More than ever, you need to get your message in front of an audience that matters. Consumers are being bombarded by louder marketing messages, and hence, blanket strategies aren’t providing meaningful results. Smart brands are now utilising cohort marketing. Cohort marketing is a systematic marketing approach that helps you group your users based on similar characteristics or behaviours to create more personalised, effective marketing campaigns. The goal of cohort marketing isn’t just to get in front of prospects – it’s to connect with them at the right time, in the right place.
In this blog, we will break down what cohort marketing is, how it works, and why it’s becoming a lifeline for successful mobile and digital marketing strategies. We will highlight real-world cohort marketing examples and how you can utilise cohort marketing strategies for your business.
If you want to track your user data accurately, correctly segment your user segments, and dig deeper into your insights, a Mobile Measurement Partner like Apptrove will ensure you can successfully implement cohort marketing at scale and with precision.
What Is Cohort Marketing?
Before we get into strategies, let’s get straight to the point: What is cohort marketing?
Cohort marketing is a data-driven approach that segments users into “cohorts” based on shared characteristics, when users signed up, which campaign they responded to, or which actions they took in your app. Cohorts are then tracked and analysed over time to see trends in behaviours and performance.
Instead of looking at all of your users as one, perfectly homogenous group, cohort marketing allows you to see how individual segments behave, which will help to highlight what’s working and what needs to change. That level of insight is especially important in order to lower churn, increase retention, and drive lifetime value.
Why Cohort Marketing Beats Generic Targeting
The modern consumer expects personalisation. 71% of consumers get frustrated when shopping is impersonal. Brands that personalise their marketing experiences generate about 20% more customer satisfaction and engagement.
Generic, broad-based marketing campaigns may generate traffic, but they cannot typically convert at scale. Cohort marketing enables you to:
- Understand retention trends within different user groups and segments
- Measure the long-term value of users coming from specific acquisition channels
- Experiment with variations in onboarding, messaging or UX flows for specific cohorts
- Identify power users and build loyalty marketing around them
Cohort marketing focuses on targeting cohorts as groups instead of individuals or broad audience groups. This strikes the appropriate balance between personalisation and scale.
How to Implement Cohort-Based Targeting
Cohort-based marketing requires good data and an understanding of your customer lifecycle. Here’s a starting guide to cohort-based targeting:
1. Define your cohorts
The first step is considering how you want to segment your users. Common criteria for cohorts are:
- Acquisition source (Facebook Ads vs. Google Search vs. Vercel)
- Signup date/week (there may be cohort differences in how users act based on the time they signed up)
- Behaviour-based triggers (first engagement may show different behaviours for users who completed onboarding versus those who completed the onboarding process and purchased).
Cohort definitions act to give you clarity in tracking engagement, retention, and monetisation.
2. Track Performance Over Time
Once you have segmented your cohorts, the next question is, how do they behave over time? For instance, users you acquired in Week 1 of a campaign could have a 40% Day 7 retention, whereas users from Week 3 may drop down to 25%. This insight can help you optimise your acquisition strategy and improve performance.
3. Adjust and Personalise Messaging
Cohort marketing is strongest when fused with dynamic messaging. For example, if a specific cohort of users exited the app post-onboarding, you can provide a follow-up email or in-app message designed to get them re-engaged. This sort of data-backed personalisation could improve retention by as much as 30%.
Real-World Cohort Marketing Examples
Let’s check out a couple of examples of cohort marketing so we can better understand how brands are effectively implementing these methods.
Example 1: Subscription App Optimization
One fitness app evaluated its user engagement and found that users who completed a workout within 48 hours of downloading the app were 3x more likely to subscribe. They used cohort marketing to identify these users and invited them to participate in a push notification campaign promoting early engagement, and saw a 25% lift in conversions.
Example 2: E-commerce Retargeting
An online store was able to create cohorts based on users’ browsing history. For example, they were able to send ads to users who’d viewed a product but not bought it. When measuring the effectiveness of these ads versus general retargeting campaigns, the cohort-marketing-based targeting had 2x the click-throughs and 60% improvement in return on ad spend (ROAS) compared to traditional targeting methods.
These examples above illustrate the strength of cohort marketing when utilised strategically. Cohort marketing allows brands to look beyond surface-level metrics and provide engagements that take action.
Final Thoughts: Cohort Marketing is the Future of Smart Targeting
Cohort marketing gives you a strategic advantage in a world where personalisation is assumed and attention spans are dwindling. With cohort marketing, it’s not merely a matter of sending out the right message, but sending the right message to the right group at the right time.
By using behaviour and lifecycle stage to segment users, you will gain a better understanding of what contributes to loyalty and revenue. There are endless opportunities to use cohort marketing, ranging from e-commerce cohort marketing examples to app retention campaigns, all of which can be achieved when you leap into the world of data and cohort-based targeting.
With products like Apptrove, you can do it all accurately and efficiently. Whether the goal is retention, increasing conversions, or simply understanding your users, cohort marketing can take you from point A to point B.
