How The Motley Fool dramatically increased retention rates and reduced churn with Chameleon and Twilio Segment

Trailblazers of financial freedom

The Motley Fool’s purpose is to make the world smarter, happier, and richer. Since 1993, they have been educating the public on how to make better financial decisions and guiding their members on how to improve their financial well-being, by investing in great companies for the long term.

Through The Motley Fool’s flagship online investing service, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, their members receive expert stock recommendations and a wealth of resources to help them invest better. With these recommendations in hand, members can start to build or add to their own stock portfolio and reap the benefits of intelligent investment ideas backed by a track record of outperforming the stock market. 

Their Motley Fool Stock Advisor 1-Year Membership offer typically comes with a 30-day membership-fee-back guarantee. If new members decide the service isn’t right for them, they can cancel within their first 30 days and receive every penny of their membership fee back, no questions asked. 

Knowing that, for new members, buying their first stock can be a challenge, The Motley Fool wanted to find a way in which they could onboard new members to their Stock Advisor service and show them how to make the most of their expert stock buying tips—quickly.

💡 Chameleon tip: When it comes to user adoption, timing is critical. Improvements in a user’s first five minutes can drive a 50% increase in lifetime value.

No fooling around with onboarding

Historically, The Motley Fool’s Stock Advisor onboarding process was primarily driven by email only. They wanted a low-tech way in which they could communicate with members on the service site and guide them towards key features.

The Motley Fool found that the first eight days were the most influential for their members and that the actions taken in this period paved the way for customers to stick around past the guarantee point. They needed a solution that would engage and nudge these first-month members to kickstart their investing journey.

Chameleon’s Tours fit the bill perfectly for The Motley Fool team. They needed a solution that allowed them to get started quickly and work in a lean style, without being overly reliant on their engineering resources. As Chameleon is a no-code tool, The Motley Fool team was able to hit the ground running and independently start building their onboarding tours. 

📧 Chameleon tip: Email onboarding is one of the most common methods for onboarding, but it comes with its drawbacks. The average open rate of an email is 22% and users receive these communications when they’re not actively using your tool—meaning your onboarding tips are easily forgotten and not put into action.

After testing Chameleon’s Chrome Extension and launching a Tour on their Stock Advisor site, Nate and his team saw the benefits of Chameleon rapidly. With their first onboarding Tour, they saw drastic improvements in driving key actions that lead to success during the 30-day membership-fee-back period, like adding a Stock Advisor stock recommendation to their “Favorites” list. Furthermore, within two weeks they already saw increased retention with those user cohorts. 

The results of using Chameleon to onboard members speak for themselves. The Motley Fool saw a 9% reduction in churn over the members’ first 45 days and a 20% increase in users taking key stock-buying actions from using Chameleon to engage and steer users towards financial freedom. Reducing churn and increasing key stock buying actions contributed to a 39% increase in overall net cash per member—all from in-app onboarding Tours.

Targeting the right users, at the right time

As well as being able to show new users onboarding Tours, The Motley Fool team needed a product success tool that would integrate with Twilio Segment. Segment is a customer data platform (CDP) that helps businesses collect, clean, and control data.

📈 Chameleon tip: We highly recommend installing Chameleon through Segment. It makes it much more powerful and can help your tech stack function more harmoniously. 

The Motley Fool leverages Chameleon’s Segment integration by using Segment’s Twilio Engage audience management and segmentation capabilities, sending them to Chameleon, then selecting User Segments for in-app messaging based on that criteria. This means that they can then engage with users who are at risk of churn and encourage them to take key actions with Tooltips or understand when users are actively engaged and show them upsell opportunities with Hotspots.

To further ensure that members are seeing the right Experiences, Nate makes use of Chameleon’s Single Page Application Support (SPA Support). This means that Chameleon can identify users and then regularly poll them to check whether an Experience should show based on changing criteria e.g. the page URL or user activity. 

Upselling members into new services

After launching their first round of onboarding Tours in their Stock Advisor service, The Motley Fool team quickly leveraged Chameleon Tours across their product suite to deliver targeted upsell offers to existing members. They’ve since generated sizable incremental revenue from these targeted upsell offers and introduced members to new services they may not have known existed. 

💡 Chameleon tip: You can use upsells to increase users’ lifetime value and help them understand further the benefits of your paid plans. One of the best ways to gain more revenue is to nurture and upsell to your current customers, who already love you, and prompt them to purchase more.

Nate and his team have an experimental mindset and are always testing theories and hypotheses to see where they can improve their upselling prompts with copy, emojis, and design tweaks. Since their first on-site Experience with Chameleon, they began A/B testing their Tours to get the best results.

Working with Chameleon for future success

As The Motley Fool is a Chameleon Growth Plan customer, they have full access to a dedicated Account Manager and Product Reviews. The Motley Fool meets with the Chameleon team every month to go over what they’re building and get custom advice on how they can continue to get the best results from their onboarding and upselling.

Nate and The Motley Fool team are delighted with the results they have seen with Chameleon and are now looking forward to more experimentation, using Microsurveys, and collaborating further with their marketing team to ensure that they can further improve their lifecycle messaging experience with Chameleon.