How In-App Stories by Storyly Fuel the Use of Tech Among Farmers

ImeceMobil is an agritech platform in Turkey, where agriculture is one of the most productive, but least digitized fields. With a vision to be an app used actively by more than 50% of Turkish farmers, ImeceMobil is working hard to educate farmers with best practices, answer their questions, and introduce them to beneficial tools and products, including digital resources.

Challenge #1: The Lack of Familiarity with Mobile Technologies Among Farmers

ImeceMobil provides farmers with a wealth of functionalities such as agricultural weather reports, personalized fertilization plans tailored to the location and crops, farm loans and insurance applications, plus access to ImeceBazar which enables users to ask for and fulfill agricultural needs. While the combination of these various services in one mobile application would certainly help Turkish farmers improve their business, ImeceMobil had trouble helping their users discover the features and effectively use the platform. The farming population's unfamiliarity with digital technologies was the app’s biggest challenge.

Challenge #2: The Lack of a Genuine Connection And Communication with Farmers to Learn Their Needs and Wants

Understanding the target audience lies at the heart of any successful mobile app. New features, ingenious solutions, and convenient functionalities can only work when they are based on solid insight. This was an issue for ImeceMobil. They were looking for new ways to hear about the needs and wants of their users, in particular, as well as farmers in general. They were in need of a strategy to pave the way for a dialogue between the brand and its target audience.

Challenge #3: Difficulty in Introducing New/Idle Features to Users

Consistent with the above-mentioned challenges, ImeceMobil was trying hard to introduce its features to users. In the end, farmers would benefit from the app and keep visiting it day after day only when they took the core action and started trying these features. Engagement and retention were essential to create value. However, common engagement tools such as sending push notifications or in-app messages failed to create satisfying results. Thus, finding a way to improve feature adoption was a matter of priority for the ImeceMobil marketers. 

How did Storyly change the landscape for ImeceMobil?

The story format has been in use for years on social apps, so most mobile users, regardless of their demographic, are familiar with it. Storyly converted this format into a tool that app owners can use to communicate their services with users in their own app with their own content.

By using in-app stories, ImeceMobil not only created a new way of communication but also started to benefit from the wide range of features that Storyly provides. ImeceMobil leveraged these features to connect with their users, improve engagement and retention, and deliver the best app experience possible.

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Solution #1: Increasing User Confidence with Educational Stories

ImeceMobil constantly aims to educate farmers, guide them to the best agricultural practices, and answer their questions. With its easy-to-consume format and full-screen experience, stories are the perfect vehicle for accomplishing these goals. The ImeceMobil marketers prepared special informative story groups based on seasonal or regional changes. They compiled and communicated frequently asked questions through in-app stories.

The most remarkable result of these educational stories has been the decreased costs of the “Ask an Expert” feature of the app. ImeceMobil offers its users an option in the app to pose their questions directly to experts in the relevant field. They outsource the service and pay experts for the questions they answer. Educational stories started to inform the farmers about the most common questions. Now, the users can find many answers without consulting an expert, and ImeceMobil saves money by reducing the need for the third-party service.

Solution #2: Stories to Announce New/Hidden Features and Services

In addition to educating farmers, ImeceMobil also provides special products such as agricultural insurance and loans. The app has features where farmers can calculate their income and expenses, keep an eye on stock markets, and track weather conditions. 

ImeceMobil is using stories to generate demand for these products and activate hidden features. They are benefiting from editable Storyly CTA buttons to encourage action and increase the number of in-app events. With this strategy, in-app stories introducing income-expense calculation with CTAs increased the event rate of this feature by 45%, while CTAs reached a click-through rate of 38%.

Solution #3: Interactive Stories Provide Insight into Farmers’ Opinions and Experiences

The interactive components of Storyly such as polls, quizzes, and emoji bars are a practical and friendly way to collect user feedback. ImeceMobil was able to leverage interactive stories to shape the app experience in a way that best fits their user needs.

The results have been substantial. Storyly polls in ImeceMobil reached an average of 43% response rate with some as high as 65%-- the highest in their history. Also, ImeceMobil marketers used the interactive components to learn about how users were enjoying in-app stories. Within an educational story group, they asked their users, “Should we continue to provide this information?” On top of the high response rate, ImeceMobil got a 95% positive response rate showing that the users are very satisfied with the format.

Solution #4: Social Share Feature to Grow and Strengthen the Community

The community feeling is an integral part of agriculture. ImeceMobil relies on this idea even with its name, imece, which refers to the collective work mostly in agricultural or rural areas. Carrying on the roots of the farming community was as important for ImeceMobil as bringing digital technologies to the field. 

At this point, Storyly’s shareable stories feature stepped in, which allows users to share in-app story content with their social network. This helps ImeceMobil to both attract new farmers to the app and create a community with increased retention rates and engagement.

“The farming sector is at the early ages of digitalization. Storyly has given us an innovative channel to reach out to farmers, to provide them with accurate and valuable information, interact with them, get feedback, and eventually build rapport. At the same time, thanks to these features that Storyly provided, we have decreased our costs related to communication, reach and visibility strategies.” - Göker Kuzucu - Cofounder of ImeceMobil

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