13 Magical Things You Should Know to Make Your App Get Millions of Downloads
| You may not know who Tamara Steffens is, but you've definitely downloaded an app she promotes. Steffens has led business development at companies such as Path and Color, and most recently joined Acompli, a popular email app company. She brought millions of mobile application downloads to Acompli and helped Acompli sign pre-installation agreements with operators such as Verizon and Sprint, so that more people can use the Acompli application when they turn on their phones. She brought new creative inspiration to the field of business development, practicing a marketing strategy that mixed a large number of marketers and salespeople to bring startups what they most needed: users. However, what she brings to the startup is not all users, but valuable, loyal users who can generate profits. Today’s startups can easily access data and then use it to find users and make them happy. However, it is also easier to lead a product in the wrong direction due to incorrect data. In this exclusive interview, Steffens, senior vice president of business development at Acompli, will share her approach to user acquisition and how she helps startups build both corporate and consumer brands in the market. 1. Clear your mindset first. Interestingly, Steffens’ first user acquisition strategy has nothing to do with users. The secret is to keep information flowing within the entrepreneurial team, and whether this can be done is crucial. She said, "Startups need to make sure that there is someone on their team who understands app distribution and app store optimization and can continuously educate the entire engineering team." The key to acquiring customers and orders and generating more users is to iterate quickly to meet customer needs and make faster product updates to surprise customers (that is, to meet their needs before they ask for them). That's why it's necessary to maintain a continuous, open channel of communication between users and developers. If you don't have this channel established yet, get it done now. 2. To win over consumers, you must control information. For consumers, there are a total of 2.5 million applications to choose from in the Google Play App Store and the Apple App Store. Given this proliferation of apps, what do consumer app developers need to do most to gain traffic? Steffens has a firm opinion on this: it takes work. Put in the work, which means that if you want your app to stand out in the store, you need to do these three things first: media coverage, partnerships, and sales skills. Here’s what Steffens did: 1. Media coverage Excellent media will definitely bring traffic. Traditional online media like TechCrunch, The Wall Street Journal, and others can drive a lot of traffic to your app. Promote products in cycles. Take some time to make a list of journalists who are likely to cover your company, including those who have written about similar products, product trends, and similar topics in the past. In any case, you have to remember people's names and appearances and communicate in the way they prefer. Make sure you're familiar with their jobs, then get them interested in your news so they feel like you're doing their job for them. Although it takes a little more effort, it is very effective. At the same time, if small media will definitely report on your product or write a review report, then don't bother to bother with large media. Establish individual connections with each consumer through social media such as Weibo, or even email. Once someone visits your website or downloads your app, you want them to feel like they have the opportunity to engage with you as a developer, whether by following your social network accounts, receiving newsletters, or receiving push notifications directly in the app. This approach can help keep users remember you and your app long after the product launch. 2. Partnership Although media coverage can solve a company’s urgent needs, strategic partnerships are the best way to help a company get back on track quickly and continue to gain distribution. Collaborating with large media outlets can almost instantly attract a large user base. The best way to sign such an agreement is to mention the product value of the company you are working with and praise how this product has helped your product succeed. Doing this can highlight the highlights and influence of other products, and then transfer them to your own products. Who doesn't want to get some of the credit? Companies like Sony and Samsung, if they see that working with you can bring obvious profits, will devote sufficient resources to maximize your market coverage. But to work with them, your application needs to be prepared. So you need to get involved early and be flexible so that you can make changes as these big companies make demands on your application. 