5 Mobile App Strategies That Still Work in 2017
The mobile app strategies that work in 2017 are not the ones that dominated in years past. Mobile devices have already penetrated most developed markets, and both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store are saturated with apps in every vertical.
From the late 2000s to early 2010s, it was feasible to run a successful app business through viral user acquisition. Apps were relatively new, and even though paid acquisition was expensive, it resulted in organic acquisition once the app started topping the sales charts. Word-of-mouth balanced out the cost of acquisition.
Today, publishers need a new list of mobile app strategies. There are too many apps on the market to depend on viral growth and top-seller charts. Apps that focus on the user experience are more likely to succeed — and that leads to a whole new set of challenges.
Which mobile app strategies are still relevant, and which are obsolete? Read on for a list of every app strategy you’ll need to stay afloat in 2017.
1. Target Your Ads
Source: Freepik
Paid acquisition isn’t as efficient as it used to be, but it’s far from obsolete. The best way to grow your app early on is still to run ads on the App Store and through ad exchanges. The one thing that has changed is the importance of targeted ads.
It’s impractical to build your whole userbase on paid acquisition, so advertising should be restricted to scenarios where you’re only pulling in high-value users. The goal is to acquire users that’ll enjoy the app and stick with it, not just people who’ll inflate the download count. And the best way to acquire targeted users is with data.
Step one is to advertise on platforms that enable complex targeting. Social media platforms like Facebook are usually good at this because of how much data they own. Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) like Fiksu also offer powerful targeting by aggregating ad inventory from multiple sources.
Step two is to track each incoming user to ensure you’re paying for the right people. Usually this is done through attribution platforms like AppsFlyer. These platforms bridge the gap between installers who discover your app from a paid campaign and your own in-app analytics. With attribution, you’ll see which ad campaigns are attracting the most valuable users.
2. Optimize Your App Store Listing
Source: Freepik
App store optimization (ASO) is a lot like search engine optimization (SEO). It’s the process of tweaking your App Store listing to rank higher in search results. Much like SEO, there’s no silver bullet, but every tweak helps.
ASO is among the most relevant mobile app strategies in today’s market because the top-sellers charts are hyper-competitive. It’s very hard to dethrone the current app giants and earn a spot on the top-sellers list, but that doesn’t mean giving up on organic acquisition entirely. Instead, this makes search results even more important as an organic acquisition channel.
There are a few ways to improve your ASO. For simple tweaks, you can follow the tried-and-true advice of including important keywords in your app description, title, and changelogs. Minor optimizations like this usually need to be performed only once.
For more complex ASO strategies, it’s best to use a tool like AppTweak. Dedicated ASO tools make it easier to track multiple keywords and compare search rankings to your competitors’.
3. Don’t Wait to Engage
User engagement is at the very core of your app, and this metric won’t improve by itself. Mobile users have an notoriously low retention rate — apps lose 77 percent of their users by day one, and over 98 percent by day 90. Disengaged users are quick to abandon apps.
It’s hard to encourage app engagement with passive marketing. That’s why actively engaging users is one of the most effective mobile app strategies. By keeping people engaged past the 10-day mark, there’s a better chance they’ll stick around through the first month.
One way that apps accomplish early engagement is with automated onboarding campaigns. With automated messaging, mobile teams can schedule push notifications, emails, and more to reach users the moment they fall dormant. This helps reactivate users while your app is still fresh in their minds.
4. Divide and Conquer
This sample campaign personalizes its content based on the user’s city.
One of our favorite mobile app strategies at Leanplum is segmentation. Most app teams realize that data is an important part of mobile marketing, but many don’t go beyond surface analytics. It’s useful to see aggregate data for how your app is performing, but when it comes to the user experience, it’s even more useful to create segments based on that data.
Let’s say your app’s core users all share similar demographic traits. But you notice that some users complete an in-app purchase within two weeks before becoming daily active users (DAUs), while others fall dormant if they haven’t completed a purchase within the first month.
With analytics, you can dive into the data and understand what caused users to make that first purchase. For a gaming app, maybe players reached a certain level or used up the free in-game resources they started with. Once you’ve identified the key in-app event that leads to conversions, segment new users who haven’t hit this event and plan a messaging campaign to push them through the funnel.
Segmentation is one of the most powerful mobile app strategies because it enables personalization. Everyone’s different, and segmentation is the only way to write messages that feel individually crafted at scale.
5. Assemble the Perfect Mobile Marketing Stack
Source: Freepik
If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably noticed that app marketing demands a handful of specialized software. From advertising to analytics, there’s a platform for just about everything — and you’ll need the best tools on the market if you want to stand out.
Among all of the popular mobile app strategies, this one is probably the easiest to overlook, because it doesn’t directly touch your users. Without the trustworthy data and a streamlined workflow offered by professional tools, you’ll struggle to run the engaging marketing campaigns that users demand.
One issue to bear in mind is that there is such a thing as too many third-party platforms. Each tool you integrate adds to the app’s loading times and (potential) instability. As much as possible, you’ll want to consolidate features into a few all-in-one solutions — which is where Leanplum’s integrated marketing platform comes in handy.
Mobile App Strategies for the Ever-Evolving Marketer
Mobile app businesses are constantly reminded that marketing changes fast. Strategies that worked 10 years ago simply aren’t as relevant today. Marketers can’t expect to outperform the competition without an up-to-date strategy behind each tactic.
If you’re curious to see where an integrated marketing platform fits into today’s mobile app strategies, contact us below for a demo.
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Leanplum is building the marketing cloud for the mobile era. Our integrated solution delivers meaningful engagement across messaging and the in-app experience. We work with top brands such as Tinder, Tesco, and Lyft. Schedule your personalized demo here.
