How Fishbrain Increased Retention Using Amplitude, Braze, and Phiture

Fishbrain is online mobile logging, photo-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to record data about and take pictures of catches, and share them either publicly or privately on the app, as well as through a variety of other social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr.

Fishbrain team was keen to increase their user retention rate and contacted Phiture to engage their team of retention experts. After conducting an initial audit analysis of Fishbrain user engagement and retention, the Phiture team worked with Fishbrain to implement a jointly-developed retention strategy.

During the Audit phase of the engagement, the team at Phiture used Amplitude and Braze to in tandem undertake a comprehensive analysis of Fishbrain’s current retention and engagement. They focused on finding key moments in user behavior that could help predict and influence retention rates. The close relationship and connectivity of Amplitude and Braze were of utmost importance during this phase of the project; The two solutions provide multiple data integration possibilities, including Braze Currents data streaming and comprehensive APIs. The use of Amplitude facilitated Phiture’s diagnosis of the areas for improvement, whereas the Braze platform enabled us to act upon these insights.

During the implementation phase, Braze was used to build strategic lifecycle messaging campaigns including in-app messages, push notifications and emails. Phiture’s hypothesis-driven campaign experiments promoted events, app features and user behaviors that earlier analysis had found to be correlated with higher user engagement and retention. Over the course of 5 months roughly 40-50 experiments/iterations were carried out.

Amplitude was also used extensively during this phase to measure the impact of campaign experiments on downstream metrics such as weekly retention and Fishbrain’s north-star metric of ‘catches logged’. Using Amplitude, they monitored these metrics, as well as downstream retention and engagement for users who received test campaigns versus control groups who were not exposed to the campaign experiments.

By synchronizing user assignments, experiment groups, and control groups between Braze and Amplitude using a web hook integration, they were able to compare users who had received (or been excluded from) experimental campaigns and measure the aggregate impact at the CRM channel and program level. This enabled Fishbrain to continually evaluate the effectiveness of their entire Lifecycle Marketing program.

In addition to running retention experiments, the team worked towards increasing push notification reach with pre-permission, retargeting and win-back campaigns. Phiture’s in-house app studio, Blender, was utilized for automated creation of HTML 5 in-app messages including surveys that were tightly integrated with Braze.

During the project, Phiture significantly improved Fishbrain’s email deliverability by creating a dedicated IP address specifically for Fishbrain email marketing and by implementing a comprehensive messaging series to boost the email domain reputation.

The project delivered a sustained, significant uplift over control in the Braze dashboard on leading ‘input’ metrics such as catches-logged and anglers-followed. Observing aggregate impact in Amplitude through the custom data integration, Fishbrain saw an increase in weekly retention, peaking at week 6 with +50.6% uplift in week 6 retention for users in the treatment group over those in the control group.

Email open rates from Gmail users increased by 1300% and there was a 14.9% increase in paid conversions within a day.

To cap off an all-round successful and hugely insightful project, Phiture was awarded the Best Retention Campaign of 2019 accolade at the App Growth Awards in Berlin.

This case study was created by Phiture in collaboration with Amplitude & Braze.