How the Pumpkin App Taps into Storyly to Communicate New Features

Pumpkin is a peer-to-peer money transfer app that enables users to instantly exchange cash with friends and family. In addition to providing reliable real-time service to users, it plays an innovative role in France as a finance app incorporating social features. Pumpkin acts as a pioneer in changing the financial habits of the younger generation, having reached more than 1 million users already.

Though digital payments feel intuitive for millennials and GenZ, it’s still critical to provide an ultra-practical flow for adoption and later retention. Aside from bringing many financial advantages to young people, Pumpkin is committed to keeping their acquired users engaged and active. 

Challenge #1 – Finding Ways to Interact with Users

The target audience of the Pumpkin app is used to interactive features due to their affinity for social apps. As app users, they prefer to be active participants rather than passive observers. Combined with a high level of digital literacy, this audience has pushed mobile apps to offer the possibility of interaction and communication with their users. 81% of marketers agree that interactive content grabs attention more effectively than static and 66% see interactive content boosts engagement. Interactivity is crucial to making users feel like they are part of the app’s community, increasing engagement, and fostering loyalty. 

That’s why the Pumpkin app was looking for ways to interact with their users by delivering an engaging in-app experience. This would elevate their in-app marketing activities as Pumpkin marketers can communicate with their users by giving them an opportunity to become active participants.

Challenge #2 – Promoting New or Hidden Features

The proliferation of mobile apps in the fintech category requires apps to differentiate themselves. The Pumpkin app continuously launches new features to simplify users’ lives and stand out from the competition. But introducing new features is only impactful when users can discover and adopt them easily, without interrupting their experience.

In other words, Pumpkin had to unlock the value of these new or hidden features, encourage a trial, and convince them quickly of the long-term benefits. Pumpkin needed a solution to promote both new and existing features to their users in an engaging way so that users can activate them and keep them coming to the Pumpkin app for more.

How Did Storyly Change the Story for Pumpkin?

Mobile-native stories have been proven to be the leading communication medium since their launch or adoption by giant social apps. Audiences love stories because they’re easy and intuitive to consume, while brands love the high level of engagement and response rates made possible with stories. Pumpkin decided to bring Storyly Stories to their mobile app to enrich the user experience through a wealth of interactive possibilities.

Solution #1 – Building a User Feedback Loop with Interactive Stories

As users are highly familiar with interactions on social apps, Pumpkin leveraged this experience to interact with its users and collect first-party feedback. Pumpkin has used polls and multiple choice questions to survey their users about campaigns and potential ideas. With stories, Pumpkin achieved a 46% response rate which was 2.5x higher than other in-app survey methods. Interactive stories enabled Pumpkin to build two-way communication by letting users be part of the app. Once the channel was open, users were happy to provide valuable insights to help Pumpkin marketers make informed decisions about user needs and preferences.

“Storyly is the new way to interact with our users. We use stories mostly to promote new or hidden features and to poll our users, but also to deliver relevant content about our brand. And it works: most of the stories are seen by thousands, and right after, about 50% of the viewers go test the features mentioned!” - Louis Le Bris - Lead Product Manager, Pumpkin App

Solution #2 – Making the Brand Communication Entertaining

Building communication in the Pumpkin app is key for engaging and retaining their hard won users, but no one wants to be bombarded with countless messages and interruptions.  Pumpkin marketers have utilized Storyly to make brand communication entertaining and reciprocal. In-app stories enabled the team to keep in contact with existing users, showcase the latest offers and plans, and ultimately reduce churn by increasing stickiness.

Now, each time Pumpkin marketers need to launch a new campaign or give an important update, they rely on Storyly to reach users via stories in an engaging and non-disruptive way.

Solution #3 – The Shortcut to the “Aha Moment”: Introducing Features with Stories

Every app delivers important features that include new and important benefits for its users. But when users miss feature launches, it’s difficult to re-activate them and unlock their value. That’s why Pumpkin uses Storyly to promote their new and existing (yet hidden) features while onboarding users, by showing the benefits and giving brief guidelines for seamless adoption. 50% of Pumpkin users who watched in-app stories immediately try the communicated features.