Fan Signals are a collection of features that help you capture, analyze, and act on the feelings of your consumers, building critical emotion data over time. These signals enable customer segmentation tied to categories of emotion to help you predict churn, boost revenue, and retain customers throughout their mobile journey. Fan Signals are derived from recurring Love Dialog interactions, with consumers being characterized as either Fan or Risk.
Alchemer Digital's Love Dialog has been very effective in measuring customer love in the moment. As you capture data from the Love Dialog, Alchemer Digital automatically segments your customers into one of several Fan Signals groups, based on their Love Dialog responses across the span of time. Over time and across customer journeys, signals are qualified as either:
- New (expressed for the first time),
- Repeat (expressed sequentially), or
- Shifted (from one state to another).
Based on these different signals then, consumer segmentation includes these six (6) “buckets” or divisions of customer types:
- New Fan – Answered yes the first time they responded to a Love Dialog
- New Risk – Answered no the first time they responded to a Love Dialog
- Repeat Fan – Answered yes at least twice sequentially to the Love Dialog
- Repeat Risk – Answered no at least twice sequentially to the Love Dialog
- Shifted to Fan (from Risk) – Answered no, then yes to sequential Love Dialogs
- Shifted to Risk (from Fan) – Answered yes, then no to sequential Love Dialogs
As critical as capturing emotion is to boosting mobile customer experience, so is taking action on that data. With Fan Signals, you can trigger more precise targeting of in-app interactions and incentives, or drive external marketing campaigns through data portability. This added emotional intelligence drives new growth and customer engagement, increases lifetime value and retention, and reverses churn and competitive risks.
Using Fan Signals
Alchemer Digital currently enables Fan Signals capabilities in four ways on the Alchemer Digital dashboard: Fan Signals Charts, Fan Signals Exports, Fan Signals Filtering in Insights, and Fan Signals Interaction Targeting.
Fan Signals Charts
Located on the App Health section of your Alchemer Mobil dashboard, Fan Signals Charts allow you to aggregate consumer emotions at a glance. Each chart will provide a breakdown of how customers are distributed across each bucket of a particular signal.
The Repeat Fans chart reports the percentage of Repeat respondents who have responded as Fans to subsequent Love Dialogs versus those who have responded as Risks to subsequent Love Dialogs. We would generally expect the bucket of Repeat Fans to be larger than the bucket of Repeat Risk as at-risk customers are more likely to churn than engaged, happy customers. Both buckets, however, provide crucial information about the emotional state of longer-term customers.
The Shifted Fans chart reports the percentage of respondents who have Shifted from Risk to Fan in subsequent Love Dialogs versus those who Shifted from Fan to Risk Risks. Shifted Fans are typically validation that you’ve improved your customer experience or made a positive change to your in-app experience. Shifted Risks tend to show that you’ve made a negative change to your offerings or that customers have recently had experiences that have left them unhappy. Identifying this bucket is critical as it creates an opportunity to avert churn with this cohort, but companies need to quickly take action or risk losing them to a competitor.
The New Fans chart reports the percentage of respondents who have responded to the Love Dialog for the first time, expressing that they are a Fan versus those who have expressed that they are a Risk in their first Love Dialog Response.
Fan Signals Export
Fan Signals Export allows you to get up-to-date, as well as historical, Fan Signals data from the Alchemer Digital dashboard and analyze it in third-party applications in order to maximize your ability to reach the right customer at the right time.
With the ability to download your Fan Signals through exports, you can use this data outside of Alchemer Mobile within your own customer intelligence and marketing automation systems. Trigger personalized responses, incentives, or targeted marketing campaigns based on the shifting emotions of your customers across time and journeys.
Fan Signal by Customer
Identify all of your customers along with their current Fan Signal. Pinpoint the customers who are shifting away from you and take action because you know who they are.
Fan Signal Buckets by Day
Get an aggregate view of all your Fan Signals on a daily basis. If your organization uses Net Promoter Score, we think that you’ll find this daily aggregation incredibly powerful and help you identify your true velocity of promotion.
Signals Over Time
Signals Over Time is the emotional journey that your customers are taking with you. It can help you identify when new features lead to more love, when outages really break trust, or when heavy investments are harming your relationships. Export to see your customer’s sentiment over a specific time during their journey.
Fan Signals Filtering in Insights
Alchemer Digital Insights are a great way for you to analyze open-ended feedback from Message Center, Surveys, and app store Reviews. Through filtering, sentiment analysis, and a presentation of key phrases, Alchemer Digital Insights allow you to spot and follow trends in your feedback data. Fan Signals filtering allows you to understand what’s important to specific buckets of customers. Are all of your Shifted Risk customers experiencing a similar bug? Do your Repeat Fans have some similar feature requests? These filtering capabilities help you to uncover patterns based upon shifting customer emotions.
Fan Signals Interaction Targeting
How would you act if you knew customers were ready to leave? How would you engage with your most loyal customers? Alchemer Digital allows you to utilize all Fan Signal buckets in interaction targeting. This, in turn, allows you to tailor your interactions and messaging to customers based upon their shifting emotions and quickly act throughout their mobile journeys.
Fan Signals targeting works similar to all other Alchemer Digital targeting segments by allowing you to choose each bucket as part of the WHO targeting criteria. You are able to select both the Fan Signal bucket and supporting criteria for it – such as the timeframe in which someone appeared in that bucket.
