[Build Backlinks Online] Mobile App Marketing, App Retention, and Building Real Customer Relationships

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Mobile App Marketing, App
Retention, and Building Real Customer Relationships'


Posted by robiganguly
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it
provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are
entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.
Mobile app growth is stunning (and changing your business)

As I shared in a prior post about inbound marketing for mobile, the growth of
the app ecosystem is simply extraordinary. A few weeks ago we learned that total
app store downloads have eclipsed 100 billion with no signs of slowing down. The
tremendous growth in this ecosystem is a testament to something that every
marketer needs to understand:


Your customers are all moving to mobile.


Whether it's the mobile web or mobile apps (the chart below tells us it's all
mobile apps these days), the evidence that consumers are flocking to their
mobile devices is overwhelming. As a marketer, our first task is to find where
our audience is and where it's going.




Today, the answer to both questions is increasingly: mobile.


Mobile's unique properties present us with a new set of marketing
opportunities â new ways to learn about and connect with our potential
customers. To name a few:




Because your mobile customers are treating their phones like extensions of
themselves (check out this recent Pew Internet study), they have invited us into
a more personal and immersive aspect of their lives.




This new dynamic means that we, as marketers, can develop truly deep
connections with our customers through digital channels.




The kinds of relationships we have been able to foster in person are now
possible through software.



This very personal device has a downside

There are some meaningful challenges to the mobile app channel, however. The
market for apps is already extremely crowded. The quality bar continues to rise
rapidly and the era of the "get rich quick" apps has long since passed.


Because consumers download so many apps on a regular basis, they're very used
to abandoning your software and maybe even deleting it. As a result, the largest
problem in the mobile app ecosystem is really app retention. Within 3 months,
over 3/4 of your customer base is gone, never to be seen again.





With average pay-per-install prices costing over $1.50, the shape of this
retention curve is really disheartening to app marketers. It means that a lot of
installs are going wasted and customers aren't really happy (one huge reason why
mobile app tracking rules).


In thinking through this problem and working with thousands of app publishers,
we've come to realize that there's a simple equation behind each and every
business in the mobile app space. We find that it's a helpful way of
understanding how to grow and build your business. Understanding the math of the
app business helps marketers, product managers and mobile business owners
prioritize their investments in order to grow their business.








In today's mobile environment, many marketers are myopically focused on the
installation number. While that input is important and a very strong reason to
invest in a proper App Store SEO strategy, our equation clarifies that it is but
one of three crucial components. App marketers need to be more focused on:




Increasing their mobile app retention in order to maximize LTV




Analyzing and improving their Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)



So, how do you grow your app's retention?

As the CEO of a mobile app feedback and engagement company, I get to talk to a
lot of mobile teams about the problems they face on the retention and
monetization side of the business. There are several key ways in which
innovators are increasing mobile retention and driving meaningful business
results.

Analytics and iteration

Many app publishers are working with analytics packages from Google, Flurry,
Kontagent, or New Relic in order to better understand their customers' behavior
inside the app. By creating various events to track specific actions taken and
watching the breadcrumbs of data left behind from consumer interactions, app
publishers are able to get a much better sense of what happens once they've
launched their app. Using that data helps identify places of popularity and
places of exit. Using analytics to drive iteration on the product is a helpful
piece of growing your retention numbers.

Consumer Engagement

Consumer engagement is a phrase that's used often these days but that requires
more specificity in order to truly be helpful to app marketers. Engaging with
your customers helps you make a product that will drive better retention, higher
customer satisfaction and inform your product roadmap. In the mobile app world,
there are 3 important ways in which you can connect with your customers:




Feedback: Listening to your customers and making it incredibly easy for them
to give you feedback is a must-have for every app. There are people who are
willing to look for a way to talk with you and tell you what they like, what
they'd like improved and what is causing confusion already. These are your most
engaged customers. Embracing and empowering them drives their investment in your
app and company even higher.




Customer research: Every company with an app has a built-in audience of
customers to conduct research with and learn from. Tapping into that audience
for specific research (i.e. Did this product feature land as we expected it to?
What are the demographics of our audience?) is an important engagement mechanism
that often informs the product, marketing, and executive teams at the same time
as involving customers in the betterment of the product. These involved
customers tend to stick around a lot longer.




