How to build Streak Messages that are truly engaging!

Streak messages, a powerful tool for marketers to engage and re-engage users, are often hailed as a 'best practice' due to their simplicity and effectiveness. However, the real challenge lies in the continuous effort required to build and maintain streaks. A well-crafted streak that’s not timely or relevant won’t bring users back.

How can you build streak messages with a user journey builder at your disposal?

1. First, think about what motivates a user to come back every day. 
2. But it's not enough to do it once—you have to think about it seven times, once for each day of the streak.
3. Once you have your messages, start building your journey builder. Simple events like "Did the user open the app? Yes or No?" can guide your process. If yes, don’t send this message again until tomorrow. Repeat this process for the next six days, and you have your streak message sequence.
4. If you are brave and have the time, you could add a few variants to the days (like an A/B split). Or you could duplicate the journey and split your users into groups to test if it’s better to send these notifications in the morning or the evening. 
5. You must test your streak messages and see if the logic works the way you want it to.
6. If you do the split runs, you go back and reevaluate the messages. If a certain variant does not work, then either get rid of it or add a new one. If you decide that one brings the most clicks, you can shut down the other two. It's definitely a lot of maintenance. 

Reminder: This is only for seven days. Imagine you want a 14-day or 30-day streak. 

But how effective is this?

The reality is that rules-based systems are great for managing predictable behaviors, but users are anything but predictable. The time of day, the relevance of the content, and even the frequency of these messages all play crucial roles in deciding whether or not a user will engage. And when you're setting up these rules, it’s easy to overlook how much the user experience varies from one person to another.

If interesting and well-timed, other message types can also lead to user engagement and inadvertently start and maintain a streak. The key is to create content that captivates and motivates users. 

Instead of building a message for each day, you could have the following three message types within an hour’s work using Aampe:

1. Start a streak motivation message
2. Maintain a streak message
3. Close to streak reward message

Now, you could say, ‘But that is not enough; the user needs to receive a message every day.’ While that is arguable, I want to show you the magic of Aampe—in Aampe, one message does not mean one message for all users. We call it a message group, and you have thousands of alternates within the message group. You don’t have to create thousands, but you can create that many by breaking down your messages into components!

In the image below, we created 7200 messages within 30 minutes! That way, users never get bored by the content because they don’t receive the same streak message daily. By the way, there are 7200 messages with the tone: “fun coach.” You can leverage the tone components to add more coach styles, like the “strict coach” or the “casual coach”. Additionally, you combine it with other components like value propositions and offerings that speak about different features and values of your app.

So you can write it in many tones to personalize the message by tone as well. Wait, what? Let’s summarize. We personalize:

• The tone
• The incentive
• The time
• The day
• The message type
• The value proposition
• The call-to-action

That’s right! And we can do even more!

Moreover, Aampe’s agentic approach allows you to fully focus on the content and how you could speak to your users while the agents learn from your users what the best message type is and the day and time they should send the message. 

If you are working with incentives, you can even learn what incentives motivate users the most!

‘So, what about maintenance?’ you might ask. I'm glad you asked! When you create that many alternates and delegate the rest of the work to your agents, you can return to Aampe occasionally. You can see specific labels and alternates on the homepage that work well. You can also check the label and message performance and see if you should add more content. This easy monitoring and adjustment process puts you in control and ensures your messages always perform at their best. 

As CRM managers, our ultimate goal is to provide our users with the best possible experience with our product. We strive to be masters of our craft. With the right tools and the rise of AI agents, we are enabled and inspired to create the most delightful experiences for every individual user. By leveraging the technology that the big players in the industry use, we can truly make a difference in our users' journeys.