App marketing today revolves around providing an app experience that people truly love. Indeed, 2015 has ushered in a phase of smarter app marketing, where emerging trends like predictive app marketing, remarketing and personalization are leading the way in shaping how marketers acquire, engage, retain and thrill users.
Unfortunately, many app marketers are still struggling to bring together the right insights and systems to provide the best possible experience. These marketers are using systems that are disconnected and ineffective, also known as disparate system marketing (DSAM). DSAM happens when marketers try to use customer information that’s stored across multiple, disconnected systems to help guide and influence their marketing campaigns—a recipe that simply doesn’t work.
Here are five symptoms of an app marketing system that’s broken:
- Lack of Personalized Marketing: Personalization, or the ability to tailor the app experience, moved beyond trend status in 2015. It’s a necessity for all app marketers. Localytics research shows there’s a 60% chance that users who don’t visit your app within seven days after the initial download will never return. That’s a stark statistic and a red flag for marketers. Successful app marketing is not just focused on how to acquire app users, but it’s also connected intrinsically to whether app marketers can provide a useful, high-quality and personalized experience for users. If not, users will stop using your app—it’s that simple.
When you don’t have your data all in one place, you can’t deliver a truly personal experience tailored to individual users. Certainly, targeted push messages can double app open rates, triple app conversion rates and increase app retention by two to three times, compared to generic push messages. Consumers respond more positively to personalized messages based on their behavior and interests, compared to messages that are spammy and inauthentic.
- One Channel App Strategy: The explosion of mobile has brought with it an “appification” (the prevalence of apps) of devices on a wider scale. TVs, set-top boxes, watches, and even thermostats all are controlled by apps. This means that the app marketing strategy of today is, by necessity, an omni-channel one. Developing this type of app strategy means reaching users with contextually relevant messages on whatever platform they are engaged with. When your data isn’t unified across channels, you can’t deliver a consistent experience across all of your apps.
- Discoverability is Not Understood: One of the byproducts of “appification” is that it’s becoming more challenging to deliver a fresh new app to the marketplace before someone else does. This isn’t to say there are no original app ideas out there—it just becomes even more important to build, market and promote apps to the right audience at the right time.
In order to know if your app is being discovered, you have to track users, not just downloads, to sources and then to their behavior in the app. With your data tied up in multiple ad networks and acquisition campaigns, how do you know when acquisition sources attract customers with the highest lifetime value? You also can’t determine what type of in-app messaging customers are likely to engage with if you don’t know the history of the content they’ve interacted with.
- Short-term App Strategy: Beyond the initial download, a strong app strategy establishes what the user loves today and predicts what the user will do next. In the short term, interacting with your users one-on-one based on who they are and how they behave helps keep users engaged. But using all the data you have about your customer to predict what they will do next is the key to keeping them coming back for more and turns your strategy into a longer term outlook. Without a data platform that keeps all of your customer data together, making it available instantly to your customer delivery channels, it is impossible to predict customer behavior and proactively engage them with personalized experiences.
- Inability to Remarket to Past Users: Mobile remarketing gives app marketers the opportunity to bring back indecisive or churned customers with highly targeted ads outside of the app. It also offers app marketers a chance to upsell to existing users. Just as retargeting works on the Web, remarketing on mobile requires the ability to deeply understand customers’ in-app behaviors and profile data to provide a personalized ad that delivers on its intention. Without all your customer insights together, combined with solid analytics to help you target the right users, remarketing campaigns will be ineffective and ignored.
So, how can marketers ensure that they don’t fall into the trap of disparate system app marketing? Integrated app marketing is the only answer. Marketers today cannot ignore the power of marketing and analytics. Eighty-six percent of all respondents in a recent survey by Regalix Research felt that marketing analytics were very important for the success of their marketing programs.
When the success of an app depends on the frequency and intensity of its use, it is important to understand as much as possible about user’s preferences, response rates, and trends, making it possible to take action on this information. An integrated approach allows businesses to centrally manage analytics and marketing in one place, resulting in more effective customer communication and relationship building.
Josh Todd is the CMO of Localytics.
