Monthly Archives:April 2015

Keeping users loyal to your app is an increasingly difficult task for the modern app publisher. With hundreds of new apps vying for the attention of users and the average smartphone owner using only 5 of the 25 apps they’ve downloaded, engaging users beyond the download is vital to an app’s success. While it’s true that the content and features of your app play their part in creating an engaging experience, the best way to fight app abandonment is by implementing a push notification strategy.

Push notifications are an app marketer’s best weapon for fighting low usage and abandonment. A study from Localytics found that users who enabled push messages on average open the app 88% more times than users who disable them, in addition to showing higher retention rates months after installing the app. 

Not only can push notifications bring lapsed users back to an app after a period of inactivity, they can also nurture users towards completing in-app events and conversions. So how can you get the most out of push notifications while increasing app engagement? Here are 4 steps for fighting app abandonment with push:

I love cooking and therefore I’ve subscribed to a number of recipe websites. Every day I go through email digests on my smartphone to explore interesting recipes I’d like to try. Inevitably I click to view one or two that look appealing and am then taken to the mobile site. There is usually a banner giving me the option to view it in the app. When I initially clicked the link in the email, I hoped it would automatically open in the native app, but alas went straight to the app store. This is the crux of the deep linking issue. It’s annoying to view a recipe on the mobile site when I have the app installed on my phone, allowing for a better interface. Why didn’t the link detect that it was installed and forward me there automatically? No doubt, many who feel exactly the same way.

With an ever-more competitive mobile marketing landscape and rising costs of user acquisition, app developers would be wise to think outside of the box and consider alternative acquisition channels. Out of all options available, one is extremely powerful: the users you already have.92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising. Word of mouth marketing (WOM) is seeding a conversation. It’s about getting people to talk about your product with their friends, family, and social networks. While you can’t always control what people are saying about your app, you can make a reference point to frame the discussion.How do you encourage your customers to sell your app for you? User generated content, guerilla marketing, and referral programs are a great place to start.

In app metrics and analytics can provide so many new insights about apps and their users, but all too often developers struggle to convert that data into actionable information that help to improve their apps.

As Ted Nash from TapDaq puts it in his post,

“90% of developers use in app analytics, but only 5% of them know what to do with their data”.

This is shocking.

In this post, I will look at three basic analytics metrics that you can start acting on today to build a better product.

It’s no secret that social communities are at the heart of some of the most successful internet businesses in history. In April 2012, just 18 months after its initial launch on the App Store, Instagram was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion in stock and cash.It was an acquisition that generated a huge amount of conversation amongst tech communities, with many developers and entrepreneurs struggling to understand how a young company with $0 in revenue could justify such an enormous valuation.Instagram was just the start. In subsequent years, Facebook has gone on to acquire WhatsApp for $19 billion, and Snapchat has grown to a valuation of between $10 billion and $20 billion (depending on which article you read!).What is most admirable is the confidence which these business owners have in their communities. For example, prior to its acquisition by Facebook, it had been reported that Whatsapp rejected a bid of $10 billion from Google, whilst Snapchat rejected an acquisition offer from Facebook worth $3 billion.It’s clear that the valuation of these companies is not determined by their revenue. What’s far more important is the scale and engagement levels of the user base with in the product itself. Facebook understand this better than anybody else, and this is proven by the fact that Instagram is now probably worth 10 times what they bought it for.However, you don’t need to build the next Snapchat in order to generate significant value from a social community. Of course, everybody dreams of creating a billion dollar viral network, but I don’t think enough developers realise the value that a community could add to their existing product(s).