3. As with sales techniques and media coverage and partnerships, people still have to see you sell before they will buy. Therefore, listing on the App Store and Google Play app store became the top priority. Once you release an app, you need to deal with the people at Google or Apple. There is no other way but to do this. To do this well, Steffens encourages startups to view interactions with platform administrators as an opportunity for growth, rather than just using them to get on the front page. Whether you choose Apple or Google depends on whether you are initially planning to enter the US market or the global market. Steffens said. In fact, the choice is simple: although Android's market share in the United States is increasing, iOS is still the mainstream. As for other markets, Android dominates the market, but these consumers are less willing to pay to download apps. Outside of North America, Europe, and Japan, it’s difficult for apps elsewhere to make money. These factors should be taken into consideration. If you want to enter the global market and reach only non-paying users, then Android is probably the best choice. If users and profits are directly linked, then iOS may be the best launch market. 3. Keep a close eye on user ratings. Once your product is on the market, consumers may be your best allies, but they may also be your most aggressive trolls. User reviews spread quickly, so it’s best to keep them positive. If you are developing a consumer-facing app, the ratings on both app stores should be above 4.5. If your app rating drops below 3.5, then you are definitely doing something wrong and you need to find out what it is. So how do you keep your app ratings high? There are many ways to encourage users to review, rather than waiting for them to express their opinions in a review. While you want to hear their feedback, you should encourage them to review your app. In addition to prompting users to leave ratings while they’re using the app, there are tools that can help entrepreneurs receive reminders to rate the app when users are happiest. 4. Be aware of your own shortcomings. Every time she releases an update, Steffens not only looks at user reviews, she also carefully observes what users are doing. You need to keep a close eye on usage data, specifically: How many times a day do users open your app? How many times per month? What do they do after opening the app? After releasing a new feature, how many users will use it? When the engineering team writes these new features, they need to add a few lines of code to let you see usage data in real time. She tracks each user's daily usage, weekly usage, usage over the previous 30 days, and usage over the previous 6 weeks. Over time, she identified two key numbers that indicated a certain percentage of users were likely to abandon the app. 5. User Churn Points How many users churn from the first day they download the app? In fact, from the first day of opening the download, there are 2 data to be mined: 1. The number of people who downloaded the app and the number of people who opened it once and never opened it again If your app is confusing or intimidating to users, they’ll likely turn it off and delete it. Solution: If users are stopping before they get to the bottom of your app, you need to take a closer look at your sign-up process. Consider how much information you ask for from users during the registration process, how long it takes, and also consider the privacy policy (many people only find out that this is where the problem lies at the end). If you’re losing users due to a long sign-up phase, take a close look at your onboarding screen. If the first screen that opens your app tells users how much fun the app can bring them, rather than explaining how to use it, you're in trouble. You need to do enough A/B testing to determine where and when you're losing users. Once you’ve identified the problem, you need to provide information during the sign-up process to improve it and keep users engaged. Sending a welcome email after registration is also an important step in retaining users. Steffens suggests sharing some tips in your welcome email, which can either bring in a highly engaged user or lose one if you don’t. If welcome emails are deployed properly, they can not only prevent users from leaving on the first day, but also retain long-term users. 2. How many users are still using my product after 6 weeks? Are their needs being met? By week 6, you need to wonder if app usage is declining. Has your app lost its novelty? What does the average user need to do to continue using your product? This is a bit of a psychology exercise, but having data to back it up can help you figure out why people leave. Solution: Keeping users engaged for more than 6 weeks means you need to consciously listen to them, understand what they want from your product, and then add it as soon as possible. It cannot be stressed enough how important it is to share what you learn in business development, sales, and distribution with the engineering team. Wanting everyone to know, she would analyze the data at weekly staff meetings and highlight where Acompli was losing users. This way, the team knows where they are losing users and what actions they need to take in the following week to get users what they need and retain them. 6. Want to acquire corporate users? Process matters Consumer-facing startups have access to data every day, allowing for fast, actionable analysis. But how to deal with enterprise-level users? When the user acquisition process extends from a few minutes to a few months, how to retain users? 7. Find great salespeople Steffens has built several enterprise sales teams from the ground up, and she knew one thing: build a team of experts. Start by asking them who knows the current market best. Who has sold obsolete technology in a sunset market? Which salesperson who has achieved outstanding results in a large company do you want to surpass? Look at them, and then look at other companies in adjacent fields. Will the relationships they build with consumers stand the test of time? Salespeople who can create long-term consumer relationships are the most worth having. They may be more expensive, but with a sophisticated stature they can be the first and possibly the best salesperson in the company. 