objective is to explain the reasons for the existence of the feature (sharing is caring), how it works….

3.A - In-app

Item	Visual
A pop-up that appears on the home page each time a user arrives to consume one of your contents.
An In-App notification / Tool Tip highlighting location of feature

3.B - Through other channels

• A CRM campaign towards your email base can also allow you to reactivate dormant accounts. We also advise you to include an example of a link that allows recipients to directly test the new feature which enables the consumption of a content in a webview without downloading an app or signing up.
• Social Media post: We also recommend including an example of a link that allows followers to directly test the new feature to drive maximum engagement immediately. Don’t forget to share your posts with our teams so we can relay them. Likewise, we post the launch with each new client in our social networks which include many decision makers and investors from the media and content industry.
• Onboarding: explain the feature to all new users during onboarding after a new sign up while introducing them to all the major features of the service
• Payment Page for the gift feature: If it is a gift feature limited to paying subscribers, then present and explain the feature on the payment page when you detail the options included in the paid subscription plans
• App Store for updates: explain the new feature in the appstore when a user updates the app “what’s new in this release…”

4 - Ensure the quality of the metadata of the shared links

We observed a big difference between the CTRs of shared links due to:

• The visual of the link:

It should be checked that a visual is loading on the communication app when sharing the link otherwise the recipient does not quickly understand what this link/ content is about and may ignore it.

We advise you to prefer a visual in HD that represents the content itself and does not highlight your brand or a commercial offer. We’ll take care of making sure it’s not so heavy that it impacts the speed of metadata fetching.

• The Title & description text:

They are paramount for the recipient to increase their interest to click.

We advise you to write a text that clearly and synthetically describes:

• The content: say what the content is: ’Enjoy this free meditation session by Othership…
• The benefits for the friend: It is important to talk about the benefits for the friend to consume the content offered:

“Relax with this 3-minute breathing exercise.”

“Find out more about the FTX drop survey”

“Enjoy this unique concert played at Wembley on June 29, 1988”

Thus, do not kill your conversion with pushy marketing messages: we advise you not to talk about your app or to put forward a very pushy CTA such as “Download the app NOW” or “Save 25% on the first 3 months”.

• Keep it short! 15 words is a good threshold, as this corresponds to roughly 2.5 lines on a mobile
• Use conversion catalysts: enthusiastic tone, emojis!

NB: Soon available: we will allow you to A/B test different visuals and different descriptive texts to compare the opening rates of shared links in order to optimize your campaigns in real time.

5 - Customise the web view and define the call-to-actions

• Be sure that the CTAs appear every time the friend pauses the content, skips ahead or finishes the content. Many people will ignore CTAs if they are only visible at the end of the content because few will go to the end.
• The first CTA attracts more than 60% of the attention of other CTAs on this page.

You probably know the CTA wording and special offers that work best for you.

It’s important to put the offer you know will generate a lot of clicks at the top.

For example, if your signup page has a CTA like “Get Started” instead of “Get 7 days free” because it converts better, it’s important to use the same wording in the CTAs you choose on Envoy.

Also, if the 1 month free offer converts better, then put it way up there as the 1st visible offer.