How to Monetize an App: User Onboarding

Your first-time user experience should immediately showcase your app’s value. Whether it’s helping users find the best fares, offering convenient travel packages, or sharing reviews for must-see attractions, your onboarding process needs to highlight key features that will help new users jump right in.
Once that value is clear, more users will opt in to push notifications and enable location access. Since most travel apps won’t work if the user opts out, it’s necessary for apps to clearly explain why users need to enable location access right away.
As for push notification prompts, your app needs to clarify that enabling push notifications will give users access to exclusive discounts, promo codes, and other valuable incentives. Users are only going to opt in when they see enough value in your app to make it worth their trouble.
Check out this onboarding flow by TripAdvisor. It clearly and succinctly communicates the benefits the app offers when users enable location access.

User Engagement & Monetization

Push notifications are one of the most effective user engagement tools mobile marketers have. Use push to:

• Send hotel deals to users who have booked airfare, but not accommodations
• Reference a user’s local airport to suggest enticing getaways or limited-time deals
• Include images and rich media to get users excited about new destinations

Transactional Messages

Your job isn’t over when a purchase is made. You need to keep engaging users to help build trust and brand loyalty.
Send personalized transactional messages that provide useful and relevant information in real-time:

• Send flight check-in reminders 24 hours before takeoff
• Provide flight status, baggage claim, or gate change updates as they happen
• Welcome users to a new city or country
• Offer hotel check-in details
• Suggest top-rated restaurants and attractions nearby

Best Practices for Recapturing Abandoned Carts

The conversion rate for mobile bookings is as low as 10%. We’ve seen that users like to browse deals on travel apps, but prefer to finalize purchases on desktop, since larger screens let them use more tabs to compare prices and travel times.
Online travel agencies see the highest abandoned cart rates at 89%, followed by the airline industry at 75%. Hotels, cruises, and car rentals aren’t doing much better – floating around just under 65% abandonment rates.

One of the best ways to monetize apps and reduce cart abandonment is to integrate multiple systems for a frictionless experience with webhooks. This will help you connect your website with your call center.
For example: a customer adds a ticket to their cart, but moves to another tab to compare prices.
A webhook could automatically send this data to the travel portal’s call center, and the customer would get a call after 10 minutes. A customer service representative can clear doubts, answer questions, and even notify customers of a limited-time only discount.

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Reactivating Uninstalls

Uninstall rates for travel apps are as high as 20% on iOS and 33% on Android.
In order to keep users around, it’s important to understand common reasons users uninstall an app. What’s the last action users typically take before uninstalling? Send current users following that path a special offer to re-engage them quickly.
For users who have already uninstalled your app, send an email to find out why they left. Our customer Ixigo saw a 12.5% response rate to uninstall emails, providing an invaluable source of user feedback.
Another way to encourage re-installs is to send app-only discount codes to users through SMS and email.
Check out the slideshow to learn even more strategies for improving travel app monetization.

Industry Benchmark for Travel Apps

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The post App Monetization Strategies: Lessons from Expedia first appeared on CleverTap.

North America

• App Promotion Summit – NYC
  June 28, New York City
  
  
  APS brings top mobile leaders and growth marketers together for a one-day event. Executives from AMC Theaters, Walgreens, Hopper, and Foursquare will discuss the latest trends. And they’ll cover key topics like mobile analytics, product development, and mobile growth. A favorite among mobile marketers, 100% of 2017 attendees rated the event as “Excellent.”
  Don’t Miss: Engagement Panel, How to Engage and Retain App Users
  App retention is a major challenge. Get expert advice from the mobile marketers and product leaders at Foursquare, AccuWeather, AMC, and Zinio. Learn their proven strategies for boosting user retention and fueling growth and revenue.
• Mobile Innovation Summit 2018
  December 6-7, San Francisco
  
  
  This event features keynote presentations and hands-on workshops on creating a mobile-first strategy. Learn expert tips for better consumer engagement and mobile advertising. An 80:20 ratio of industry leaders to major vendors makes this a lucrative event for mobile marketers.
  Don’t Miss: Keynote Speakers
  While the speaker list for this year is not yet confirmed, past events featured executives from Disney, Google, Twitter and eBay. The event format allows you to discuss case studies and network with senior industry leaders.
• Mobile Connect
  June 11-13, San Diego
  
