Mobile Mastery: Buser Achieves 71% ROI Lift and Curbs App Uninstalls with Netcore

Buser, the Brazilian collaborative transportation platform, has revolutionized inter-city travel by offering affordable and flexible bus tickets. As a digital-native business, the Buser mobile app is the single most critical touchpoint for the customer journey, allowing users to find and schedule trips, handle online bookings and payments, and manage reservations efficiently. However, rapidly scaling the business on a legacy marketing automation platform proved challenging, resulting in high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and significant roadblocks to personalization and deliverability – especially on mobile devices.

Industry Context (Industry and Geography Perspective)

Buser operates in Brazil’s intercity road-transport market, one of Latin America’s largest bus travel networks and a primary mode of long-distance travel across the country’s vast geography. As a digital-native, app-first challenger in a traditionally offline, ticket-counter-driven industry, Buser competes on the strength of its mobile experience rather than physical infrastructure alone – making app engagement, retention, and deliverability directly tied to revenue. This mirrors a broader shift among LATAM digital marketplaces and mobility platforms toward AI-led, omnichannel customer engagement to reduce churn and marketing costs as they scale.

Faced with escalating costs and diminishing marketing effectiveness, Buser sought a partner capable of delivering a customer engagement strategy that was truly omni-channel. They needed a platform that could reliably boost repeat purchases, dramatically reduce their uninstall rate, and significantly improve the ROI of their mobile marketing spend.

Objectives: Scaling Mobile Engagement and Loyalty

Buser’s rapid growth necessitated a shift from generic communications to hyper-personalized mobile experiences. They defined three primary, high-impact business objectives for their new engagement platform:

• Minimize User Churn and Prevent App Uninstalls: Despite the app being the main booking channel, a substantial portion of users were actively uninstalling it. The objective was to deploy automated, targeted strategies to quickly detect and re-engage these at-risk users, thereby retaining the existing customer base and defending against churn leakage.
• Accelerate First-Time Buyer Conversion: A large number of newly acquired app users would search for routes but fail to complete their first transaction. The goal was to leverage precise, real-time behavioral tracking to deliver timely, highly contextual and personalized offers during the critical onboarding phase to drive immediate purchase completion.
• Boost Customer Loyalty and Repeat Booking Frequency: Buser aimed to convert the large segment of one-time buyers into frequent travelers. This required better segmentation and personalized lifecycle campaigns to build loyalty and significantly boost the Lifetime Value (LTV) derived from their existing user base.

Buser made the strategic decision to migrate from Salesforce to Netcore, driven by the need for superior deliverability, AI-powered personalization, and a platform that offered a much lower Total Contract Value (TCV) – achieving a 40-50% reduction in MarTech spending almost immediately.

With Netcore, Buser implemented a Comprehensive Customer Engagement Strategy approach, leveraging three key mobile features:

1. State-of-the-Art Analytics and Dynamic

Buser utilized Netcore CE’s state-of-the-art analytics module and real-time behavioral tracking to segment users based on specific in-app actions, like searching for a route but not booking, or uninstalling the app. They rely heavily on features like ‘Is in Segment,’ Control Group testing, and Reachable Audience to drive experimentation, fine-tune targeting, and elevate the Customer Experience (CX).

2. App Push for Retention

App Push became the core channel, responsible for 77.09% of total attributed revenue contribution. Critical journeys were implemented using App Push Notifications to deliver hyper-personalized and contextual messages designed to prevent churn, capture early-stage searches, and offer exclusive discounts.

3. Automated Conversion Journeys

Specific journeys were created to target new users and one-time buyers. For instance, new users who searched but didn’t book received timed App Push Notifications offering first-booking incentives, dramatically improving the conversion rate at this crucial stage.

The shift to Netcore’s AI-powered engagement strategy delivered powerful, quantifiable results across Buser’s mobile marketing KPIs:

Netcore’s attribution methodology showed a remarkable impact:

• Revenue Uplift: The platform contributed to 11.60% of Buser’s overall business in the Jan-Mar quarter of the following year, delivering an impressive Revenue ROI of 113x.
• Mobile Dominance: App Push solidified its position as the undisputed revenue engine, contributing over three-quarters of the platform’s total marketing attributed revenue.
• Sustained Engagement: By implementing proactive retention strategies using App Push, Buser successfully curbed its app uninstall rate by 11% and secured a 4% improvement in repeat purchases among users early in their lifecycle.

By choosing Netcore, Buser not only achieved significant cost savings by reducing their TCV by 40-50% but also armed its marketing team with a truly powerful, scalable, and AI-led mobile engagement platform. The result is a highly efficient marketing engine that consistently drives repeat purchases and generates massive revenue impact directly through the app.