Lumos Labs Drives Users to Form Brain-Building Habits with Email and In-App Messaging from Braze

Lumos Labs’ Lumosity is a simple online tool that allows anyone to train their core cognitive abilities. From neuroscience to visual art, Lumos Labs combines diverse disciplines to create their engaging brain-training platform Lumosity, bringing sophisticated cognitive research to everyone. Offering both free and paid subscription models where users can play and engage with a variety of brain games and exercises, paid Lumosity subscribers gain the added benefit of choosing from a wider variety of daily exercises and adaptive software that tailors a unique experience for their skill level and strengths.

Customer engagement is important to Lumos Labs because their mission is to improve the lives of users by exercising their memory, information processing, and problem solving abilities. Users who stay engaged with the Lumosity platform are more likely to subscribe to access paid features and insights, and to renew their subscriptions to continue seeing the added benefits the platform provides.

So when Lumosity wanted to re-engage subscribers, encourage them to form positive long-term exercise habits, and convert more users to paid subscribers, they turned to Braze to upgrade their customer engagement strategy.

Stronger Brains with Increased Engagement

Lumos Labs begins each year with a New Year’s Resolution campaign in an effort to attract new users to their free offerings and motivate dormant users to re-engage with their brain training tools. However, in the months following the completion of those campaigns, the team at Lumos Labs saw that the initial engagement would wear off.

This finding led the Lumos Labs team to conclude two key things. First, that their product experience might need additional support to help users build sustainable long-term habits around training. Second, their customer engagement efforts were not providing clear enough incentives to keep users working toward their goals.

So, Lumos Labs looked to Braze to create a new style of New Year’s campaigns that would:

• Aid users in building habits around repeat use
• Provide additional onboarding support so users could better understand the platform’s features
• Reward engaged free subscribers by giving them temporary access to premium-only features
• Incentivize users to upgrade to paid subscriptions so they could unlock features that would highlight their progress and track their streaks

Incentivizing Positive Habits

Lumos Labs leveraged Canvas, the Braze customer journey tool, to deliver a series of emails and in-app messages (IAMs) that would encourage users to unlock their Game Progress Report with a three-day streak using the platform. The same Canvas was also set up to remind users via IAMs and email when they missed a daily exercise, encourage users who started an exercise to complete it, and celebrate accomplishments of those users who successfully completed exercises.

Canvas also allowed Lumos Labs to further segment users based on their activity levels, rewarding engaged users by showing them how much they had progressed and the benefits of playing consistently, as well as splitting off users who needed extra help getting started, reaching them with triggered messages if they didn’t play games within two days of receiving their initial email.

By using events tracking to monitor how many days a user had been in a streak, Lumos could also trigger action-based motivational messages to encourage users to keep it up the minute they completed a game.

Finally, the Braze platform helped Lumos Labs test to see how responsive users are to specific language within their messaging and realize that specific words, like “challenge,” yielded better results and that people responded better to messaging that encouraged competition.

Lumos Labs’ Results: More Engaged Users

As a result of their New Year’s campaign with Braze, Lumos Labs saw a 350% increase in streak completion rate when compared to using a singular email campaign. They also saw a 170% increase in free user engagement rate over the previous year’s single-email messaging strategy and 21% lift in paid user engagement rate over the previous year. After the New Year’s campaign, Lumos Labs ran a follow-up promotional sale—users who received this promotion were 11% more likely to purchase a subscription during the sale than users who did not.

Final Thoughts

Keeping users motivated to continuously derive the most value from your products can be a challenge, but building an encouraging cross-channel messaging strategy around usage incentives and streak-building can help. With Braze, Lumos Labs is keeping users motivated to continue exercising their cognitive function and maintain their streaks, which aligns closely to both their mission and business model.

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