The green social network GreenApes : an interview with Maike Laumen, dutch marketing consultant, who will explain her collaboration with the brand for developing their app.
1) GreenApes: activity of the company.
« Greenapes is a gamified green social network focused on promoting sustainable behavior. You could compare it with Facebook but solely for sharing your environmental conscious actions. Once you have downloaded this app, you start posting and fill in your sustainable habits like « you use your bike to get to work, instead of the car » and you will inspire others by doing this and you collect points by doing so at the same time. The amount of points you have collected is related to the level in the app. By gathering more points you will be promoted to the next level and will experience other challenges. The collected points, that are called « BankoNuts » can be exchanged for local offers in your city. At the moment GreenApes is active in Florence and the rest of Italy and in Essen, Germany. Other cities are planned to be connected as well. The idea is to inspire other users by sharing your sustainable actions ».
The collected « BankoNuts » can be redeemed at one of the connected vendors.
2) Maike Laumen: who you are?
« I am marketing specialist with experience in different sectors like the financial sector telecom and consultancy. I have had the possibilities to work on different things: campaign management, defining propositions and introduce them in the market, customer journeys, aligning all the channels etc. I worked as an independent marketing consultant working for different companies like ING Bank, Digicel, OnlyHuman, T-Mobile, GreenApes, Alliance Healthcare, and currently for Connexxion « .
3) How started the collaboration between you and GreenApes?
GreenApes post a job opportunity on Linkedin and I have send my curriculum. Some weeks later they contacted my : I have had three interviews via Skype and in the end they have offered me the job as their marketing manager.
4) Your project for GreenApes.
« The app was available in both the Google Play and Appstore, there was a small group of active users in Florence and there were some vendors contracted willing to work together. The assignment was to get more active users of the app ».
5) Which method did you use?
« In order to get more active users we addressed different strategies:
- Get more new app installs: We defined different persona’s and translated those into target groups in Facebook and started with FB advertising. The advertising is focused on both sustainability and the gamification element while the call to action was to download the app with a link to app store. By focusing on people with interest in sustainability and many other variables we were able to be more successful along the way and get the costs per app install dramatically down.
Besides the fore mentioned advertisement we used advertisements including interesting posts with a indirect message to install the app.
- Get more active users: once the app is installed after some days you see the usage going down. We invite them to follow GreenApes on Facebook and share interesting updates from others users and in order to see the full article we refer you to the app. Besides this we send push notifications and in app messages. We also use email in order to « wake you up ».
- Create a strong community with the help of a community manager some events were planned were the active online community could meet in real life. The idea behind is to strengthen the online community.
At the same time the different posts are showed on the website, which also includes a personal section. The website structure is recently adjusted by offering the possibility to give more visibility to the vendors in order to give them more exposure ».
Enter in the jungle, get inspired on green social network greenapes.com
