Telling Better (Digital) Stories – Spotify’s Impeccable User Engagement
In our previous article on telling better (digital) stories, we spoke about how modern marketers are orchestrating customer communication seamlessly over several marketing channels(email, mobile, onsite) in order to create lasting digital experiences. In today’s article we take you through the journey of how Spotify, one of the best examples of a company that has evolved from being overly traditional to highly targeted and personalized, has created a lasting narrative around its digital engagement landscape.
Spotify is one of the largest brands in the music industry. With over 60 million users, and estimated to add another 60 million in 2017, Spotify is strongly poised to remain as an industry leader in the foreseeable future. One of Spotify’s strength over the years has been its emphasis on customer engagement strategy.
Their engagement strategy is flawlessly built with a lot of emphasis placed on the user’s persona. Even though it has access to almost all the aspects of a user, Spotify focuses and relies on non-intrusive marketing strategies. In fact, they have mastered this form marketing over the years. Spotify is a great example of non-intrusive and highly personalized user engagement.
And therefore, we decided to start with Spotify as our first brand in our deconstruction series of customer engagement narratives.
Spotify’s engagement campaign is a combination of emails, in-app notification, push-notifications and a lot of personalization.
Why Publishers Need A Winning Mobile Engagement Strategy
To study and understand Spotify’s user engagement effort, we went ahead and mimicked a basic user.
- We signed up for a free account. Remember Spotify is one of the few music streaming service that has a free tier, which is supported by selling ads.
- Next, we downloaded their desktop application, as well as their mobile application.
- For the next 2 weeks, we made about 6 playlists and added almost 100+ songs in our collection. We made sure, we give Spotify’s engine enough data that it can profile our user behavior.
- By the end of 2nd week, we moved their premium user plan, which costs $9.99 in the US.
- We ended the campaign at the end of 3rd week.
- Over this period we monitored and studied their user engagement process. We read every email, push-notifications and in-app notification. We also kept a gaze at the apps for on-screen dynamic recommendation, which involves serving suggestion based on user-behavior and app-engagement.
- Once the campaign ended, we developed a dedicated web-page to share Spotify’s user-engagement strategy.
On a whole, we loved Spotify’s engagement process that included, email, in-app and push notifications. However, we noticed that there was room for improvement when it came to promoting the platform and user-based critical actions.
Glimpse of What You’ll Find in the Full Deconstruction
- Why does Spotify communicate in the most non-intrusive manner with customers. Are they doing the right thing by having a passive marketing strategy than a aggressive one?
- How is Spotify using omni-channel engagement to give customer information right when they need it?
- How Spotify is lagging in their social media strategy and engagement.
And much more! Click below to see the full deconstruction of Spotify’s user engagement.
