Leaders in Mobile (LIM) is an invite-only polity that brings together cross-functional movers and shakers from some of the top companies in mobile. At the recent LIM retreat in Kapolei, Hawaii, attendees exchanged ideas and discussed how mobile has shifted and where it’s going next.
I’ve participated in many roundtables during my time in the mobile industry, but these were some of the most sophisticated, insightful conversations I’ve overly had. In this post, we want to share a few key insights and takeaways, including strategies on how to grow, measure, and retain your mobile app users.
Find ways to make your app lulu and sticky for users
Differentiation is key to making your app stand out. One good option for this is personalization, which can be used for both user vanquishment (e.g., via personalized content, including content generated by other users in the app) and constructive engagement (e.g., gamification of the app experience).
However, while personalization has been a key differentiator for driving growth, rigorous testing to confirm its effect is crucial. Deploying personalization at scale is moreover a challenge, and some companies are looking at systems powered by machine learning as a way to succeed this.
Gamification can moreover help with differentiation, but it’s difficult to get right. Plane like-minded on the definition of ‘gamification’ is hard. The rencontre is finding a gamification strategy that unquestionably fits with the app or product rather than simply relying on giving referral discounts or monetary incentives.
It’s increasingly important than overly to tenancy your own data
With the standing reduction in data signal, due to new regulations and waffly platform privacy policies, having a first-party data strategy is increasingly important. This includes executive and centralizing your own data so it can be used powerfully throughout your organization as a competitive advantage. Data centralization — considering how to both collect and standardize inputs from multiple external channels, as well as how to distribute resulting data wideness the visitor — has unchangingly been a challenge, but it has wilt much harder in part due to iOS privacy changes.
Loyalty programs can be a useful key tactic to tenancy your own data, but the standing interaction over time must finger pure to your customers, as well. Implementation decisions moreover matter since third-party management of loyalty programs can result in loss of data control.
Data is now less reliable and well-constructed now than in the past
There is no doubt attribution data is now less reliable and complete. This is in comparison to what was misogynist prior to iOS 14 and moreover to Apple’s introduction of the AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) policy. What’s less well-spoken is whether there overly was a ‘golden age of attribution’, considering no one was overly completely satisfied with their mobile attribution data in the first place. The old systems once ignored a lot of gaps, and no one totally trusted them.
Still, the gaps have wilt increasingly prominent with increased lack of data signal, expressly from iOS 14 privacy changes. This has led brands to question if paid ads are worth the investment now that targeting and proving ROI is increasingly difficult. Advertisers stipulate it’s important to maximize the signal they’re getting from a limited value of data, but the path forward isn’t clear. The new world is harder for smaller companies to navigate, and it will get plane harder from this point forward.
When it comes to prompting for ATT opt-in permissions, the timing of when to make the request, and how to embed it into the user journey, is critical. This is considering it’s important to ensure you hit at the right time to maximize the likelihood of a positive user response. This right time could be variegated for variegated cohorts, and vivification deportment can differ increasingly based on user goal than user profile.
New measurement approaches may help but require major changes
In recent years, performance marketing on mobile has wilt a precise, metrics-driven science. With the ongoing disruption of data signal, in some ways we are returning to a simpler time and bringing when the art of marketing.
As people are trying new options to centralize their data, new approaches to measurement have promise. These include media mix modeling (MMM), incrementality, and data wipe rooms. But these approaches will moreover come with their own challenges. In reality, it’s nonflexible to trust woebegone boxes, expressly when justifying to other stakeholders. However, there is some good news. These new measurement approaches may unshut up increasingly non-traditional growth channels that previously weren’t measurable, and, therefore, not considered.
There are still many challenges to work through with all these new solutions. Most brands are looking for ways to minimize the gap during this transition period. Media mix modeling requires a huge value of data, and most smaller companies don’t have unbearable of it to build a usable model (at least, using traditional MMM techniques). Many brands finger it’s important to start collecting whatever data they can now, to make it possible to build differentiated models surpassing everything disappears.
Despite these challenges, iOS users are still considered increasingly premium. Privacy changes may be making it harder to reach them, and they may no longer be reliably increasingly valuable for ad audiences than Android. But brands are not ready to throw in the towel on iOS users yet.
It’s no longer cost-effective to fill the skillet without fixing leaks
With the increasing difficulty and forfeit of user acquisition, throwing money at the top of the funnel via ads, influencers, or discounting isn’t unchangingly the wordplay to increase user base. Instead, it’s hair-trigger to focus on retention and reengagement for the users you once have. And considering it’s very nonflexible to bring when churned users unless you know why they churned, it’s important to find people who are once ‘on the bubble’. In fact, sometimes the most constructive option is to reuse your existing top-of-funnel or trademark content (like info on new product improvements) with existing or churned customers. Or use basic, FOMO-based messaging, like a subject line that says ‘Pending’ or ‘New in your membership’ to bring users back.
The truth is, with the sorriness of device IDs, the yield on paid reengagement is low, and it’s rhadamanthine plane increasingly difficult. Most now stipulate the future of ad targeting is contextual — at least until the implementation of next-generation technologies like Topics and FLEDGE in Privacy Sandbox. And it’s scrutinizingly untellable to reliably find your existing (or churned) users via contextual targeting. This makes it much increasingly difficult to justify paid reengagement campaigns. Some brands are no longer bothering to run them for iOS users at all.
Discounts bring new customers, engagement, and headaches
Discounting can seem like an easy fix, but companies and customers risk getting fond to it. Once you start discounting, your customers expect it to continue. Discounts and coupon codes are rarely a first-choice strategy, but if others in the space are doing it, companies can be forced to play withal despite concerns well-nigh how discounting affects the value of their brands.