  
  With two full days of content, the Mobile Connect conference is an invite-only event. Senior executives from top US brands share challenges and business solutions. Roundtable discussions, keynote presentations, workshops, and panel debates will address: Mobile Commerce & Marketing. One of the interesting roundtable topics is, “What role does your app play in the customer journey?” chaired by Steve Souza, VP of Technology – eCommerce, Education First.
  Don’t Miss: Your Chance to RSVP
  If you snag an invite, this summit offers a valuable opportunity to hold meaningful discussions with high-profile mobile marketers who share your challenges — and whose insights can make a real difference in your campaigns. This year’s attendees include top executives from companies like Amazon, Adidas, Best Buy, and Dell.
• Mobile Next
  September 26-28, Rancho Mirage, CA
  
  
  Major retailers and top startups alike will gather to discuss the latest trends and opportunities in creating customer experiences across mobile and web. Key speakers for 2018 include executives from Walmart, Dominos, and Anheuser-Busch. This event also offers two parallel agendas, with more options to pick topics of interest to your app.
  Don’t Miss: Keynote, Moving Beyond Voice Assistants
  Have you thought of payments via voice? Or push notifications through voice? This keynote discusses the untapped potential of voice technology.

Asia

• Digital Marketing, Malaysia
  May 30-31, Malaysia
  
  
  This event focuses on the latest digital marketing trends, like geotargeting, in-app chat, and more. Speakers include industry thought leaders who will share their strategies for achieving omnichannel excellence. Learn how to serve customers across channels and nudge them toward conversion.
  With Tiags, FoodPanda, and Trinity Group as exhibitors, it’s a perfect opportunity to network with and learn from the experts.
  Don’t Miss: Case Study, Double Down on Personalization
  Curious about using machine learning to personalize and automate message content and delivery? Learn how to add the right personal touch to your user communications. Plus, find out how to scale personalization to a large audience.
  Panel Discussion, The New Era of Digital Marketing and Data
  Leaders from FoodPanda, AirAsia, and Adzymi will cover the trends brands should adopt to stay ahead of the competition. They’ll also discuss the key metrics to track, and ways big data can transform your marketing.
• Mobile World Congress
  June 27-30, Shanghai
  
  
  MWC is one of the largest mobile events in the world, with over 600 exhibitors, 60,000 attendees, and nearly 60 hours of content. Mobile thought leaders like Huawei CMO Dr. Peter Zhou and WithinLink CEO Bessie Lee will share their insights on key industry trends.
  Don’t Miss: Keynote Panel, Better Future for Society
  The digital revolution has shown many benefits for society. But it also poses significant challenges, like greater threats to data security, social inequality, and industry disruptions. This panel brings together five thought leaders to discuss these challenges and their efforts to build a better society.

Europe

• eTail Europe
  June 19-21, London
  
  
  Since it launched in 1999, the eTail conference has been dedicated to retail industry growth. It’s now almost 2,000 attendees strong, attracting brands like Adidas, Nestle, Hermes, and Lego.
  The event helps e-commerce players learn insider tricks of the trade from luxury brands and digital champions. Learn how to achieve omnichannel and e-commerce excellence through the latest retail tech.
  Don’t Miss: Keynote panel, Omnichannel & Online Growth Tactics
  A cohesive experience on every marketing channel strengthens customer relationships with your brand. The speakers will share their tactics around growth, disruption, and omni-commerce strategies.
• Digimarcon Europe 2018
  September 5-6, London
  
  
  Digimarcon Europe is a thought leadership event on the most relevant topics in digital marketing. It focuses on customer loyalty, lead generation, sales, and consumer engagement. This conference showcases thought-provoking speakers from Hubspot, Moz, and Marketing Insider.
  This year’s event focuses on digital strategy, customer engagement, social media marketing, growth hacking, and much more.
  Don’t Miss: Inbound Marketing MasterClass by Steve Wiideman, CEO Wiideman Consulting Group
  Sharpen your inbound marketing skills with advanced strategies used by enterprise ecommerce brands. Learn tips and tricks to attract the right customers with timely, personalized content.
• The Web Summit
  November 5-8, Lisbon
  