8. Don’t just sell once, sell repeatedly. Once you have a top sales team, you have to give them a lot of products to sell. The most successful enterprise platforms are not those products that are sold once and then withdrawn, but those that provide more additional modules after the sale, so that they can be sold to a wider user base. 9. Keep honing your skills in the process. Because the corporate sales cycle is very long, it is difficult to measure the success of marketing and sales strategies. But in the end, revenue is the measuring stick for a company's sales performance. You know exactly how the enterprise sale works and how much success the salesperson will have within this time frame. There is no gray area. But focusing only on revenue will cause a business to lose some important differentiation and, as a result, lose customers. In addition to looking at the data, Steffens also recommends taking the time and analyzing the process. Do you keep your sales team up to date on company news? Do you continue to pay attention to sales representatives after the meeting? In most sales processes, if you keep paying attention to the salesperson, understand the sales process, and tell the engineering team what the consumer is thinking and what they need, you will get the order. A healthy feedback loop requires rapid follow-up. Waiting 5 or even 10 days will cause you to lose a lot of profits. If someone says they’re interested in trying the product, find out what features they’re interested in trying and send them the trial right away. Once they’ve gotten used to the product in a short period of time (maybe two or three days), ask them what they think. 10. Do you have any good ideas? There have been a lot of Growth Hacking conferences recently (small meetings where startups get together to learn how to grow), and there are also many articles online that talk about methods and tricks to help companies acquire users. What does Steffens think about this? Ignore it completely. No one method works in the long run, she said, and in a product world that changes so quickly, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. If a strategy becomes popular, it immediately becomes ineffective. She points to a technique that many social networking sites have used: asking new users whether they want to automatically invite their email contacts to the social network. Soon people found this method extremely annoying and all websites stopped using it. In the end, the most effective growth secret for consumer and enterprise apps is to learn from great sales and marketing examples, but don’t lose sight of the basics. 11. Pay attention to customer service. If you want to differentiate your company from your competitors and steadily increase your user base, nothing is more important than attentive, friendly, and incredibly responsive customer service. Especially in the enterprise market, impeccable consumer service is a must. If any failure or accident occurs, you need to manually resolve and support it as soon as possible. If consumers have trouble entering text, data, or integrating your app into their tools, they won’t view your product as competitive because they feel you’re not providing great customer service. 12. Multi-channel growth brings traffic. Although the optimization methods of other channels cannot bring a lot of people, they are effective. Optimize the sign-up process on the homepage of your website, constantly test copy, page layout, experiment with videos, images and animations, and test the color of each button. It all has to be done in one go so that you can be sure that everything you do is geared toward gaining as much market share as possible. The time spent and the problems solved are worth it, and all changes can increase user engagement with the product and brand. “If every time you make a change you get 1, 2, or 3% more conversions, that adds up to a lot. 13. Find the magic number It’s not a silver bullet, but for every application and product, there is a magic number, and Steffens has seen it. For Acompli, this number is "2", which means 2 email accounts. She said that as soon as one of our users creates a second email account on the app, we have essentially locked that user out. Because at this time users already clearly know the value of this product. With that number in hand, Acompli’s team began tweaking its messaging to get more users to open a second account. Providing expert instructions for using your app via email is just one way to help them reach that magic number. By defining this magic number, companies can tell consumers who their most successful users are (i.e. those who consistently achieve success at work through their use of the app) and then take action to get more users to reach that number. Taking Acompli as an example, if you want your users to send 2 emails in the first week of using the app, you can guide them on the welcome screen or give prompts directly in the app to encourage users to move towards this number. You want to give users the opportunity to discover the value you can provide. Unless people know how to use your product, how to get started and how to keep using it, you have to think ahead for the user. |
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