How we increased engagement by 8.4 times

Context: My platform lets users create animations in minutes.

Problem: As is typical of most websites, the bounce rate was very high and the engagement was low. The landing page had a Dilbert cartoon that users could edit. This was a hit on Hacker News. Outside of HN the engagement was low.

I read a book titled 'Contagious - Why things catch on' by Johan Berger. One of the chapters deals with triggers. When a user comes to a page and if it triggers some emotions, the engagement will be higher.

What triggers could I create? Some answers were humor and emotion. So, I hunted down controversial characters. The King was Trump. Then I found his most ridiculous sayings and picked one where he says "My life has been difficult growing up in Brooklyn, where my father gave me a small loan of a million dollars." I created a Trump animation with this saying. Engagement almost doubled.

Could I do some more? The Contagious book also had an example where a viral song had a huge spike every Friday and Saturday. The reason - the song was about the weekend. Well, I knew what day it was, so why dont I use it? So I modified the animation to "My life has been difficult growing up in Brooklyn, where one Monday morning, my father gave me a small loan of a million dollars" I wrote some code that dynamically adds the day of the week.

Engagement went some more.

Okay, what other information did I have that I could use as a trigger. Well... I knew the city of every visitor (from ip geolocation). Bingo! I modified the dialog to include the city. So it became "My life has been difficult growing up in {{$userCity}}, where my father gave me a small loan of a million dollars." I modified the code to insert the user's city.

That did it. The user lands on the site and sees Trump talking about his city on the current day of the week! It pushed engagement to 8.4 times.