  
  As one of the largest tech conferences in the world, The Web Summit covers cutting-edge technologies and best practices. TWS attracts the world’s leading tech companies, including Reddit, Intel, Oracle, and Drivezy.
  Don’t Miss: World-Renown Speakers
  Their speaker lineup has always been a huge draw. Past speakers include Stephen Hawking, Al Gore, Reed Hastings, Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, and other renowned names. Check out the entire list of speakers here.
• App Promotion Summit
  December 6, Berlin
  
  
  APS Berlin is an action-packed one-day event. Marketing leaders come to discuss data-driven growth strategies, app monetization, and user retention. Brands like Applift, Remerge, Voluum, Liftoff, and App Samurai will be exhibitors, so don’t miss out on this event.
  Don’t Miss: Panel, How to Engage and Delight App Users
  The success of your engagement strategy depends on how well you understand your user base. This panel will dive into campaign strategies to help you retain acquired users, drive app engagement, and even win back lost users.

We’ll See You There!

The mobile marketing industry is growing leaps and bounds every year. Conferences are some of the best ways to keep up with the latest innovations and connect with the larger mobile marketing community.

The post Can’t-Miss Mobile Marketing Events for 2018 first appeared on CleverTap.

We Believe in Using Technology to Make Apps Smarter

A mobile-first marketing strategy is a must for connecting with your supporters. Engaging people by connecting them to the right cause at the right time is the best way to promote your organization’s efforts and accomplishments.
CleverTap gives you a real-time view of what users are doing in your app so you can effectively target and engage them to stay active with your organization. Detailed reports track key campaign metrics so you can adapt and perfect your engagement strategy.

We Help Create a Community of Like-Minded Individuals

In order to gain traction for your cause, you need to build a community of people who are passionate about your mission and can influence like-minded supporters to amplify your vision.
With CleverTap, you can better understand your existing user base through detailed demographics, user preferences, and social profiles — and then craft personalized engagement campaigns that resonate. Building a community of users who believe in your cause has never been easier.

We Further Efforts to Save Our Planet

Countless philanthropic groups are focusing on one of today’s most pressing issues: reversing the effects of climate change. Volunteers are spread all over the globe, and the only thread that links them is their passion to preserve our planet for the next generations.
To connect activists with each other and to their passion, CleverTap helps organizations send personalized messages to their supporters. Everyone gets real-time updates on the latest events and opportunities to help.

We Provide Mobile Marketing Expertise

You have the expertise to solve society’s most pressing issues. Our mobile marketing experts have the experience to support you. We’re here to help you draft compelling campaigns that are guaranteed to improve your marketing ROI.
We’ll work closely with you to understand your objectives, help you interpret user data, build an event strategy based on the right touch points, measure campaign success, and suggest recommendations.
CleverTap customer Ketto has raised more than $50M for social, creative, and charitable causes.

— Zaheer Adenwala, Co-Founder and CTO, Ketto

Learn more about how nonprofits and social organizations are using CleverTap to make a difference at our nonprofit page.

The post CleverTap: Pairing Technology with Philanthropy first appeared on CleverTap.

Almost every service and product company has created a mobile app to make life easier for their users/customers, but struggle to prevent users from uninstalling their app and try hard to keep their users engaged. Apps are meant to facilitate ‘personalized’ engagement with users. Engagement with the user in a relevant and timely manner translates users into paying customers. Sending the correct message at the correct time will keep a user engaged with your app.
To ace ‘personalization’, businesses need insights into user behavior. And if you are a startup, you need to spread your information net wider and deeper because you know nothing about how users want to engage with your app. The more you understand your user, the better you engage with them.
So, the message is simple.
Information about user behavior and personalized engagement are critical to the success of your app. But, apps do not come with an in-built functionality of capturing, processing and utilizing this kind of information. So, to unveil the true potential of an app, you have to complement it with the right ‘app analytics and engagement tool’.
In the recent years, a slew of app analytics and engagement tools have hit the market. All tools come with a lot of pros and a few cons each. That raises the question- how to choose the right tool for your startup?
The answer lies in what matters the most to your startup from a growth perspective. The tool you choose should support the growth strategy of your start-up. Simple!
High engagement, increased retention, and continuing mobile app revenue are the top goals of a start-up. Having said that, here is how CleverTap helps start-ups grow their business.