Targeted and personalized communications: Because mobile is such a personal
experience, the old methods of communicating with customers (email blasts to
your list, direct mail to everyone, advertising spend to find your audience) are
not nearly as useful. More importantly, in the face of the tactics others are
using, they make your brand look a bit clueless. Instead, it's possible to
communicate with your mobile customers based upon the actions they take, the
groups that they fall into and the questions they ask of you. Using intelligent
in-app communications to generate conversations and follow-up in a personalized
manner allow your brand to deliver a 1:1 experience for every consumer, which
brings them back to your app on a regular basis.



Interested in more specific resources about driving retention?

We've scratched the surface about the retention problem and how to address it,
but there's a lot more in the way of resources out there for mobile marketers.
Here are a few that are helpful and specific:




Urban Airship's white paper on "good push" can help you understand push
notifications and the difference between a well-targeted campaign and spam




OMI's piece on using analytics to boost retention is a helpful overview of
setting up studies and using data wisely




The Apptentive guide to increasing mobile app retention was compiled after
100s of customer interviews and walkthroughs of tactics and specific outcomes



Retention's downstream impacts:

In addition to driving up the retention aspect of the app business equation,
increased retention actually fuels two significant long-term benefits,
illustrating how interconnected each of these components are:

Boosting downloads

When apps increase their retention, their overall audience grows. As a result
of the growth in their audience they end up with better app store performance
because their larger, happier customer base is more likely to talk about them
and share great ratings and reviews in the app store. In addition, the larger,
more engaged audience is more likely to spread the word with their friends about
the app. A more engaged, larger audience proves to be a significant engine for
organic download growth.

Understanding your customers better

In order to drive higher retention, marketers need to understand their
customers better and develop better relationships with them. The side effect of
the work required in order to get to know customers better is that you
understand the language that customers use and the things that customers care
about most. Using that understanding to shape your further marketing efforts can
yield significant increases in efficacy because you're using customers' language
instead of your own. Very few things are as powerful as speaking to someone in
their own words.

The deeper goal: meaningful customer relationships

Ultimately, mobile marketers should be focused on developing long-term value
for their clients and brands. Through the mobile channel's unparalleled ability
to deliver a personal experience and the opportunity to be with a customer
everywhere they go, the notion of lifetime value (LTV) has become even more
important. As inbound marketers, many of us have felt first-hand the effects of
measuring traffic sources and understanding that the most relevant, invested,
interested customers are our most profitable customers. We are past the days of
trying to acquire every customer possible and have moved on to doing much more
value-oriented great marketing, marketing which invites our customers into an
ongoing conversation that is more give and take and less broadcast and pray.


When you create meaningful relationships with customers, customers see your
company as a more human organization, one capable of listening and learning.
Along with this more personal perception comes a more robust public image
â consumers give your company leeway and understand that you will make
mistakes along the way. Developing organizational tolerance for mistakes extends
to your customer base: a deeper understanding of the people behind the app helps
you keep your base of supporters on board when you make mistakes.


Because of the mobile device's always on, "five minutes of use at a time"
paradigm, it's incredibly important to try and become a habit of some sort for
your consumers. By putting a personal face and voice to your communications with
customers, you're more likely to earn that habitual usage of your app, resulting
in outstanding performance.

Finally, a bonus: presenting the case

We know that as marketers many of you struggle to make the case for new
initiatives, investments and strategies inside of your organization. Often the
question of where to put resources comes down to an analysis of cost/benefit or,
put another way, ROI. As we've worked with a number of companies where this has
been an important piece of the puzzle, we've created a simple sample equation
you can use to highlight the benefits of investing in customer retention and
happiness.


In this example, we're making very conservative assumptions about the impacts
on installs and retention and not even assuming any impact on ARPU. Many
businesses find that their happiest customers spend 1000% or more of the average
consumer, so this is a place where a lot of ROI is uncovered over time as well.




Feel free to borrow it for your own purposes, we hope it'll help you grow your
business and be more successful.


Finally, please let me know in the comments if you have other tips for making
the case for customer engagement and retention or if you've employed other
tactics that I haven't mentioned.

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