TextNow Goes to the #MWCA17

Something mobile this way comes - the GSMA’s first ever Mobile World Congress, the Americas edition. Too wordy? Well, let us explain:

We’ve always been fans of the Mobile World Congress event and have really enjoyed heading to Barcelona each year to network, meet our partners, and learn from industry experts and our peers. Last year, they announced that they will be extending their event to North America in 2017, with a world congress held in San Francisco from Sept 12–14th. Imagine our excitement, which was only doubled when two of our growth experts were invited to the panel during the App Valley Summit. They’ll be discussing the future of mobile apps’ growth alongside other mobile-industry giants.

Heading into next week’s MWC Americas event, we’d like to take a moment and introduce Chas Castell and Tyler Cooper, our very own TextNow growth experts, who will be representing us on the panel at the summit on Sept. 13th.

Chas: Our Ad Revenue Guy

Before Chas came into the picture, our advertising strategy for the free mobile app was a little more haphazard. The free mobile app has always had great organic growth potential, which admittedly, we weren’t utilizing to the fullest.

Since then, Chas has revamped our strategy and molded it into an efficient, sustainable, and most importantly, adaptable plan. He quickly recognized the app’s potential and worth to advertising networks, and has been able to introduce methodological techniques to raise demand, and consequently, raise our CPM (Cost per thousand impressions) at a unit level. Having tripled our advertising revenue since his hiring in 2015 — business, as they say, is booming.

One of the main challenges that Chas acknowledges is that the mobile app market is volatile, and it takes great skills to be able to leverage new advertising standards in such a fast-paced industry. Take our recent venture into custom sticker support with our free Android app. We’re optimizing our limited mobile ad space by offering branded stickers through selected keywords. It’s subtle, efficient, and let’s face it, it’s fun.

Looking to the future, Chas is excited to continue cultivating an environment of “intellectual curiosity mixed in with technical, methodical approaches”. A/B testing is the bread and butter of our advertising strategy, as we are building our own data reservoir that we can formulate all future decisions with. He hopes to keep “making sure we are in the best place in the long term while meeting the challenges of today” — spoken like a true Marketing vet.

Tyler: Our UA Guy

Around the year 2013, TextNow was soaring through viral word-of-mouth and positive reviews. But as we all know, it’s too easy to become a one-app-wonder. And so, not too long after, began the reign of Tyler, who was brought on in order to help future proof and accelerate our growth.

Since his appointment as the head of User Acquisition, Tyler has meticulously worked with our data science team to ensure that we are running our campaigns with a positive yield. We’ve been able to build a respectable basin of user knowledge, testing our advertisements on 47 different channels, and optimizing them for the best 8 of those 47. He’s brought experienced knowledge, as well as modern creativity to our campaigns, implementing animated gifs, Facebook carousel ads and the like to increase our exposure to a rising user base.

Tyler’s typical day in the office consists mainly of analyzing data and performance metrics of the campaigns that we are running. But every now and then, something quirky may come along, like running advertising on a recently introduced Snapchat platform.

At TextNow, we pride ourselves on making decisions based on tried and tested data analysis, while also taking risks and being rewarded for innovation and creativity. As the business expands, Tyler is looking forward to future internationalization with our marketing- being able to dip our feet in new markets, and optimize our re-engagement stats in creative ways.

We can talk endlessly about the different strategies and tricks that Chas and Tyler use to keep TextNow at the top of your apps list. But AppNext has already done all the work for us — they’ve set up a panel where other talented figures alongside Chas and Tyler will be talking about their experience, and how they face their own daily and future challenges. So don’t delay, register for the App Vally Summit today (Perhaps they can teach that rhyming is not advertising). And if you can’t make it, keep an eye out here and on our Twitter channel for live coverage of the panel!