Understand and Analyze your Users Better

Segmenting users based on who they are or what they have done in your app will help you to interact with them contextually and guide them through the buyer’s journey.
CleverTap allows you to define user behavior and monitors these behaviors as they happen in the app. You can set automated push notifications, SMSes and emails in response to the behaviors. With the engagement platform, you can optimize click through rates of responses.

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Here are some use-cases of the different segmentation filters that CleverTap offers:

• • User action/inaction: Set up a funnel with a sequence of steps that represent your business objectives. Interact with a user based on whether or not he completed a step towards conversion.

• • Profile attributes: Segment users based on attributes like revenue, last interacted, etc. Run a campaign to get inactive users back to interact with the app. Reward loyal customers. Run offers encouraging users to buy.

• • Geographic location: Analyze user behavior based on location. Explore locations where users are active at a particular time, their interaction habits etc.

• • Frequency of activity: Come up with innovative campaigns to move users forward in the marketing funnel for those who clicked on notifications or played a video but have not made a purchase yet.

• • Relative/absolute time: Send push notifications to all users reminding them about the sale that will start tomorrow. You can also schedule them to be sent out based on the user’s time zone. Not just this, you can also send out notifications time relative to a particular task performed in the app – to users who have not completed the registration, to those who have added items to cart but have not purchased them.

Personalize at Scale or Engage them using the right channel at the right time

CleverTap facilitates live user segmentation based on their behaviour as it happens in the app. Identify customers you are about to lose based on whether or not they completed a specific activity and send them personalized push notifications, emails and SMSes, with an incentive to buy.

Re-engage

Retention strategies also rely extensively on segmentation. Segmentation combined with push notifications is the most promising way to get users back to your app.
The cost of acquiring a new user is five times higher than the cost of retaining an existing user. Almost 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers, and it costs much more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one satisfied
CleverTap has some handy campaigns targeted specifically at getting users back to the app. Apart from push notifications to users who were inactive for some days, CleverTap has in-built campaign templates to engage with users who have not opened the app for longer than their regular frequency.

You can combine auto-segmentation with clever campaigns to deliver the right message to the right user at the right time. Choose the most optimal channel from email, push notifications and in-app notifications for your users.

Dashboard and Reporting

Reporting is one of the major problems with many tools. CleverTap has an intuitive dashboard, which helps you in taking decisions for a complex problem in a second, apart from that you can get all reports directly to your inbox.
CleverTap has four default dashboards for –

• • Today

• • Mobile App

• • Uninstalls

• • Revenue

The analytics dashboard allows you to process user data on a real-time basis to enhance the user experience.
CleverTap also has a set of Clever Campaigns that allows you to engage with users as they move through the app. You can engage with users by targeting critical touch points in their journey with welcome campaigns, reminder campaigns and re-engagement campaigns.
CleverTap is an end-to-end app analytics and engagement tool that serves the purpose of decision-making and user retention in a single dashboard.

The post Growth Hacking Tips for the Savvy Mobile Marketer first appeared on CleverTap.

He finally gets the sneakers, and you get a new user,.
Congratulations!
Now comes the hard part for you as a marketer: how do you calculate the ROI of your app marketing?

Getting the metrics of your mobile app right

In Bruce’s story, you might be tempted to attribute the download and sale to the deals website, because that’s what your analytics would show as source of traffic.
If you go down that route, you might ramp up your investment in that website, issuing more coupons and potentially neglecting other channels.
That would be a mistake!
His decision to buy was likely influenced by what he saw online across multiple channels. The deals website was just the means to an end, and not the reason.
Google, for example, found out that one car buyer went through 900 + digital interactions over a period of three months before making a decision.

Notice the different channels at play in this buyer journey?
While the number of interactions are high because the car is a higher value purchase compared to a shoe or a $1.99 app the principles behind customer behavior are consistent: people will use multiple channels to find out about your product or service before they make the final decision.
Understanding how a buyer finds out about your app is crucial if you want to really calculate the ROI of your app marketing.
But that’s just one piece of the puzzle.
You also need to know:

• Whether users are responding to your onboarding process and not abandoning or uninstalling the app immediately.
• How are users responding to different retargeting or marketing campaigns to get them to be more active on the app.
• The channels and campaigns which are sending the most loyal or most high value users.
• The customer acquisition cost for users who join following a referral campaign, and the channels which drive the highest referral installs.
• And much more.

