Chris Nguyen

This Q&A was conducted when Chris was a Senior Marketing Manager at Zoosk. Currently, Chris is a Performance Marketing Manager at Zendesk.

Chris Nguyen was formerly a Senior Marketing Manager at Zoosk in San Francisco. Armed with a background in user support, Chris focuses on giving users a quality mobile experience before they’ve even registered to make sure that once they are Zoosk members, they’re more likely to stay engaged and active in the community.

What does a quality mobile user look like to Zoosk?

A quality user for us is someone that fills out the profile as soon as they install the app. They upload a photo, they fill out all the fields about themselves like, “What are you interested in? What do you like? What do you not like?” When users promptly fill out the profile, they’re more likely to subscribe as a paid user.

Are there specific tactics that you’ve found work best to convert installs into engaged users?

Creative testing definitely works out well for us. We test our creatives to find out which ads drive the best view-to-registration rate as well as what landing page will get more profile creations. Those are our most valuable actions and we can always get better so we test constantly to improve.

What is one thing you’ve done in the past year to improve monetization?

We’ve done a lot of landing page testing. We’ve seen the profile creation and conversion to subscriber rate jump, just from optimizing our landing page. We’ve done a lot of creative testing as well, to see what creative actually gets users to convert at a higher percentage. Those are two really big ones.

How important are the holidays to your business?

The holidays are extremely important to us. We see a huge surge in subscribers from after Christmas to New Years. A lot of people are trying to find that special someone, that’s what we capitalize on.

What do you do differently to market your app during the holidays?

During the holidays what we do is that we spend a little bit more because we want to capitalize on this upswing. Conversion rates are naturally higher, subscribers convert at a much higher rate, we want to make sure that we’re getting all the profiles and subscribers we can.

What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made in mobile marketing?

The biggest mistake I’ve made in mobile marketing is probably that I didn’t do as much testing as I should have early on. There are a lot of parts in our funnel that we could’ve optimized, but I didn’t test as much as I should have. I felt like that could’ve really helped our business.

What’s the one piece of advice that you would give to other marketers of non-gaming apps?

Test as much as possible. Creatives, Landing Pages, everything. Test everything in your funnel and see what works. You’ll never know what works until you test it out.

How did you get into mobile user acquisition?

I joined Zoosk straight out of college but I didn’t start in user acquisition. I needed a full-time job and I had a lot of background in tech support so I came here for a customer support position in the fraud protection department. Zoosk really cares about creating a quality user experience and we want to make sure the profiles you’re connecting with are legitimate, real human beings. I worked in fraud protection for two years before our Director of Marketing invited me to join that team. I trained under him for a year and then he brought me full-time onto the marketing team.

What do you see as the next big thing in mobile marketing?

The next big thing to me is going to be mobile video. I feel like if whoever you’re running with doesn’t have mobile video traffic, they’re probably going go to get left by the wayside. I already see it happening this year. Now users have better Internet and cellular connections with 4G and LTE, so you can stream video extremely easily. I’m already seeing companies dedicated to it. I think that’s definitely going to be the next big thing. If you’re not in on it right now, you better get started.