How launching a mobile app helped Med School Bro ace its customer experience
It’s no secret that medical school is hard work. Whether it’s prepping for entrance or certification exams, pre-med and med students study. A lot.
The problem is that many traditional study methods aren’t cutting it anymore. This was the inspiration for Med School Bro, an influencer brand that sells modern educational resources, study guides, flashcards, and PDFs to med students all over the world.
Co-founder Brandon Portnoff further explains the origin of Med School Bro, “There are a lot of old and archaic textbooks in the current education system, and the industry has been ripe for innovation. And so one of the things that we bring to the educational space, specifically with medicine, is a fresh, fun way to study for your exams.”
The best part? Med School Bro has found that their colorful, engaging study resources have led to better results than traditional resources.
With a revolutionary study approach to a century-old industry, it’s fitting that Med School Bro was looking to innovate in other areas. As a creator-led brand with over 2M combined social media followers across Instagram and TikTok, they wanted to build momentum with their mobile-primed audience.
The team decided the best way to build on their online customer engagement was with a mobile app. Med School Bro worked with Reactiv, leveraging its AI-powered mobile app platform, to design an app that would score some extra points with their customers.
The goal: personalizing standardized tests with a mobile app
Med school (and pre-med) students face their fair share of standardized tests throughout their academic careers. Whether studying for the MCAT, USMLE, or OSCE, these students cover a lot of content.
As an influencer brand that relies heavily on social media for customer acquisition, Med School Bro recognized that its customer experience already takes place on a mobile screen. The goal was to make that experience even better. Cue the mobile app.
Launching a mobile app with Reactiv filled two gaps in Med School Bro’s customer journey:
- An additional communication channel. Enabling push notifications allows Med School Bro to re-engage past customers and increase retention.
- A first-party customer data source. Unlike customer data from social media, mobile apps provide valuable information that the brand owns.
As a niche ecommerce brand, Med School Bro has a one-of-a-kind customer journey. It sells study resources for medical students at different stages, making it vital to keep a pulse on each customer's academic journey.
As Brandon puts it, “There are some products that we sell to students that are looking to get into med school, and then there are ones that we sell to those already in med school. Being able to be with them throughout that whole process and actually have that app on their phones lets us gain even more data and information on them throughout their whole customer journey.”
Without that data, Med School Bro was operating with a blind spot. Even as a social media-first brand, they faced obstacles with accessing customer info.
The approach: balancing simplicity and flexibility
When launching a mobile app, ecommerce brands have historically had 2 options—build or buy.
Building an app from scratch requires time-consuming custom development and internal dev resources to maintain the tech over time. Alternatively, drag-and-drop solutions are easy to use but limit your flexibility.
“Building from the ground up is a whole undertaking in and of itself. And that whole thing wasn't something we wanted to deal with. On the flip side with the cookie-cutter aspect, our brand is different and we’re not the typical ecommerce store. We didn't want to fit a square peg into a round hole. Having that balance with Reactiv was key in making our decision," said Brandon.
A collaboration as easy as ABC
By working with Reactiv and Lazer Technologies, a digital product-focused agency, Med School Bro can create a one-of-a-kind mobile app that meets its specific needs. Not to mention, at a fraction of the cost of a fully custom solution.
The Med School Bro team worked seamlessly with Reactiv and Lazer Technologies to build out unique features like daily and weekly quizzes, a loyalty program, personalized product recommendations, customer segments, and more.
“Reactiv understands what we want and our goal. We're not treated like just another ecommerce brand. We really feel like they want to see our success."
The strategy: a healthy dose of mobile app engagement
For Med School Bro, a mobile app is more than just an additional touchpoint—it’s a chance to exceed customer expectations.
“At the end of the day, we want to give people a reason to come back into the app,” Brandon explains. While the app simplifies transactional processes like product searches and order tracking, Med School Bro includes unique page experiences that stand out.
Customer-centric features that add value
As a mobile-first, social media brand, Med School Bro aimed to deliver added value to incentivize app adoption. With Reactiv, they implemented several unique features:
- Reactiv App Clips. This allows Med School Bro’s audience to use the app without even downloading it. “It removes that friction,” Brandon says. Importantly, they can still push notifications for abandoned browse sessions or abandoned carts, capturing potentially lost business.
“A lot of the time when someone goes to our website, we don't have their email, so we can't send an abandoned cart or an abandoned browse email, and we kind of lose them forever," said Brandon.
- Educational quizzes and weekly trivia. With Reactiv’s flexibility, Med School Bro was able to build educational features on top of the native shopping experience.
Through interactive ‘Questions of the Day’ quizzes and weekly trivia features, Med School Bro has designed enriching components to nurture potential customers.
The education brand already offers educational quizzing and polling through its social channels—but an app felt like the more natural choice.
Med school students are eager to test their knowledge and will jump at any additional opportunity to prepare for their exams. “The daily quizzes and weekly trivia that will happen in the app are just other fun ways to keep them engaged outside the traditional way of studying, whether they're on the go or in between classes.”
- Personalized product recommendations. Aside from engaging users, in-app quizzes offer a wealth of first-party data that Med School Bro can leverage to deliver hyper-personalized product recommendations.
For example, “A natural kind of upsell is if we have a cardiology question of the day and 20% of the people get it wrong, we can immediately send them a push notification or an offer in-app giving them 15% off our cardiology guide,” Brandon explains.
By learning what quiz questions students are getting right and wrong in the app, Med School Bro can alter its product promotions and increase conversions.
The other lever is discovering where students are at in their med school journey. In-app activity such as first download, account creation date, or product page visits will allow for more personalized push notifications, messaging, and product recommendations.
Prepping for the Next Steps
As Med School Bro ramps up to release the mobile app, they plan to drive engagement in a few key ways:
- Social media influencer campaigns. As an educational creator brand, Med School Brand plans to get the app in a lot of different influencers’ hands to create excitement about the launch and drive downloads.
- Centralized order tracking. Once customers place an order (including on the web), they’ll be prompted to download the app to track progress. Instead of losing email tracking notifications in their inbox, customers will be able to find, monitor, and get in-app notifications on their phones.
- App Download Ads. Med School Bro plans to create excitement on the paid side too with ads to increase adoption.
Med School Bro is determined to continue challenging the status quo of medical school prep. Whether through modern study guides or an engaging mobile app, the education ecommerce brand is committed to creating the best possible experience for students everywhere.
“What I've learned throughout this process with Reactiv is it's actually not as hard as you think to launch your own mobile app," Brandon said.
Want to build a mobile app that works for your brand? Reach out to our team to get started.
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