How to Boost Your Mobile App User Strategy for Maximum Impact?

How To Make Your Mobile App User Strategy More Powerful

Summary

Every business owner and mobile app developer builds applications with an intention to gain maximum number of downloads. With the increasing competition, one needs to think out-of-the-box and come up with unique app user acquisition strategies to grab a larger audience and boost the mobile app downloads.

Introduction

The app market is growing at an incredible rate – there are a staggering 1.8 million apps in App Store and another 2.8 million in Google Play Store. App marketers are facing a unique challenge of battling for their prospects’ attention in an ocean of competition.

The market success of an app is measured by mobile app engagement and user retention. Before we dive deep into the finer points of user acquisition strategy that bring a high number of mobile app installs, let’s examine these two terms.

Engagement is, in a nutshell, a metric that shows how active the app users are. An industry standard defines highly engaged users as those who have at least 11 app sessions per month.

Retention is a percentage of users that keep returning to the app on a regular basis - or once within 30 days, according to Localytics industry standards. The definition of good retention rates varies from one app enterprise to the next and depends on the nature of the app.

Now, let’s take a look at the top five ways in which you can improve your app’s user acquisition, engagement and retention rates.

Leverage Push Notifications

Acknowledging your app users is very important for retention. A personalized brand interaction makes users more likely to return to an app for at least 11 more sessions.

This interaction that shapes the user journey, can be a simple push notification that welcomes users or provides useful tips as they progress through it.

For instance, you can strategically reach out to your users and supply them with relevant deals based on their behavior patterns and location.

Push notifications are very effective at re-engaging users who have dropped out of the conversion funnel and do not use the app as frequently as before. Implementing this type of user interaction reduces app abandonment rates from 25% to 19%, according to the same study as above.

List Your App's Benefits In Store Listings

Engaging potential users is vital even in the pre-sale or pre-download period. The most impactful way to do this is by demonstrating how your app addresses and solves the pain points faced by users daily.

Users are looking for the long-term benefits the apps can provide. To explain these benefits, come up with a persuasive messaging that points out your app’s unique value propositions and lists out the features that users will find helpful.

This app store optimization matters because as much as 90% of users explore the apps by browsing through the app store options.

The ways in which you can optimize your app’s page to demonstrate the benefits – and become top-rated in the process - include:

  • Read competitors’ products reviews to find variations of unique keywords for your app
  • Upload a video showcasing the app in action to rank higher in app store
  • Use bullet points in the app description to highlight its key features and benefits that bring value to users
  • Think about your users’ number one pain point and explain how your app solves it in the description's first sentence itself

Communicating your app’s benefits and then delivering solutions based on the promises made from your app store’s page leads to an increase in number of engaged users.

Build an App-Oriented Website Or a Landing Page

When advertising and pointing out your app’s value, you shouldn’t limit yourself to app store listing only. Having a standalone website for app promotion is a great user retention and engagement tool too.

A single-page website will do as well – as long as it is packed with copy that provides valuable knowledge to potential users, videos that describe how your app works and calls-to-action that nudge prospects toward conversion.

An efficient way of boosting the number of your native app users is to drive your website traffic to your app’s landing page/standalone minisite. Another benefit of having a webpage dedicated to your app is the increase in brand awareness through greater visibility.

Your app’s trustworthiness also increases when you link your app to your website, which results in greater user acquisition.

Companies that provide the best web design services advise building a standalone app webpage for the benefits it brings to the app project, including search engine visibility and wider range of marketing options.

Offer A Freemium Version Of Your App

Offering a freemium model of your app will not gravely compromise your product monetization, but will create an active community of users.

The users are much more likely to convert when the required commitment on their end is to install the free version of the app. This lets users explore your app fully before choosing to buy the premium version.

A freemium or demo version of the app should contain all the necessary benefits users are looking for in order to solve their pain points. The paid model should build on that and offer even more enhancements and features.

Another important consideration in favor of freemium apps is that they have a much higher acceptance rate when users recommend them to their friends and family members. Some of the most successful apps on the market – like Dropbox and Duolingo to name a few – are using this business model.

Resort To Paid Advertising And Retargeting

Digital marketing connects your app with prospective users. To acquire more users for your app, utilize app marketing platforms such as Start App, Media.Net or AdMob.

Segment your audience and target each segment with an appropriate ad format to maximize conversion rates. There are different categories of ad networks based on cost:

  • Cost per click (CPC)
  • Cost per acquisition (CPA)
  • Cost per install (CPI)
  • Cost per view (CPV)

Some other tools to target ads at different audiences include:

  • Facebook ads to reach maximum number of relevant audiences through this social media platform
  • App Store Search Ads
  • Promoted Tweets

For prospects that visit your app website or app store page but do not download the app, there is retargeting - a type of advertising that lets you re-engage with such users.

Retargeting shows the ads to users based on their browsing history. Since they are highly personalized, retargeting ads are very effective at persuading users to download the app.

These are the best practices of an effective retargeting campaign that boosts user acquisition:

  • Use convincing messaging and visually appealing graphics
  • Use deep links to send the users to your app directly
  • Automate the process to remove the users that have already downloaded the app

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sunny Chawla
Sunny Chawla
Sunny Chawla is a CEO at AIS Technolabs which is a Web/App Design and Development Company, helping global businesses to grow. He is having expertise in Digital Marketing, Game Development & Product Development.