After months and months of hard work, stressful deadlines and numerous modifications along the way, your mobile app is READY to go public!
It’s awesome and you’re thinking: Yeey, that’s a great start!
I don’t want to discourage you, but the success doesn’t come just with a launch of your app. Since there are almost 2 million apps in stores, it is a huge challenge to find your place under the Sun of the mobile app world.
The actual challenge appears when you realize that you’ve uploaded your mobile app and your download rate is nothing as you’ve hoped for.
Hold on! Not everything is lost yet, you just need a few techniques to help your app become more visible.
Some of the techniques below may help you to boost downloads of your app.
Methods to Boost Your Mobile App Downloads
ASO
ASO (App Store Optimization) increases the app’s visibility. How?
ASO uses elements like app title, description, keywords, screenshots, etc., to improve your mobile app visibility as per the store and current trends’ best practices.
Tweaking your ASO for the better can lead you to more downloads, increase your brand exposure, rank your app higher on the app store and even attract more potential users to try out your app.
Let’s get real — when searching for a specific app, most of us won’t search more than the first page. And that’s your goal — getting higher in the app store as the higher the ranking, the more people will be able to find your app.
If you succeed for the users to download your app, the following factors also influence your ASO:
- App downloads number
- Positive reviews
- Popular keyword relevance
- Backlinks
- App opening number
- Retention rate
- Revenue records
Free App at Launch
This is an effective strategy to attract new users where your app should prove the value which you guarantee.
This strategy can drive significant growth in the number of app downloads. If your app is paid on the App Store, make it free for some period of time (a week or more) as no one likes to pay for something they’ve never tried.
Also, if you have a free app but with paid in-app features, it would be smart to make your app ‘in-app feature free’ for a while until the users engage with your app and realize the potential.
Crash Free App
If your users download your app and immediately encounter problems, they will leave bad reviews and comments thus preventing future users to try out your app.
In order to prevent this, you should go down the proactive path and submit your app to vigorous testing prior to making it available for the public.
No matter what happens, keep in mind that you should ALWAYS respond to your users nevertheless positive or negative comments.
Referrals and Reviews
Whenever I want to download a new app, I first check the reviews from other users and try to get an overall picture of the app usability.
If you have a majority of bad reviews or no reviews or referrals at all, it’s an instant sign that your conversion rate is extremely low.
Referrals can also demonstrate your app’s quality and trust which can help to increase your downloads. Your current users can become your brand ambassadors if you offer them some kind of incentive for referring your app to their friends. Those incentives don’t have to be monetary, but app related; e.g. if you have a cloud storage app, you can offer free storage or if you have an email finder tool, you can offer an additional free number of searches if your users leave a relevant review or refer it to their friends.
Online Content
Brand awareness is much more important than you think.
Creating and maintaining a strong online presence can help you to reach more people and to introduce your app to new customers. But be careful to place your content to the right target audience as not all social media channels are used by the same age groups. Also, find time to respond to your followers and ask them for comment as it will show them you care about their opinion.
Content may be interesting blogs, articles, sponsored content, videos, infographic or a website or a landing page where you can place your content with the most important centerpiece — your app. Make sure that you perform SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so to get the most out of your online presentations.
Present information about your app so that users can learn more about it and get more engaged. Getting more visitors, followers, and engagements on your web channels will surely improve your app downloads.
Create a buzz around your mobile app and get people to talk about your product as that will draw attention to it and hopefully will be followed by brand awareness.
Email Marketing
This less used strategy seems that’s getting lost among social media channels today. But it can be as powerful as any other strategy I mentioned above. With 3.8 billion people using emails in 2018, it is unreasonable not to seize the benefits of this ‘traditional’ marketing method. You can successfully connect to your potential users and depending on the age of the target audience, this method proves itself as fully effective.
You can create lists through your website or other channels and win new contacts with fresh, funky and shareable content.
As per DMA, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect $32 in return. A carefully planned email marketing strategy can make you money and keep your business steady-going.
Measure, improve and measure again
In order to be able to fully grasp the effectiveness of your strategy, you will need to keep track of your metrics. These insights will help you to improve your future strategies and campaigns.
Many times I read that for being a successful growth hacker, you need to work with what you have and CONSTANTLY measure your results in order to tweak your future attempts and ensure better results. You should apply the same for your mobile app
If you’ve noticed that your users abandon your app, you should try to figure out the reason why it happens. Once you gather the information like retention rate, uninstall rate, etc., you can redirect your strategy and focus on a more proactive approach for the best results.
Final Thoughts
Simple launch of your mobile app is not enough to ensure success on the current market — no matter if it’s robust, providing unique value or working flawlessly.
Today, you need more to get to the top — you need some of the best marketing practices in order to get your app closer to the users and once you do that, rest assured that your mobile app will move towards a greater number of downloads and increased visibility.