Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing with you some app basics, best practises and trends relevant to the mobile ecosystem in our Mastering Mobile Marketing video series. Our team at Yodel Mobile possess extensive knowledge of the app marketing fundamentals. We will be sharing insights on topics such as app discoverability, searchability and conversion optimisation. This week, Mick Rigby, our CEO here at Yodel Mobile, explains why we need to flip the mobile marketing funnel to ensure app marketing success.

Transcript:

We believe here at Yodel Mobile, that if you flip the funnel and focus on user retention, you are more likely to succeed in your mobile marketing strategy.

There are five million apps across both app stores. That’s a lot of apps and a lot of app users. The problem is, they’re all competing for the same users.

In the UK, we only use a third of the apps we have on our devices and the churn rate after three months, is 80%. What this means is that the time, effort and money you have invested, into generating app users, only 20% on average is still valid after three months.

The textbook mobile marketing funnel has user acquisition at the top and user retention at the bottom.

So, why is this important?

If you build a relationship with your user, then everything else you do from a user acquisition perspective is going to be far more successful.

If you increase your retention, you’re going to get more five star reviews. That means when people visit your app store listing, they’re going to be more compelled to download your app.

And if you’ve got more users regularly using your app, the algorithms will pick that up on Google Play and the Apple App Store, meaning you will have a far higher position in the app stores.

There are other things you could be doing to flip the funnel to ensure that your users are retained. However, I’m going to share three things with you today.

1. Understand your user

So firstly, you need to understand your user and what they’re actually doing in the app. This means you’ll need to tag the app correctly, use the right kind of SDK and analyse all the information. Once you understand who your users are, you can then hypothesise about why they’re using the app.

2. Hypothesise

What is useful for your users? You could trial things like a Friday night offer and this could drive to better game play on a Saturday. Whatever you do, you’ll get some good learnings and those learnings will lead to far better retention in the long term.

3. Onboarding

Once you’ve got a better understanding and some good learnings, you can then focus on your onboarding within the app. The onboarding is both progressive onboarding and standard onboarding. This means you’re going to be educating your users on how to get the most of your app and how they can benefit from using the app.

So remember, unfortunately, more apps fails than succeed. However, if you focus your efforts on retention, the chances are your app will be more successful than not.

Make sure to check out our other episodes from the Yodel Mobile Mastering Mobile Marketing video series:

Episode 1: What is ASO?

Episode 2: Why you need an mCRM strategy

Episode 3: Increase opt-ins for push notifications

Episode 4: Picking the right mobile tools for your app

Want to find out more about optimising your app and keeping up with the latest OS capabilities? Make sure to subscribe to our Mastering Mobile Marketing video series. You can also get in touch by visiting the Contact Us page. Follow us on LinkedIn, chat with us on Twitter @yodelmobile, and join our #mobilemarketingUK LinkedIn group.