Stickiness, Virality and 21 Days of Meditation
Nalpeiron Software Analytics Blog, November 2013 http://blog.nalpeiro ... editation/
Stickiness, Virality and 21-Days of Meditation
I just signed up for Oprah & Deepak’s 21-Day Meditation Experience that was emailed to me as a marketing piece. I had seen prior email ads a few times before – not irritatingly frequently or I would have unsubscribed already – but none had caught my eye sufficiently to motivate me to open the email. This morning, however, I chose to engage in the stickiness phase of this business by signing up, providing my email address and beginning to provide data through my application usage.
And why didn’t I sign up the first, or second, or third time I had received the email? I look like the ideal customer. I am a daily mediatator and have always liked Oprah and Deepak. There are no barriers to entry as the program is free, so why hadn’t I signed up before? Perhaps like most people living in the 21st century, my life is far too busy to take notice of everything that passes me by. And who can really find time for meditation anyway? (That’s a joke for all the meditators out there!) I am just the kind of customer that an entrepreneur might assume would purchase the product.
Frankly, I am so advertising-resistant that it’s going to take a lot more than a little-ol’ email to get my attention. It’s not only that I’m trained in the ways that marketing works to hook people and I reflexively resist, but I choose to be very aware and make conscious decisions about what I do with my time and money, so I am rarely driven by advertising and branding. (Unless it’s Apple. But that’s another story…)
So what made me sign up today? Well, yesterday I was talking to a mentor who told me that Oprah and Deepak have done this 21-day meditation in the past, and that she had a wonderful experience doing it. She pointed out that the program provides a structure for daily meditation and makes it really easy because there’s something different to do every day. I found this idea of daily variety extremely appealing, a concept not addressed in the marketing email.
My friend was engaging in the virality phase of the business by doing Oprah and Deepak’s marketing work on their behalf. Because in our world, most people are just like me, overwhelmed with busy-ness and stress, bombarded with advertising, and are far more likely to respond to a recommendation from a friend – in this case someone working in the field - than a piece of marketing collateral from a business.
A few hours after our conversation, I was checking my email and up popped another email advertising the “last day to sign up for the 21-Day Meditation”. This time I didn’t hesitate, and clicked on the Register button. On a second screen I filled out my name, email address and password. Almost instantaneously a confirmation email arrived in my email box and once I clicked on that the process was complete. I doubt I spent as long as 30 seconds on the transaction. The transaction took place at a satisfying and comforting level of speed and efficiency.
For a variety of reasons, I ignore the invitation on both the registration page and the sign up page to invite my friends. Thus far, Oprah and Deepak have failed to persuade me, unlike my friend, to join the virality stage in this process. However, if my experience is as positive as my friend’s was, there are 21 more days during which I have given Oprah and Deepak permission to continue to invite me to do so. Also on the Registration Page was another button to buy products such as mediation cd’s, candles, incense, downloads, etc. If they had surveyed me, I probably would have answered as though I were a perfect customer, but I am not. Looking at the products page, their perfect customer is probably someone without experience in meditation who truly benefits from the structure and actually believes that the term “Meditation Essentials” means buying stuff! Application data analytics, however, will quickly show the difference between someone who says they would be a good customer and someone who actually is.
By the end of the 21 days, Oprah & Deepak will have collected massive amounts of data about their customers’ application usage adoption: what time of day they log on, what part of the world they live in, what type of operating system they use, whether or not they engage in viral marketing and how successful they are at this, how frequently they log on, how long they watch the video meditation, and so on. Armed with all these metrics on software usage patterns, engaging in sales will be far more successful now that stickiness and virality have been the focus from the beginning of the customer interaction.