What’s the ROI of iMessage Stickers?
I get this question a lot. Mostly from brands that are deciding if iMessage Stickers are a good investment. The honest answer is; I don’t know yet. Truthfully, no one knows right now. iOS 10 was released 17 days ago and no one’s sharing their performance yet.
Here’s what I do know. iMesssage Stickers have the ability to become the most powerful app marketing mechanism we’ve ever seen.
Let’s start here:
That’s some real shit. Half of US smartphone users download ZERO apps per month. The fight for user attention is real and it’s getting more real as time goes on.
With this in mind, let’s talk about the value of iMessage Stickers.
iMessage Stickers are full apps. They are cheap and relatively easy to make. They are also extraordinary easy to download and share. Don’t be fooled, they are not constrained to iMessage. They are gateways to the users home screen.
Anyone that downloaded your sticker pack from the Message app store can send the sticker to someone that doesn’t have the sticker pack on their device. It gets displayed with an option below the sticker to download your app. This makes the sticker inherently viral. Additionally, the app associated with the sticker can be a full iMessage app or even a full iOS app.
Think about this… if you send someone a simple sticker, you can also share an entire app infrastructure that reaches across iMessage to the home screen of the iOS device at any time now and in the future. This could be a solution to the dark days of app downloads.
Here’s an example: A new movie where the actors are iMessage Stickers distributed for free in the Messages app store. Your friend sees the sticker, likes it and wants to engage back with you. They download the app too, without ever leaving iMessage. You share with two friends, they share three friends and just like that, you have viral adoption of both your brand and your app.
This reminds me of the early days of social media. Everyone was asking “What’s the ROI of social?” I’ll let Gary Vaynerchuk answer that for you…
