Increase Acquisition & Retention: Mobile App Dev Tips

These Tips are Organized in Wide Range according to the Phases of App Development Process

User Acquisition Strategy

Tips for acquiring new app users:

1. Create a product that solves the problem: Are you sick of standing in the cold corner, trying to hail a taxicab on a cold night? Lyft.

   Lyft is a great option if you dont have the time or desire to travel 45 minutes to get to a class.

   Use Duolingo.

   Find the solution to your problem.

   Do it in a unique way.

   This will increase word-of-mouth referrals.

   Referrals are important.

2. Incentivize your users to refer to your app: Uber did an amazing job of offering ride credits to people who referred to the app.
3. Create a waiting list: People are always looking for what they dont have. You can capture demand early and build up a list of email addresses by creating a waitlist. Youll be able to announce that your app is now generally available and have a large number (hopefully thousands!) of people eager to download it. Its easy to create a landing page for your website using platforms such as Squarespace, Unbounce, or Wix.com, and we have many web application development company. This can be used to capture email addresses.
4. Use a freemium plan to make your app free: You might get more downloads if you offer a free version. For premium features, you could offer virtual currency purchases.
5. You can make your paid app completely free for a short time: No worries! No worries! Send the promotion via Twitter to their accounts or directly to them on your website.
6. Create and promote content about the problem that your app solves: Provide value to customers through blog posts, ebooks, videos, or webinars. To reach the right audience, you should target keywords and topics that are relevant to your app. Your content will help people overcome their challenges and make you a thought leader in this space. To increase network effects, promote the content on your blog or social media profiles.
7. Answer Quora questions: Ask questions about the pain points that your app solves. This will help you build awareness of your target audience. The Quora team may recommend your article to major media outlets if you provide a valuable answer. Quora picked up my post, and it was published by Forbes, Inc., The Huffington Post, and Business Insider. It generated more than 7,700 shares and 33,000 views, all for absolutely nothing.
8. Local marketing events are worth hosting: In a world where everything is digital, its easy to forget how important in-person events can make a difference in building buzz. Host an event to build a network of champions who could be the backbone of your apps success. Meetup can help you find events or promote yours.
9. Pay for acquisition: Consider this route if you dont see results with your in-app marketing and organic marketing efforts, consider using the paid acquisition route. This route can be used on channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and Apple iAd. Pay acquisition is a process that requires you to answer three questions:

1. Is the lifetime value of the user worth the investment?
2. Do you stack rank your acquisition channels on the basis of ROI?
3. Are you aware of the paid acquisition route that leads to app installation?

To find the answers, you can use mobile attribution tools such as Apsalar and Adjust.

10. Reach out to the media: The press is a great way for short-term awareness and can often lead to an increase in downloads. Reach out to publications such as TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Forbes, CNN, Forbes, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, and Business Insider, Inc. You dont have to be in PR to pitch to the media. LinkedIn allows you to find editors for each publication. You can write a message about how your app can change the world (use app metrics wherever possible) and give them access.
11. Strategic partnerships are important: Find mutually beneficial partnerships to expand your apps reach. If you are developing a workout app that is suitable for cyclists, you might reach out to local shops or national brands and offer a special premium feature for their customers in return for promotion and good customer experience.
12. Cross-promote in other apps: If more than one app is in the store, and they are in similar categories (for instance, gaming), you can include a call for action to promote other apps.
13. You can experiment with the way you ask users to review your app: Ratings and reviews are a prominent component of an apps listing. They can influence people to download or tap through. Reviews are social proof. Its likely that the app is popular if it has been liked by many others. What can you do to increase app reviews? Try out different ways to ask users for reviews. This blog post contains examples and ideas for testing.

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App Discoverability

These are App Store Optimization (ASO) tips and tricks to make your app more searchable in the store.

