I Quit

Background.

Quitxt is a free, AI-powered smoking-cessation program that uses mobile SMS text messages and Facebook Messenger to ease the quitting process and ultimately help users break the habit, save money, and live longer. To enroll young smokers into the program, UT Health San Antonio reached out to us to create an engagement campaign that’s more human, direct, and cost-effective than advertising on Facebook.

So we asked, how can we manufacture behavioral and psychological change at scale for the Quitxt platform, using our 5-1-2 framework to create deep relationships with smokers? The answer came in a humanistic approach that could freely and easily help more people adopt a frontier technology to help them quit smoking, once and for all.

What the campaign needed was the human touch. It had to be person-to-person and face-to-face, finding humanity in a potentially awkward situation to break the ice. So we went to the bars, clubs, and venues in San Antonio and across the urban and rural areas of South Texas.

Challenge.

The Quitxt program and the cutting-edge technology behind it were extremely new and, as it often goes at this stage, not many people had heard of it or its successful track record in helping people to quit smoking. Right away, we knew the campaign needed a method that informed young people with a culturally appropriate approach to get them interested in the program, a nuanced position to say the least.

We have to remember that the audience was notoriously skeptical of smoking aid programs (many had tried and failed with other programs before), and since we were going to bars and other venues, many of our targets would be smoking when we approached. The challenge of this campaign was, therefore, minimizing the amount of interruption into scene-specific and demographic-specific audiences.

Since the campaign hinged on quality face-to-face interactions, we also needed a warm approach to establish positive, genuine connections with smokers outside of bars, clubs, and venues. In most cases, this meant empathetically approaching smokers about a smoking-cessation program, at the very moment they’re actively having a cigarette.

The face-to-face approach also presented another challenge — how can we scale the campaign to achieve broader awareness and higher engagement in the hard-to-reach populations of South Texas, while realizing a lower cost-per-enrollment than Facebook ads?

Campaign.

The ‘I Quit’ campaign included a multi-phased approach designed to evolve and improve based on real-time measurements of interactions. The first phase was to scout the street teams who would be the face and the frontline of the campaign. This was a crucial phase of the entire rollout, as we specifically targeted multi-culturally diverse groups by matching our street teams to the demographic and culture of the young smokers at a certain venue.

Together with a cultural anthropologist and a behavioral psychologist, we shaped the message and carefully crafted the conversations we would have with our audiences. We meticulously honed the tone we would use at specific moments, what words were most appropriate and effective for the goals we had in mind. On the personal level, we ensured a genuine and authentic approach within each cultural segment.

With this knowledge, we crafted a range of ideal approaches that lasted no longer than five minutes (the average burn time of a cigarette), backed with a well-crafted questionnaire and measuring system to gauge a person’s interest in the service.

To be eligible for the Quitxt program, smokers had to be willing to quit in the next 14 days, and so we put the street teams through multiple rounds of training to identify and connect with eligible smokers. The teams also rehearsed multiple situations to respond empathetically and in a way that resonated with the journey of quitting. By superimposing municipal demographic data with Google Maps, we were able to select high-impact venues, bars, and clubs based on the target demographics that normally frequented the location. A key insight we uncovered was how our audiences weren’t necessarily from the neighborhoods in the vicinity of the bar or venue, but had traveled to these culturally specific locations that catered to their demographics.

Over nine weeks from January to March 2020, the street teams traveled to the pre-selected venues and approached young smokers with the questionnaire, educational materials, branded lanyards, and QR-coded business cards for contactless interaction (in response to the pandemic crisis). Reaching almost 4,000 individuals in multi-cultural and multilingual areas with an average interaction time of 4.5 minutes, the street teams established rapport with the smokers and measured their motivation and readiness to quit. If the person showed interest, the street teams explained the Quitxt program and its benefits and ultimately invited the smokers to join the AI-powered program via Facebook Messenger or SMS text.

At the end of each day, we conducted exit interviews with team members to assess and improve the quality of their interactions and venue choices.

Results.

For every two hours that we were out interacting with smokers, our street teams enrolled 3 people into the Quitxt program. Just two hours of work to get 3 people on the path to a healthier, longer, and tobacco-free life.

Compared to UT Health San Antonio’s previous advertising on social media, the ‘I Quit’ campaign reduced costs by 50% for every young smoker that enrolled.

Overall, the ‘I Quit’ campaign reached almost 4,000 smokers, establishing a strong and memorable relationship between UT Health San Antonio’s smoking-cessation initiatives and each and every smoker. This relationship drove future enrollments for when smokers were finally ready to quit and needed a trusted program at their fingertips.

Additionally, from the empathetic approach of our street teams to the engaging, face-to-face experiences we created, our process of forging meaningful relationships in a quick manner, and helping people adopt healthier habits, is the subject of an upcoming academic study by Dr. A. Ramirez (Lead Investigator), Dr. P. Chalela (Co Investigator), and Dr. A. McAlister (Program Auditor).

FIVE

The success of the ‘I Quit’ campaign depended on the quality and diligence of our street team selection process. We looked at age, gender, ethnicity, proficiency in Spanish, perspective about smoking, previous experience, and so on, building teams of appropriately diverse individuals and matching them with the right venue.

While team members were allowed to choose their clothing, we nevertheless outfitted the ‘I Quit’ teams with branded accessories to visually unify them. We also gave the team members lanyards featuring the program and university logos and displaying the member’s name in bold white (providing a crisp contrast to an orange gradient background).

In addition to selecting the right team members, it was essential to train them on our well-crafted methodology and question funnel, as well as how to efficiently deliver the AI tool to audiences in the field. Before hitting the streets, we created special QR cards (in English and Spanish) that allowed people to easily open the Quitxt program and enroll in the service.

ONE

Directing our feet on the pavement was a strategy based on three interwoven elements. First, we optimized our process for cultural matching, a key factor in establishing meaningful relationships quickly, and scaled this process with our venue selection to hit our conversion numbers.

The next element was the prioritization of street team training to create an evidence-based approach where we focused on bottom-funnel audiences, and finally, we vigorously reviewed and improved our methods to meet our cost-per-enrollment goals.

TWO

From a very human approach, combined with a drive to continuously review and improve, we leveraged a meticulously crafted campaign to increase loyalty among smokers and the Quitxt service, resulting in referred demand and, more specifically, a 12% increase in users that successfully quit smoking on the platform.

All this was completed with a 50% reduction in the cost for every user who enrolled, with a gross cost per engagement of $3.77 (net cost per engagement of $8.85) and a gross cost per enrollment of $42.08 (net cost per enrollment of $98.90).