3 Benefits of Working with Your Mobile App Product Team
Julia Wu is currently Director of Performance at Ten Percent Happier. Previously, she was a Senior Digital Marketing Manager at American Well. Learn more from her Mobile Hero profile.
During my career in mobile user acquisition I have come to notice that the relationship between the product and marketing teams can often feel antagonistic, and transactional at best. Oftentimes our user acquisition team would work with the product team off a prioritization framework and have bi-weekly check-ins, but not much more. Over the past few years I had the opportunity to work with some awesome product managers and develop meaningful, collaborative relationships that not only helped with UA, but also overall company growth.
There are a few notable benefits to marketing that comes from close collaboration with product teams including:
- Speeding up creative testing and optimization
- Minimizing campaign disruptions
- Supercharging customer lifetime value (CLTV)
Here is what I learned by collaborating with and becoming a thought partner with my product team.
Speed up creative optimization through user-centricity
Having started my marketing career in performance marketing, I was deep in the quantitative mindset. Using qualitative research to tease out user problems felt vague and unfamiliar. I was skeptical until I saw my CTR double in a month (while maintaining a lower funnel conversion rate) and my email campaign beat projections by 47%.
Product teams (PM, UX) have a deep understanding of the user’s problems based on countless consumer insights interviews. This translates directly to compelling value propositions and hypotheses for creative testing. Coming up with hypotheses for creative was straightforward when I worked in e-commerce where sales data can directly inform your creative options. However, in the service/subscription world, hypotheses are more challenging to develop.
Using learnings from the product team, I was able to develop ad copy that drove significantly better campaign performance. In essence, we pivoted away from feature-centric messaging toward problem-solving messages.
Minimize campaign disruptions with sound measurement infrastructure
As performance marketers, so much of what we do is dependent on proper measurement. And there have been times when I had to shut down all marketing spend because measurement has gone awry. A large part of our measurement framework lives with the product and engineering teams. By having a proper infrastructure set up for marketing measurement, we can minimize inaccuracies and disruption to our campaigns.
Sadly, measurement and instrumentation is not sexy development work. For us, the product team was the perfect partner to help develop a framework for instrumentation, make sure the work gets done properly, and keep us alerted to potential problems. The result of our collaboration with the product team was a simple framework that we use to this day.
| Event Name (Human readable) |
Event Description (When it triggers) |
Property | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enrollment | User successfully enrolls | Account Type | Email, Google, Facebook |
| Enrollment | User successfully enrolls | Success | True, False |
Supercharge your CLTV by streamlining the user journey
The beauty of performance marketing is full funnel optimization. We are attuned to industry benchmarks, from click-through rate to purchase conversion rate. We can test new creative, audiences, and vendors, but at some point, we look at our organic user funnel and see opportunities in the product. The better the onboarding, engagement, and retention rate – the more we get to spend.
As marketers, we often have access to more, and often, different data than the product team. I often ask, “how can we help?” By working together with our product team to streamline the user journey we have been able to increase our customer LTV. Our marketing teams have leaned in on A/B tests by prioritizing and assisting with their analyses.
Some of these may overlap with your product and analytics team. Do what works for your teams. The partnership between our marketing and product teams has been invaluable. A great partnership can help power creative testing, measurement, and CLTV. Start with goal alignment and remember… product managers are our friends, not foes.