1. App Store Search is a powerful tool to increase app store visibility: Sensor Tower claims that over 60% of apps are found through App Store Search. There are more than 2 million apps available in major app stores today. Its amazing that there are so many AppStore Optimization strategies to help you get your fair share. App store optimization is the process of increasing the visibility of an application in the app store. This is done to increase traffic to your app page and encourage people to download your app. These are some great tips from Sensor Tower, an app marketing intelligence tool that can help you get started with ASO. You can also use their tools to help you with the tips and tricks below.
2. Keywords are the most important thing when optimizing your apps visibility: Keywords (words and phrases) should be relevant to your app. If your app offers dog walking services on-demand, then the keyword "dog" may not be very valuable as it does not indicate intent to download that particular use case. However, the phrase "dog walker," which is a better indicator of intent, might be more useful. You want someone to download your app after they find it. Unrelated search terms/phrases are likely to bring up your app listing. They wont be your target audience and will not download your app.
3. Keyword competition and traffic are important: Take into account how competitive these keywords are. Consider the number of keywords that you are competing with. You can try another keyword if there is too much competition. Heres a look at LinkedIns app keyword traffic via Sensor Tower. Sensortower.com allows you to enter any app and view which keywords drive traffic to that app.
4. Keyword placement is important: Sensor Tower points out that there is a direct correlation between having a keyword in an apps name and ranking for that keyword. If you use the same keyword multiple times, your app could be considered spamming, and you may lose your #1 ranking for high-traffic keywords.
5. How to determine keyword weight: Keywords in app titles for both iOS and Android are the most heavily weighted keywords in the algorithm. You can improve your rank for specific keywords by including them in your title. Keyword density is important for Android apps and also for Android app development company. Its not only in the description but also in the title.
6. Target long-tail keywords and multi-word keywords: Sensor Tower states that app publishers often target single-word keywords. They then wonder why their apps Difficulty Scores and rankings are so low. Multi-word keywords tend to be searched less frequently but are also less competitive. Combinations of single-word keywords will automatically rank you, but target phrases or "long tail keywords," which can be easier to rank for, will not. The long tail is an excellent place to begin new apps/developers.
7. Make an impact with an icon: This makes a big first impression. You have probably tried different versions. This can be done by testing different designs on mobile advertising networks like Admob, Google Adwords, and Facebook and measuring how users react to them before rolling them out to the app store. A quick tip is to not put the apps name in your icon. Other tips and tricks to increase downloads than keyword strategy.

Read More: 7 Reasons Why You Should Take Mobile App Development Service

App Performance

You want to make the first user experience memorable. Research shows that users will abandon your app if they have a poor first experience.

This is according to studies.digital Experiences include more than just a good UX design, intuitive useability, and modular code. Your apps success depends on its infrastructure and performance. These are some tips to ensure your app runs smoothly and quickly:

1. You must monitor your app regularly: App behavior can be affected by cloud services, device updates, and even other apps. An OS update can significantly increase crash rates in your app. You can monitor the performance of your app through all variables to avoid being reactive to issues. Performance management solutions like Crittercism and Crashlytics give you visibility into your apps while in production. This allows developers to be proactive and fix issues quickly. It also provides insight into all aspects of your apps performance, including latency, crashes, and transactions, even if it isnt yet in production. To mitigate risk, you can also use Optimizely phased rollouts to leverage these tools.
2. A reliable cloud provider is the best choice: The user experience can also be affected by network performance. The spinning wheel, which is a sign of network slowness, is something everyone hates. However, its difficult to simulate these conditions during development and testing. Crittercism data shows that 68% of apps use five or more cloud services, and 17% use twenty or more. Your app will be affected if even one cloud service slows down. Choose a reliable cloud provider such as Parse!
3. Performance in the real world is important: Your work doesnt end when you launch. In fact, its only the beginning. Monitoring your apps latest version is not enough. Retail apps, for instance, have a high conversion rate on older versions of their apps. You need to ensure that these users are well-supported. There is nothing worse than releasing an app to the wild, where hundreds of millions of variables could impact its performance.

Analyze User Behavior

Do you have deep insight into the behavior of your users? Deep insights into user behavior are essential to driving user growth, retention, and increased monetization.

Analytics can help you do that.

1. App analytics is complex: There are three levels of metrics app developers should consider. You should start by tracking level 1, but as your company grows and becomes more sophisticated, you can expand your analysis to get a complete view of your apps performance.

1. Level 1: Counters
2. Level 2: What are my problems? (Funnels Retention, Segmentation Events)
3. Level 3: What drives growth? Behavior-Based Cohorting/Data Science

2. Your Level 1 analytics can be measured: Common metrics include MAUs, DAUs (Daily Active Unifieds), page views, revenue, and page views. These metrics are crucial and provide a baseline for your apps success in terms of engagement, retention, and monetization. These metrics are great, but are they engaging your users?
3. Your Level 2 analytics can be measured: Level 2 metrics will help you to track events and give you a high-level picture of user behavior (ex. How many users perform actions per day, which actions are most popular, and what actions are users not performing? This will allow you to identify any issues in the app. You can then create segments based on user behavior (e.g., You can then create different segments of users based on their behavior (i.e., active users vs. inactive) and demographic information (i.e., age, location). You will be able to gain a deeper understanding of the interactions of different users with your app.
4. Your Level 3 analytics is what you need to measure: Level 3 is where your secret sauce lies about what drives growth. What behaviors are associated with lifetime value? Facebook, for example, had 50 million users at one time and was trying out user behavior to increase long-term retention.

