What are the factors that drive app user growth? This article is very sharp.

What are the factors that drive app user growth? This article is very sharp.
Today, as mobile Internet has penetrated into every area of ​​people's lives, competition in the mobile application market has become fierce. What followed was a sharp increase in promotion costs. The era when the average activation cost was 2-3 yuan is gone, and the activation cost of a financial application is as high as dozens of yuan. For startups , the high promotion costs are not only a burden, but more importantly, the quality of users brought in through traditional promotion methods ( app stores , advertising networks, etc.) cannot be effectively guaranteed. Therefore, it is particularly important to find a cost-effective way to grow your application. What is a user growth engine?  A user growth engine refers to a cyclical mechanism that encourages existing users to invite more users to use your app, thereby achieving effective growth in your business. There are several key words here: cyclicality, business, effectiveness, and growth, none of which can be missing. Having a clear understanding and mastery of the user growth mechanism can not only make promotion work more planned and rhythmic, but also help developers better optimize and improve the promotion model.  This cyclical mechanism includes four steps: discovering apps, downloading apps, activating apps, and sharing apps, finally forming a closed loop. The conversion between each step is crucial to the promotion of the product. Once there is a problem in any link, it will affect the final promotion effect.  

 Discovering the app is the first step. How to attract users to the app store or official website to download your APP? There are too many ways, such as advertising promotion , social marketing or email marketing . In this step, it is very important to use innovative marketing methods and monitor and analyze the promotion effects of different channels, because it can not only evaluate the effectiveness of the promotion work, but also provide better guidance for the next step.  Downloading is the second step. As product popularity increases, download figures will also increase. However, the conversions brought by different channels vary greatly. Some channels have very high conversion rates from app discovery to download, while other channels have almost zero conversion rates. You need to find the most effective channel that suits you best.  Activation is the third step and the most important one. According to statistics, 20% of downloaded users uninstall the app after using it only once. In order to avoid one-time usage by users, developers need to provide some unique experience when users launch the application for the first time to gain user recognition.  The last step is to allow users to share the APP with their relatives and friends. Sharing can take many forms, such as rewards for recommendations or content sharing, or something in between. Word of mouth is the best way to market , so it is very necessary for developers to drive existing users to become promoters of their own apps to the greatest extent possible.  1. Discovery and Download (Awareness)  The first thing to do when a new application is launched is marketing. The current mainstream promotion methods are still app stores, advertising networks ( Guangdiantong , Toutiao , Yidian Zixun, etc.) as well as social communication and ground promotion (subway advertising, flyer advertising, etc.). It seems that promotion is not difficult as long as you have money. However, if the marketing budget is insufficient, you may need to find a relatively cost-effective method. Another problem is that advertisers and promoters tend to argue over the evaluation of promotion effects. At this time, it is necessary to access third-party monitoring tools for data statistical analysis, which can not only evaluate the value of the promotion channel, but also make the data more fair and transparent when settling accounts with the promoter.  2. Convert downloads to activations  Now that enough product promotion and publicity has been done, the next stage of user growth is to convert new downloads into activations. Based on a comparative analysis of app store download data and activation data from a third-party statistical analysis platform, it was found that if an app requires users to register before they can browse the app’s content, they will lose almost half of their users. This means that half of the work done on promotion is wasted, and you may need to work twice as hard to acquire the same number of activated users.  Fortunately, there is work that can be done on the registration page to remedy this. Based on the analysis of different APP registration pages, we found that if good information and materials are provided on the registration page to make users have more expectations for the future or arouse their curiosity, then the user's willingness to register will be greatly improved, such as customized page display. It can be an introduction to the product value of the APP, or you can include the recommender’s profile picture information or usage habits, so that the recommended social credit becomes the attraction of the APP. To sum up, the registration page needs to show two points:  Transmit value and let users see the value of the product  Eliminate pain points, eliminate the pain points that users experience during product use. The best way to achieve this is through deep linking.  3. Drive users to share your app and content  For many start-up companies, they may not have much marketing budget for product promotion, so if they want to achieve marketing goals with a limited marketing budget, it is almost impossible because the activation cost is too high. However, we can change our thinking. If we use this money to encourage users to share and let users help promote our products, we may be able to achieve our promotion goals and establish a good growth model.  If you only interpret sharing superficially, it may be a bit misleading. Many people think it is just adding a sharing button. In fact, sharing comes in many forms. For example, sharing can be included in the user invitation process. If an existing user can recommend more new users, he will be rewarded with a certain amount of money. This money can be distributed in the form of red envelopes, which may expand more gameplay and further improve user retention . Another form is basic content sharing. Users can share their favorite content with friends or social networks to increase product awareness.  When adding a sharing function to an app, it is very important to pay attention to the user experience. If the location and scenario where the sharing button appears are very stiff and inappropriate, it will basically not bring about user growth. And if the scenario in which this button appears is very appropriate and natural, explosive growth is not impossible. Many phenomenal products have achieved explosive growth through this form, such as Xiaokaxiu , Zuji, and Huisuoping.  Introducing deep links in traditional sharing functions can better optimize the user experience. Because not only can you jump to the content page of the APP with one click, but it also supports the scene restoration function. For some forwarding invitations, the identities of the inviter and the invitee can be automatically tracked and rewards can be automatically distributed, eliminating the trouble of invitation codes or verification codes.  If this step is done well enough, it will be easy to find that the resulting downloads will increase, so that we have completed a complete closed loop and established a complete set of mechanisms.  4. Self-Propagation  Above we have introduced each link in the user growth engine. The next step is to measure whether this mechanism is effective enough to ultimately achieve healthy self-growth of the application. The best and most direct way is to conduct data analysis . Data analysis is not only a good means to evaluate the effectiveness of existing work, but also provides necessary reference for the formulation of optimization strategies. For example, when analyzing the data of each link, you find that the data from "user discovery of application-download-sharing" are very high, but in the next link you find that too much sharing does not bring explosive growth in new users, then you may need to optimize the sharing link, or the commission prompt is not obvious, or the shared content is not attractive enough.  In addition, through data calculation, you can measure the viral spread effect of your APP. Here we introduce a K factor. The K-factor measures the ability of an existing user to bring in new users and can be used to measure the quality of your growth engine. It can be calculated by the following formula:  K=( conversion rate from download to activation)*(conversion rate from activation to sharing)*(conversion rate from sharing to new downloads) If the conversion effect of each link is relatively good and the K factor can be maintained at a high value, it means that your user growth engine can already achieve self-growth. In the end, not only did we achieve user growth, but we also saved costs, so why not do it?  In short, deep linking can optimize and improve each link in terms of user growth, helping developers break away from existing traditional promotion methods and achieve explosive user growth. Of course, there is more than one way to achieve growth. The most important thing is that the products and services must be practical, and then find a promotion method that suits you, so as to achieve twice the result with half the effort.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

This article was written by @LinkedME and published by ( Qinggua Media ). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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