How to promote your app: 10 useful tips

Nowadays apps are key contact points between companies and clients, and their development is growing exponentially. In fact they represent a great opportunity to create engagement with customers by involving them through their smartphones, the most commonly used device, in an entirely new way.

In recent years a gradual shift from websites to apps has been happening in an attempt to better accommodate users’ behaviors that, as described by ComScore, tend to choose apps over websites when looking for information.

Even though apps are crowding the stores, a big chunk of them are not being downloaded. One of the main reasons of this is that companies are not convincing users to actually download the app. Therefore there is a need for an efficient communication strategy.

• Offer an economic incentive such as discounts or free gifts to boost downloads and create a user base potentially valuable in the future;
• Add useful services for the user which depending on your type of business may be
  • One pass for skipping the line;
  • Practical advice for handling situations that may happen in your clients’ daily lives;
  • Offer unpublished songs or contents to your fan.
• Create a digital word-of-mouth in line with the key role played by friends in the process of downloading an app (as explained above). Offering discounts or prizes for every friend invited to download the app may be a good way to drive the buzz.

Your app has now been downloaded: don’t get too excited just yet, your dedication on it is still vital! According to the data from Adobe:

• 77% of the users stop using the app after the first 3 days;
• 90% of the users use it for a month;
• 26% of all mobile apps are used only once after the download, thus implying that 1 out of 4 apps is abandoned after the first access.

Therefore, once the app has been downloaded, you still have to carefully look at your users’ needs to avoid losing them later on.To help you in this phase, here are some useful tips:

• Create engagement with your users to encourage them in using your app, thus reaching a good ROI. To do so, take into consideration the adoption of context-based technologies such as beacons and geofencing;
• Create in-app messages starting from the very first app use to encourage users to come back and help them in navigating your app. One example could be to give free gifts (such as in games) when users open the app more than once in a specific period of time. In-app messages will help you creating a very friendly user-experience;
• Create a progressive first experience and login process to avoid being too intrusive for the user.

How can you encourage users to download your app if your are not visible on the stores?

To increase the number of downloads for your app it is important to ease the research on the store, to accomplish this is important to publish it correctly. This will prevent the app from being hidden in the universe of apps that users see on the stores.

Follow our precious advice to promote and make your app visible:

• Work on your app ASO optimization, meaning the position of the app on the store. This is extremely important as the ASO represent the SEO for websites and thus influences the number of downloads;
  Be aware that Apple Store and Google Play follow different logics and metrics to evaluate apps. Take advantage of those parameters to create different descriptions for the app on the two stores;
• Monitor the variations on the stores to keep updated on the latest news and be ready to act accordingly. Keep an eye on the new categories, releases, rankings and logics;
• Put some thought on how the review mechanism for your app works and what it tells you: Choose when and how to ask your users for a rating or feedback as it influences the evaluation. This point is very critical because reviews have a strong impact on the stores. Therefore you have to:
  • Create a good relationship with your clients as well as a pleasant experience before asking for a feedback;
  • Ask users to leave feedback and information about any issues with the app, so that you can directly reply and foster your relationship with them.

Developing a successful and engaging app is not easy but by following our valuable advice, it’s possible!

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