Did it have to do with the number of profiles that were completed? Did it have to do with the number of photos that were added? It was the number of walls visited.

Was it the number of bacon-related posts? Answer: None of these.

Facebook discovered that the best indicator of an engaged user was adding seven friends within ten days.

This insight was not simply a matter of checking the analytics dashboard. Facebooks Data Science and Growth teams analyzed countless user actions.

They performed analyses to identify the actions and attributes that were most closely correlated with engagement while also controlling for outliers and lurking variables. This was a huge undertaking, and it is a great example of how predictive analytics can be used to identify potential improvement areas that could drastically affect the trajectory of your application.

Optimize App UI Design

These tips are focused on understanding qualitative feedback about the way people interact with your app in order to improve your mobile UX.

Heres an example of a touch heatmap:

1. Heatmaps can be used to identify user focus areas: How do users interact with your app physically? What are their touch, swipe, and pinch habits? UX analytics are key features of touch heatmaps. Touch heatmaps combine all user gestures (taps, swipes, pinches, swipes) and show you where they are focused on the screen. These are just a few questions heatmaps can help you answer: Are they paying attention to what you want?
2. Recorded user sessions: Appsee allows you to view recordings of real users using your app. This will allow you to see how they interact with it. The user recordings below, for example, show a user who couldnt create an account on Facebook because of a technical issue, as shown by the popup message. This information will help you understand why users have stopped registering.
3. To begin building an A/B test plan, deconstruct your funnel: A/B testing allows mobile app development agency or companies to improve their key metrics. It allows them to try out new designs for signup flows and messaging. To make their apps more engaging, mobile developers and managers of mobile products are adding mobile A/B Testing SDK (like Optimizelys SDK).
4. To reduce risk, all app updates should be A/B tested: App updates have high stakes. PMs need to make sure they are high-quality. An app update that isnt caught could result in bugs, interaction issues, or unintended damage to business metrics.

Read More: Mobile App Development- How It Affects Your Business Growth?

App Onboarding Flow and Mobile A/B Testing Ideas

1. Onboarding: Test different login/signup options. How would people like to log in or sign up for your app? Is signup necessary? Perhaps your users prefer to log in by email and password. Try prioritizing different options as this app did. These are some more social sign-on test ideas.
2. Experience: Test previewing the app experience. OpenTable and Paperless Post give previews of the app experience. This is a great way to test if it drives engagement and activation. You can test which screenshots are used and which features are highlighted.
3. Check the order of the user onboarding tour: What are the steps? Additional test ideas for your user-onboarding tour.
4. The CTA button is tested: What size, color, and location are the best for your CTA button? Would it make it easier for people to notice and increase conversions if it were larger? These are some more ideas for the app CTA button.
5. Change messaging and help text: I spoke with one company that changed their messaging, and it dramatically improved the game. Their messaging changed from "We wont spam you" to "We care about your privacy," and they saw a 50% increase in conversions. We suggested a test for Pandora. Show different upgrade CTA copies in order to drive premium subscriptions.
6. Test different navigation layouts: Try testing different navigation layouts. Lets discuss WhatsApp together to test ideas. WhatsApp could also test moving the navigation bar up to the top. They might also try to remove the bottom navigation bar entirely and have it become a drop-down navigation menu in the upper left-hand corner. You can remove distractions from your CTA by removing other elements.
7. Your onboarding tour should include progress bars: Good mobile onboarding flows will quickly teach users how to use the app. Because they encourage people to complete a tour, progress bars are a great way to motivate them. They give people a feeling of accomplishment as they use the app more. This is a great feature of Duolingo. An indicator tracks your progress every time you answer a question.
8. You can test your discovery functionality: This will allow you to see how users discover new products and experiences in your app. To discover new people, users can tap on a banner in Instagram. Imagine if they just started suggesting Instagrammers that you follow to your feed. This would increase user discovery.
9. You can test targeting images for different audiences by first identifying your primary audience using tools: Lets suppose that you discover that your primary audience is comprised primarily of 21- to 30-year-olds. For example, the 7-minute workout app could use images of people in this age group to test if it drives more engagement.
10. Try discounts: Would you be able to drive more conversions if you had a special promotion? And would the revenue generated from these additional conversions pay for the discount prices? Below is an example of how Oasis, a retail app, could offer a discount promotion to its home screen.
11. You can test leveraging video in your app: Todays apps use images to guide you through the onboarding process or to show you how to use the product. What if you added a video to your app? What would happen to activation?

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Conclusion

We hope these pointers will help you create an outstanding app! Please get in touch with us for working on a custom mobile app development.

References

1. 🔗 Google scholar
2. 🔗 Wikipedia
3. 🔗 NyTimes