So many questions, so few answers. 🙁

Fortunately for you, there are a bunch of frameworks you can use to uncover the metrics that would help you answer these questions.

Mobile App Monetization Strategies for 2018

A collection of 7 time-tested monetization strategies for all mobile app verticals

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We will be using the familiar AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) framework.
This article goes into details about determining your mobile marketing KPIs but for tl;dr version, here’s what you will get after going through the process of figuring out your metrics by using the Goals-Signals -Metrics framework.

Different apps will have different AARRR metrics, but this table can help you get started.
Once you know the metrics you need to track, you will need to set up systems to track your costs and your revenue to find out your ROI.
Simple, right?
But as you might suspect, it’s not easy.

Plug- and- play (ish) formulas for calculating app ROI

Let’s talk about Bruce’s sneaker shopping journey for a bit.
When you are calculating the ROI of your sneaker app, you will not only need to figure out the ROI at different stages of the user journey as represented by the AARRR framework but…
…also demonstrate the value of mobile app as a whole, as opposed to other channels like social or digital.
After all, there are already mutterings that mobile apps have peaked and they would be rapidly replaced by newer channels like chatbots, or by progressive web apps.
A rigorous ROI measurement effort could also uncover missed opportunities and trim wastage, 80/20 your marketing efforts, and turn your app marketing leaner and meaner, like this:

“That sounds all well and good in theory, Clevertap,” you will say. “But how the covfefe do I actually calculate the numbers and justify my marketing budget hike?”
We hear you!
There are a whole branch of approaches for calculating app ROI considering the mind boggling diversity in the app universe.

• Calculate Cost Per Install and Install To Action rate

This approach works if your app has one single most valuable post install action that the user can perform, like upgrading to Pro version.
The cost per install number will give you the total costs incurred in acquiring a high value purchaser, and dividing this number by the total revenue per user for the same time period will give you the app marketing ROI.

You can fine tune your marketing strategy by segmenting these numbers on a campaign, channel, creative or source basis to identify the high performers, and either double down on them or work to boost the laggards.
Drilling down into revenue numbers inside Clevertap
Another related metric that will give you insight on the value of your entire post install funnel is the ITA (Install to Action) rate, which is defined as the number of installs that perform the highest value action.

You can benchmark your CPA by using data from Fiksu’s cost per purchaser index. As the following graph shows, getting purchasers on Android is less costlier than on iOS.

• Net Present Value method

If you are not directly selling anything, or if you are in charge of an enterprise app built for internal users, you might not be able to use the revenue metrics to calculate the ROI.
In such a scenario, you can use the net present value formula to calculate app ROI.
This post, along with the associated infographic goes into more details about the method but here’s how the math works:

1. 1. • NPV (Costs):Find out all the costs associated with building and maintaining the app over the life time period, adjusting for cost of capital deployed down the line
      • NPV (Benefits): Find out the value delivered by the app over its complete lifetime.
      • Divide benefits by costs to get the ROI.

• The ARPU and CPLU method

Another way to find out whether your app marketing is going on the right track is to calculate the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) and CPLU (Cost Per Loyal User) numbers and compare them.
You are in positive ROI if your ARPU is greater than CPLU.

ARPU > CPLU

Here’s how you can find out the numbers:

Final thoughts on ROI

As you may have realized, ROI isn’t something that you can get by punching some numbers into a spreadsheet or a calculator.
Your ROI numbers will always have an element of uncertainty, especially if you are a fast growing team with multiple marketing experiments running at any given time.
Instead of absolute numbers, pick one method for ROI and observe the trend over a period of time (assuming that you haven’t drastically changed your marketing strategy).
But even if you don’t have fancy spreadsheets, focus on increasing the ARPU metric while keeping other variables constant.
This simple tweak will guarantee that your app marketing effort is delivering positive ROI.

The post Do Mobile App ROI Measurements Give You the Heebie-Jeebies? first appeared on CleverTap.