Use Cases
Below are some suggested use cases for specific Fan Signals buckets, as well as some general use cases. While this is in no way an exhaustive list, it should be a good starting point for utilizing Fan Signals Export and Interaction Targeting.
It is also important to consider your vertical as you think about use cases. Our Customer Success Team is happy to help!
General Use Cases
- Adjust product roadmap based on customer feedback and emotion
- Re-target shifts in emotion in real-time
- Reveal new emotion data behind NPS to improve differentiation, predict churn, and accelerate CX enhancements
Fan Signals Export
Use Fan Signals Export to build audience segments around customer emotion to reduce churn, increase engagement and conversion, or prompt a certain behavior across all of your programs.
- Identify and map all customers who are super fans or have shifted away in any of your tools outside of Alchemer Digital in order to take action
- Reach out to customers who have their trust in you broken due to a product change or outage
- Retarget new fans on your paid channels to increase CTR and decrease spend
- Increase engagement with your promotions by tailoring your messaging across all of your marketing channels based on whether they are new fans, existing loyalists or new risks.
Repeat Fans
- Send a Prompt (formerly Notes) with promo code thanking your most loyal customers
- Ask your biggest Fans to rate your app through the Rating Dialog
- Recruit customers into a demo group or invite them to try new features
- Send a special Survey asking your happiest customers to help prioritize features
Repeat Risk
- Send a Prompt containing a special offer to engage with the customer and prevent churn
- Prompt customers with a Prompt linking to Message Center to get these at-risk customers in touch with your support team
- Create a Survey to understand how you can provide a better product, service, or experience for these customers
- Remove customers in this bucket from certain interactions and engagements that might be better suited for customers having a positive experience
Switched to Fan
- Send a promo code/coupon through a Prompt to thank them for their business
- Send a Survey to learn about their experience; try to understand what is repeatable about this cohort. What changed to improve their experience?
Switched to Risk
- Prompt customers with a Prompt linking to Message Center to get these at-risk customers in touch with your support team
- Send a Survey to learn about their experience – what changed that shifted their emotions?
- Send a promo code/coupon through a Prompt to apologize for a bad experience
New Fan
- Send a promo code/coupon through a Prompt to thank them for their business
- Send a Prompt introducing them to functionality in the app you think would be of interest
- Ask your Fans to rate your app through the Rating Dialog
New Risk
- Send a Prompt containing a special offer to engage with the customer and prevent churn
- Prompt customers with a Prompt linking to Message Center to get these at-risk customers in touch with your support team
- Create a Survey to understand how you can provide a better product, service, or experience for these customers
Using Fan Signals Exports
Use Fan Signals Export to build audience segments around customer emotion to reduce churn, increase engagement and conversion, or prompt a certain behavior across all of your programs.
- Identify and map all customers who are super fans or have shifted away in any of your tools outside of Alchemer Digital in order to take action
- Reach out to customers who have their trust in you broken due to a product change or outage
- Retarget new fans on your paid channels to increase CTR and decrease spend
- Increase engagement with your promotions by tailoring your messaging across all of your marketing channels based on whether they are new fans, existing loyalists or new risks.
Best Practices
Below are some best practices recommended for utilizing Fan Signals
- Do not use Fan Signals Interaction Targeting to trigger your Love Dialog
- You want to understand the emotions of all of your customers over time. If you’re limiting your Love Dialog prompt to only one segment of customers, you will miss out on connecting with all of your customers throughout their mobile journeys.
- Pass Customer ID as custom data
- Passing an ID that is meaningful to your business will make your data richer and allow you to take advantage of exports and webhooks in the future. It enables for you insights and actions on identified consumers.
- Other custom data attributes would also be impactful here, such as rewards level, if the customer has any favorites set (like location or items), and other attributes specific to your app.
- For more specific targeting, add a time frame in your Fan Signals Interaction Targeting
- Because we track customer emotion over time, it’s possible for someone to be in different buckets throughout their time as your customer.
- If you target a bucket without specifying a timeframe, we will attribute each person to the bucket they are CURRENTLY in.
- If you target and bucket and specify a timeframe, we will include each person who had that fan signal status AT LEAST ONCE during that time period. This means that a customer could be targeted in a bucket that they’re not currently in but that they were in during the time period selected.
- If you have many Repeat Risks and Repeat Fans, it is more critical than ever to understand their differing experience in separate surveys.
- In 2019, the average number of New or Repeat Fans was 60% (iOS 58%, Android 65%). The average number of New or Repeat Risks was 31% (iOS 32%, Android 28%). On average, 5% of Fans shifted to Risks (iOS 5%, Android 3%) and 4% of Risks shifted to Fans (iOS 5%, Android 3%). (source: 2019 Apptentive Benchmark Report)
- Understanding how the experiences of these separate groups have differed will allow you to acutely zero in on the moments of friction that could cause customers to leave and to double-down on the moments of delight that create loyal fans
- Analyze and act
- It’s great to engage with your customers and to gather feedback; however, unless you spend time understanding that feedback and then acting upon it, you’re not closing the loop with your customers. Use customer feedback to inform your product roadmap, influence your marketing campaigns, and engage with the rest of your company around customer experience.
For a walkthrough of Fan Signals reporting and targeting, check out the video below:
