Turning downloads into transactions, and transactions into habit

The situation

Caura is an app that brings together a lot of the admin that comes with owning a car: road tax, city charges, MOT, servicing and insurance.

The difficulty was that most of those things don’t happen very often. Someone might download the app today but not need to renew their insurance or tax for another six months. If they didn’t have a reason to use Caura fairly quickly, there was a good chance they’d disappear before one of the more valuable transactions came around.

Insurance was particularly difficult. It was a very competitive market, and Caura wasn’t always price competitive because it didn’t yet have the scale of the bigger providers. Buying customers who were already shopping for insurance was therefore expensive.

So the job was partly to find drivers who had a reason to use Caura now, and partly to give them enough value afterwards that they would still be around when the next transaction came up.

What I did

We became much more targeted about acquisition. New clean-air and congestion schemes gave us a good reason to reach drivers at the point they actually needed help, so we targeted by geography and vehicle profile and supported that with local partnerships, PR and content.

Bristol’s Clean Air Zone was a good example. We worked with the Mayor of Bristol, produced video content and appeared on BBC Radio Bristol to explain how the new scheme worked and how Caura could make paying for it easier.

Once someone had signed up, I worked closely with product on getting them to make a first transaction quickly and then giving them reasons to return. We changed onboarding and lifecycle communications, introduced referrals and AutoPay, surfaced the next useful task after someone completed one, and used information such as renewal dates to remind people when another service became relevant.

Paid acquisition was expensive, so we also invested heavily in organic content around the things car owners were already searching for: clean-air zones, road tax, MOTs, servicing and similar questions.

As the business changed, I also led a rebrand and supported the move towards B2B white-label partnerships.

Getting someone to download the app wasn't enough. We needed a reason for them to use it now, and another reason to come back.

The result

Quarterly transacting users grew from fewer than 1,000 immediately before I joined to nearly 18,000 at their peak, c.19x higher.

The proportion of new users making a transaction in their first month doubled from 20% to 40%, acquisition cost halved, and the business reached seven-figure gross merchandise value.

We made a lot of progress in getting people to use the app and come back to it. The harder problem was keeping customers engaged for long enough to reach some of the higher-value annual products, particularly insurance. That was partly a product and lifecycle problem, but it was also a feature of the category: many of the things Caura helped with simply didn’t happen very often, and insurance wasn’t always competitive enough on price.

The business increasingly moved towards B2B white-label partnerships alongside the consumer product.

What it took

This was quite a hard model to make work. We didn’t have the budget to buy large numbers of customers in the obvious places, and some of the things we ultimately wanted to sell them might not become relevant for months.

That forced us to be inventive about where customers came from and what happened after they signed up: local partnerships, PR, useful content, tighter targeting, better onboarding and much closer work between marketing and product.

The important thing was not just getting more downloads. It was getting people to do something useful with Caura quickly enough that they had a reason to keep it.