What makes for a useful tip over WhatsApp?

Maia doesn't just sit back and wait for questions. Every week we send out a sector-specific 'tip of the week' to expose users to a broader set of topics, drawn from leading entrepreneurial training programs and manuals.

Now that MAIA users number in the thousands, we can look at the data to see what makes for a useful tip via WhatsApp. Ideally this would be based on business impact, our north star, but that data is only starting to fill in. Yet it is pretty clear from the chat data if a user 1) doesn't even read a tip, 2) reads it but doesn't ask any follow-up questions, or 3) engages in a conversation to learn more about the topic and how it applies to their situation. That is the outcome we use here.

Our Data-Driven Rules for High-Impact Tips
After analyzing thousands of user interactions across more than a hundred tip-week pairs, we've distilled our findings into a few key principles.

1. Always End with a Question. This is our strongest result, and it’s not even close. The single biggest factor in driving replies is ending the message with a direct, open-ended question. It turns a monologue into a dialogue.

The Impact: Tips that end with an invitation like "Want help with this? Ask me!" see up to 6 times more follow on topic engagement than tips that simply offer advice without a question.

2. Solve Today's Problem, Not Next Year's. Specificity is key. Tips that focus on a concrete, immediate challenge consistently perform better than those about broad, long-term goals.

The Impact: Tips focused on a challenge that can be tackled this week (like "how to price against a new competitor") consistently double the rate that entrepreneurs will engage with the topic. In contrast, tips on broader abstract topics (like "how to build a brand") are more often ignored. But broader topics like branding are important and can't be ignored! The challenge is to break them into steps that are more concrete and achievable, to help entrepreneurs build progress.

3. Explain How You Can Help. We tested tips that explicitly stated, "Maia can help you by..." followed by a list of how Maia can not just give advice, but also be a tool in implementing the solution.

The Impact: early results here were actually not that impressive, and near baseline. But mixing a content and form test together can muddy the waters, so we're re-testing to better isolate the impact of this form change with a proper A/B test, which we can now more easily do thanks to user volume and improvements to our whole system and data pipeline.

4. Make It Easy on the Eyes. While harder to quantify with a single number, the visual trend is clear. Our best-performing tips are concise, break up text into small paragraphs, and use 1-2 relevant emojis (like 🧐 or 📈) to grab attention, but no more. Long walls of text get ignored, and users don't want an overload of emojis and exclamation points. In other words: more Millenial less Gen Z. 

5. Make it Easy on the Hands. Quick reply buttons are the single best tool to make it easy for users to start exploring a topic, and kick off in-depth conversations. This was such a clear boost that we implemented it way back, even before setting up the pipeline used in our current data-driven analysis. 

We'll keep updating on new results and experiment findings, so that everyone can improve the quality and usefulness of their WhatsApp-based tips.