13 Ways to Engineer Growth as a Service

App growth & marketing is the most critical piece for app businesses. Most product owners spend good amount of time in User experience, User interface, features & perfecting a shadow & corner radius. Very little thought & efforts are put in for sustainable & organic growth for mobile applications. Product owners & marketers are often do not have knowledge or right tools & methodologies on growth.

One of the reason can be marketing companies as well. Most of the marketers & agencies has confined Mobile App marketing with web SEO, content, blogs & ASO (App Store Optimisation).

At MobileFirst, we are exploring new, creative & easy to implement ways for app growth & marketing. This is Arpan from MobileFirst, we are mobile app development & growth agency.

Ideal Mobile App Growth Lifecycle — Ref. LeanPlum

App marketing is beyond only running ads. There are still an organic ways to grow your applications

Referring an image from App Growth platform called LeanPlum. In general Product Owners & App Developers should plan following 4 steps.

• Use Acquisition (Organic & Paid)
• User Retention & Reducing Churn
• Marketing Automation
• App Store Optimisation

“95% Of Opt-in Users, who don’t receive a push notification in the first 90 days will churn” — This makes user retention a most crucial aspect for building user base.

With this article, we are covering strategies to improve App Growth. e.g, With branch DeepViews you can create App Content previews. On a lighter note, Winston Churchill famously quoted this for effective speech. This is very applicable for App Content previews.

“App Content previews work like a woman’s skirt; long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.”

13 Easy ways for achieving App Growth:

• Make your mobile app Content Aware : You can get organic growth with your app’s content. We recommend that you use SearchAPI, NSUserActivity, Spotlight Search, Indexing content for Android. This will create a long term effect in SEO & link generation of your content.
• Making mobile applications Social Aware: We recommend that you use right Social tools when you share via an application. OpenGraph & Schemas.org can be an excellent tool for creating immersive posts on Social Media. This will helps you create content rich social media posts when users share from your mobile applications. We integrated OpenGraph for Texas based Sports Platform — this is bringing 5% more users organically. A big reward for right app engineering.

Open Graph tags make your applications Social Aware — By adding open graph tags, you are improving CTR by 40%.

• Making mobile applications Location Aware: Utilise an SDK to understand your User’s location to provide tailor made experience to you users. At times you don’t need them to provide their accurate location.
• Improve Discovery by Universal Links & Deep Linking: App to Site Association on your server to provide link back to your app.
• Improve Conversion by adding Smart Banners for App Downloads on your Website for conversion. This is simplest form of converting website visitors to app downloads. Apple & Google provides the tools or you can use Branch.io for this.
• Deep Linking SDKs by Firebase & Branch are quite popular you can utilise this to convert more users to App downloads. We will cover in-depth analysis of Deep Linking & how it can impact your customer engagement.
• DeepViews by Branch, they work as mini website for converting your visitors to App Downloads. This is one of the most effective way for app downloads. With DeepViews you can create a content preview websites.

DeepViews by Branch — Cost Effective ways to promote & grow your user base.

• Understand User Journeys with the help of Mixpanel, Localytics, Firebase, CleverTap or Branch. There are lot of frameworks, based on your requirement you should pick the one. We will cover comparative analysis in next posts.
• Facebook & Goole re-marketing campaigns to activate users. Activating acquired users improve the conversion by 15 to 20% more. Only few of the SDKs provide this feature. This is very effective, as users already know your app & value. As an app owner you are reactivating the idle users with some incentives. This is more targeted incentives to acquired users.
• Automation to fix Funnel leakages with Email or Push Notifications, really effective for eCommerce related applications. What is funnel leakage? Imagine a customer has visited a specific product on an eCommerce app, added the product on Shopping cart — but have not completed transaction. A simple reminder via Email or Push Notification help you fix the funnel leakages.
• App Referral Program or Loyalty Programs. You can create with Deep Linking as well. With right strategy you can grow your user base organically. E.g Uber — Everyone remembers their first free ride & how they utilised loyalty programs to bring new users. The rightly executed Referral programs motivates your existing users to transact more on your platform. We built Loyalty program for a Client based in Singapore, this resulted in 20% more users organically.

App Referral & Loyalty Programs are most efficient & scalable method to build your audience

• ASO (App Store Optimisation) by tracking & monitoring your keywords. You can utilise SplitMetrics, SearchAds, SensorTower for keyword tracking.
• Running App Store Ads & Google Universal Ads to understand the regions. At times some regions appreciate your application more than you have anticipated. You can utilise Google Ads & Apple Ads to understand conversion based on geography. e.g — One of our early apps got popular in Taiwan & Indonesia. We did not consider those markets to grow significantly. Eventually we changed our strategy to cater those customers with new features & translation for the region.

We have a detailed deck & few case studies created for our clients, happy to share the same on personal emails.

Regards, Arpan Desai ([email protected], Mobile Strategy & Growth Consultant at MobileFirst). Know more, If you are looking for help for your app business.

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