Kevin Hsu

This Q&A was conducted when Kevin was a Marketing Manager at Touch of Modern. Currently, Kevin is a Director of Growth Marketing at Lyft.

Kevin Hsu was formerly Mobile Marketing Manager at Touch of Modern in San Francisco. His key to success is utilizing multiple device touch points to turn prospects into engaged, returning customers of their eCommerce platform.

What are your day to day duties at Touch of Modern?

I run a lot of the user acquisition for both mobile as well as web, specifically a lot of Twitter advertising, Facebook advertising and working with partners like Liftoff. I find new channels to try and grow this company and drive as much top line revenue as I can. Customer retention is another big focus for me, I’m working hard to increase their lifetime value to Touch of Modern.

What does a quality mobile user look like to Touch of Modern?

A quality mobile user to us is really someone who comes in, is really engaged with our app, makes a lot of purchases, and shares the app with friends. Virality plays an important role in our growth.

How important are app installs?

Installs are fairly important for us. As a top of the funnel action, they serve as the first indicator of how well we can scale the operation.

What strategies have you found work best to convert installs into engaged users or, perhaps in your case, purchasers and sharers?

For us to convert power users, we focus on the channels and DSPs that consistently back out for us. At Touch of Modern, we’re very aggressive about analyzing how are partners are performing month over month.

It’s not always apparent initially, but as we continue to test our variables, we can really hone in on which channels are backing out best over time.

What have you done in the past year to help better monetize your app?

We’ve really focused on to better monetize our app would be making sure that the technology itself, the app itself, works well and it works very simply. The experience you’d have with our app a year ago is much different than now, we’ve invested heavily into the technology and reduced downtime. The result is a reduction in attrition, something we’re keenly focused on.

What do you think about diversifying user acquisition channels outside of Facebook?

We’re very active and aggressive when it comes to diversifying our user acquisition channels, as well as partners that can drive app users to us. Twitter is a great example of a company that has a tremendous amount of traffic and is driving pretty strong user behavior for us, actually.

What are some of the things that you might do differently to market your app during the holiday period?

We do focus a lot more on re-engagement because we’ve already spent a lot of money into acquiring these users. We want to make sure that the app is top of mind for them so we actively re-engage our end users at the places on every device they interact with us.

What’s the biggest challenge that you’ve encountered in app marketing with mobile user acquisition?

Two challenges come to mind. The first is that, as a mobile marketer, the landscape is really fragmented and it can be really challenging to cut through the noise and understanding which channels to focus on for user acquisition.

The second challenge for me is attribution. Touch of Modern began as a web-based eCommerce site and eventually transitioned into an app-first company. Having insight into how our customers are interacting with us, and where they’re converting – whether it’s mobile or desktop, app or website – is a top priority for us.

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

I think the next big thing for mobile marketing is true omni-channel and device type advertising. Facebook is the closest to building out their dynamic product ads to something where you focus in on that person’s experience and how they’re interacting with their devices in their everyday lives.