Mobiles have become the go-to device connecting consumers to their most sought-after brands. More than any other channel, the mobile is an intuitively convenient device for delivering a personalized shopping experience. Surveys tell us that consumers are spending more than 90% of their time using apps to fulfill their intent.
For businesses, mobile app marketing is the strategy that is aggressively driving apps into the hands of consumers. After all, an app is a beautiful vehicle for relationship-building with potential customers. But you’re desperate to know what’s working and what is not working, and which strategy is having maximum impact on customer creation and customer retention.
The classic app marketing strategy of hiring mobile developers or DIY app making is fast losing ground. App marketing strategies and marketing tools have evolved. More than the talent pool that you create by way of a marketing team, you need Key Performance Indicators to kick-start a meaningful marketing campaign.
What Is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI), and Why Is It so Important?
The most successful mobile app marketing strategies are those that actually measure mobile performance using what are known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are metrics which measure actionable data, and each enterprise decides its own parameters for measuring and tracking customer interaction and behavioral patterns.
Terrestrial customer footfalls in a Mall, measured in the thousands, can easily translate into millions of customer-brand interactions online because multiple channels are facilitating the communication. Using Mobile app analytics, we can evaluate the popularity of the app, determine how many consumers are actually using the app, and probe the efficiency of the app-customer interaction.
Capturing customer data is half the job done; the more important concern is what you do with the data. How do you know which information is irrelevant and which data is actionable? Which data do you track, and which data do you ignore? As more information enters the analyst’s domain, the more complicated it becomes to interpret the information. Fortunately, we have KPIs (measurable metrics) that show us exactly what we need to track, and how customer behavior can be studied to improve app delivery.
The 7 KPIs Driving Successful Mobile App Marketing Campaigns
Which metric is most suitable for your mobile app marketing campaign? That’s a good poser. The honest answer is that there’s not one but many KPIs that must be collectively analyzed to gain a comprehensive overview of the campaign’s success.
According to marketing mavens at Miromind, some of the world’s most successful app marketing campaigns have been built on the foundation of seven significant KPIs. You can afford to ignore every other strategic input but make doubly sure that these 7 KPIs form the core of your marketing campaign, and success will be your permanent companion:
Tracking the Mobile App Download
When you’re measuring your mobile application’s performance, it obviously helps if you know how often the app is downloaded. Of course, we do confess at the outset that merely downloading an app is not a guarantee that the customer will end up using it. Some features that come bundled with the app may translate into an annoying experience for customers.
Ads for example come in the way of relevant content and distract consumers who may press the wrong prompt and land up where they have no desire to go. Frequent pop-ups can be distracting. Many users uninstall apps at the slightest sign of poor user experience.
There are pitfalls in measuring downloads, but downloads are a metric that needs to be tracked. If the number of downloads is way too low, you know for sure that your app isn’t winning the popularity contest. Understanding what that means and devising strategies to improve downloads is a different ball game altogether. Obviously, you need more metrics to measure success. Read on.
Tracking In-App Behavior: The Consumer Retention Rate
If you’re satisfied with download metrics, you need a reality check. You’ll need to know how many customers actually used the app and how many went on to uninstall the app eventually. That kind of data becomes available when you measure the customer retention rate. By retention rate, we mean the number of people who actually reuse the app after app installation and the first look in. Only the best-designed apps with great user experiences display the highest retention rates.
Retention rate is a crucial metric that reveals actual consumer behavior, and can also be used to gauge the success of the in-app monetization strategy. The retention metric is a neat way of analyzing probable reasons why customers are not sticking to the app, and the metric throws up plans for fine-tuning user experience when you’re targeting people with a specific demographic profile.
Tracking User Experience: The App Loading Duration
Developers will tell you that an app’s probability of success is as high or as low as its loading speed. This is believable because statistics indicate that almost 70 percent of app users abandon or uninstall apps discouraged by slow loading speed. So, it’s not enough to design the trendiest app in the world if consumers aren’t accessing it fast enough to avail its benefits. In all probability, consumers will switch to lighter, faster-loading apps that deliver better user experience. Loading speed is a metric that can’t be ignored; if it’s an issue, get the backroom boys to iron out the app’s deficiencies pronto.
Tracking the App Open Rate: Measuring Sessions and Session Length
The measure of an app’s success is the frequency with which customers open the app. This metric reveals how many times the user opened the app, how short or long was the interval between app openings, and the duration of the user’s stay within the app. This metric captures the profile of users and gives you an indication of why they’re using the app frequently.
In the broadest sense, you gain a clear picture of the consumer expectations driving app usage. This metric generates information that’ll be useful in redesigning in-app data access pathways that improve UX.
Tracking User In-App Interaction: The User Screenflow Mapping
User Screenflow Mapping is a very useful metric that gives you a clear picture of the way users navigate the app’s features. It is a faithful record of user behavior helping you to identify app defects and improve UX. There are incredible benefits in tracking this metric:
- You get a live preview of user interactions.
- It identifies poor UX in the sales funnel like glitches in the shopping cart or reasons why users tend to drop off after continued usage.
- Helps detect and eliminate bugs in the software to improve the user experience.
- Shows where users face difficulty in onboarding the app. Enables designers to remove flaws to create a smooth onboarding experience that retains customer interest.
- The metric can be leveraged to position better landing pages and observe how users eact.
Hotjar, Mouseflow, and Inspectlet are three sought-after recording tools that help usinesses to probe, analyze, and understand user-app interactions for promoting better app designs.
Gauging the Success of an App Using the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV)
The customer lifetime value is a metric that uses predictive analysis to estimate the potential revenue app users may bring in future – it sums up the lifetime value of customer interactions. Properly deployed, this metric can be of great help in developing long-term customer-centric relationships that promote brand building. It’s a way of calculating your return on the ad spend and of estimating how profitable your app venture becomes.
Tracking When, Where, and Why Users Drop off Your App
Your campaign is bursting with SEO marketing plans, automated email solutions, and PPC, but all the hard work bites the dust if your customers don’t stay in your app long enough to get your message through. Frequent on-screen pop-ups, ads that conceal content, compulsory login or registration banners, and too many steps involved in navigation are a few of the top reasons why users lose interest in an app.
With a metric that tracks the user drop off point, you’ll know exactly where consumers are getting off, and the reasons why they’re disinterested in the app.
If you want to raise the investigative bar, you can use Google Analytics to probe where consumers came from before using your app. With this kind of information, you’re equipping yourself to promote a better app experience that brings lost customers back to finish off what they initially set out to do.
Conclusion
The new age app marketing strategies use Ky Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track what users are doing. The wealth of data that in-app user interaction generates can be used to create better strategies that resonate with end users of the apps. What you learn from KPI metrics helps you to customize the app to cater to targeted audiences to improve the quality of their app experience.
KPIs enable you to monitor the traffic continuously and optimize the app experience so that your lifetime revenue expectations from users can be exponentially increased. Though this is only the tip of the iceberg of mobile app marketing, what we have listed are KPIs that lay a solid foundation for future business growth riding piggybacks on the popularity of your app. These seven significant KPIs are integral to any marketing strategy because they open a window to human behavior that you can tap for business growth.