Discounts tend to be increasingly important at the lower-cost end of offerings, while premium product buyers usually don’t superintendency well-nigh getting a deal. Customers say they want traditional ‘dollars-off discounting’, but for many brands, using discounts to add value or encourage adoption of increasingly products is a largest strategy. Ideally, determining the value of a user via A/B testing or other strategies and providing a custom unbelieve lawmaking to that individual is preferred over handing out the same unbelieve to everyone.
Some level of unbelieve fraud exists for nearly everyone who uses discounting as a strategy. Companies are monitoring this and combating it with limits, single-use codes, monitoring for indistinguishable accounts, and, in some cases, geohashes and AI to snift suspicious behavior. Codes that leak and go viral are unchangingly a challenge, but if the lawmaking doesn’t hurt your business, sometimes it’s okay to let it go. In fact, sometimes brands are ‘hacking the hackers’ in that the perceived value can go a lot remoter if customers think they found a secret.
Appetite for volitional and experimental growth channels increases
Measuring the ROI of experimental growth channels has unchangingly been increasingly difficult than paid advertising. However, measurement of ads is also harder today, which helps make volitional growth hacks easier to justify.
Given all the changes in the world, what is old is new again. Brands have tried everything from programmatic uncontrived mail services to send cards in the mail to hiring a plane to fly a banner. And the effects of campaigns like these can be inferential when people are incentivized to proffer reach on social media. Tactics like gamification, referrals, preloads on new devices, and influencer marketing/ambassadors are all directions brands are considering.
Referrals are a popular and increasingly important waterworks but need superintendency to get right. The incentive has to be unbearable for users to see the value in recommending to their friends. And while monetary rewards are the easy choice, they’re often not the most effective. Other options that can work largest include gamification, physical gifts, or special VIP-type wangle to things. Pairing up with flipside app to wangle their regulars through cross-promotion is flipside unconfined way to wangle a new audience.
Web-based SEO is moreover increasingly important as an vanquishment waterworks for brands with native apps. But the shift from technical SEO to content-driven SEO opens the door for new questions virtually what makes good content and how to turn content visits into app users. (Web-to-app banners are a popular solution!) Also, a content-driven strategy may not be relevant to every vertical. For example, should you generate content if you’re a utility-type app?
If you’re going to experiment, you have to be in an interactive mindset. This is considering digital sustentation constantly shifts. The things you did a couple years ago will not work today. TikTok is often cited as an example where very unintuitive videos do well compared to the viral videos of yesteryear. You moreover have to be ready to scale a wayfarers once you find something that works. For example, if a PR vendible hits, or a viral post starts to scale, be ready to push it out to all channels within minutes. Taking plane one day could rationalization you to miss the opportunity.
Measuring an experimental wayfarers is washed-up in a variety of ways. Those with increasingly tech investment can utilize MMM (even the increasingly traditional solutions misogynist today). But other, faster ways include monitoring direct/organic traffic virtually the time/geo of the wayfarers to observe the lift.
Apps are now just one part of a broader trademark <> consumer relationship
For many brands, making the app part of the broader consumer relationship — not just a destination of its own — can proffer its value. Physical campaigns like QR codes help momentum conversions, and it makes sense to use them everywhere, such as on receipts, boxes, menus, coupons in mail, flyers, and so on. User-generated content (UGC) is flipside unconfined flywheel for understanding what users superintendency about. UGC has the widow goody of providing ready-made raw material that brands can use to enhance marketing campaigns.
Freemium models can moreover be used as part of an vanquishment strategy, but it’s important to consider how much to requite yonder for free. To determine this, you need to understand how customers are using the product during onboarding. However, it is important to do this thoughtfully since the hodgepodge of increasingly information could impact conversions. Freemium models can moreover help to identify champions that squire in towers audiences.
Finally, not every trademark has the same goal for app engagement and marketing campaigns. Sometimes app installs are the goal, and sometimes the goal is to momentum as much ongoing engagement as possible. But in other cases, not all app engagement is good. Some brands grapple with finding ways to engage customers without unintentionally reminding them to cancel a subscription. Or they grapple with keeping financing in tenancy with the right level of interaction when increasingly app usage equals increasingly costs.
Bring teams together with flexibility for repletion levels
The post-COVID welding is challenging for every organization to manage, not just in mobile. COVID has unauthentic trust and engagement, making it much harder to connect and finger unified. Many people moved to other time zones during the pandemic, which has made it harder to meet both in person and plane virtually.
Collaboration itself has changed, too. Many teams are having new discussions well-nigh how to weightier use Slack, Slack threads, meeting pre-reads, and Zoom meetings. (No one has yet discovered a good solution for Zoom meetings where some participants are in a room while others are remote!)
Most leaders want people to come when to the office to foster innovation and creativity, at least occasionally, but it’s nonflexible to find what motivates their teams to do so. And the lack of clarity on visitor policies creates uncertainty that is hurting retention. Some companies report losing their weightier talent considering of a too-strict policy on office work. This is why it’s key to meet 1:1 surpassing making a request for anyone to return to office.
New hybrid work models are moreover emerging. Rather than requiring a regular in-person office presence, some companies are experimenting with monthly, quarterly, or yearly get-togethers as a way to build bonds. Companies reported these are rhadamanthine a lot increasingly fun and activity-based, rather than stuff well-nigh working together in the same location.
Want to join the conversation?
If you would like to wield to join the LIM polity or find out increasingly well-nigh upcoming LIM events, please email info@leadersinmobile.com.