7 Tips To Growth Hack Your App Retention Rate

The app market is booming with the increase in smartphone and internet users. Businesses who started off with the conventional websites to cater to their target audience are now moving towards that one device we all spend most of our time on – mobile.

According to VentureBeat, the app economy could double to $101 billion by 2020. This only goes to say how businesses will move their revenue models more towards apps than the web.

But with the rise in the number of app in the market, there is also an increasing challenge coming in place – acquiring and then retaining those users.

Smartphone users practically have at least a thousand options in any category of apps that they could download from. Acquiring users is not just a matter of standing out, but also consistently optimizing your marketing strategies and budgets. While acquiring users is something that businesses are still able to execute, retaining them is the tougher part of the model.

The average app user retention rate is considerably low as compared to when the app market started. The reason being that people are spoilt for choice and don’t find a good reason to remain loyal to one app – anything that promises a better experience or is trending in the market, is what they download.

For instance, what do you think is the current retention rate of games with Pokemon Go trending across the world?

The answer is low, very low.

Don’t believe us? Here’s what an average app’s retention problem looks like:

How to boost your app retention rate starting today

The true key to measuring the retention rate of your app is to understand how frequently your users are returning to it – starting from the first time they downloaded and used the app.

This metric plays a big role in the mobile growth stack because higher the retention rate, greater are the chances of the user recommending your app in his circles and helping you grow it organically.

So here’s taking a look at some ways to boost your app retention rate:

7 Tips To Growth Hack Your App Retention Rate

1. Personalized onboarding

The first and foremost thing that determines how a user is going to use your app, is the onboarding you offer. It is important to understand who your target users are, where they are coming from and what they are looking for, to give them an onboarding accordingly.

It is important that you personalize their experience right from the beginning. This not just helps you gather the important data from the user, but also ensure he explores the app as you’d prefer. It is like giving your user a direction to move in so that he doesn’t get confused and leave the app.

For instance, beats music starts off its onboarding process in a simple step-by-step manner. They ask the user for the information they think is important and would help them personalize their in-app experience.

2. Push notifications

While some app developers and marketers consider push notifications intrusive, the truth is that they are actually not. Smartphone users always have the option to turn on/off the notifications as well as define the way they want to be notified – via an alert, a message, a badge icon, etc.

Implementing push notifications in your app helps you create a retention strategy wherein you can reach out to your users time and again with a personalized message. The notification serves as a reminder of the app to the user and a nudge to bring him back to it. Although, it is important that you fully understand your user’s behaviour on your app and test the frequency of push notifications that you must maintain.

Almost 80% of smartphone users opt in to push notifications from the apps they download. The reason is that they expect some value from the app, and don’t want to miss out on any news. Although, you have to ensure that you’re adding value to them each time, or they’ll also be the fastest to opt out.

Companies like Wigzo provide you with the tools that help you create effective push notification campaigns. It enables you to segment your audience and target them with custom campaigns, to drive even more conversions.

Wondering how to create the perfect push notification? Here’s your guide: The guide to leveraging from push notifications.

3. Embracing wearables

Wearables are a big part of effective mobile marketing strategies. In fact, according to PWC, the wearable technology is all set for exponential growth and marketers will definitely need to include them in their business strategies.

Since wearables are devices that are constantly going to remain with a user, they present an opportunity for marketers to communicate with them more often. Be it notifications, reminders or simply updates about the app, using wearables will ensure your app remains at the top of their minds at all times.

For instance, Kim Kardashian West’s Forbes recognised app actually uses wearable to remind the users of an event occurring in the app or to bring him back with a message.

4. Creating a community

Create a community of your users – right from the beginning. Be it a Facebook group or in-app community, give them a platform to consistently network with each other as well as communicate with you.

This also gives you the opportunity to send out broadcast messages related to app updates, events and other marketing campaigns.

Another aspect that a community takes care of, includes addressing user concerns on time. Most of the times apps lose their users simply because they were not able to address a problem or resolve an issue stated by him. This also leads to the user losing interest and faith in the app, moving on to another from the mobile market.

5. Implement a sharing strategy

Take a look at your app and analyze if you’ve made it easy for users to share your app and its content. It is imperative to encourage users to share with friends as it is an essential functionality for apps across verticals and you need to be readily available to aid its vitality. Focus on your app’s UX and UI to maximize the ease of sharing vital information when necessary the most.

Incentives such as referral strategies can also propel the growth and vitality of our app. Codes, coupons, invitations are just some of the ways to go for incentivizing referrals. Each app is unique thus you need to think about incentives that will work the best with your product.

A good referral strategy accounts for ways to enrich user experience bespoke to the app, simultaneously keeping in mind the goal of encouraging a chain of referrals.

6. In-app chats

Another way to keep your users hooked to your app, is to implement in-app chats. This ensures that the user doesn’t need to switch to another app just to communicate with his friends. If he has the ability to chat simultaneously with his people, he is more likely to stay longer on the app as well as have a higher retention rate.

This also opens the opportunity for you to ask the user to invite his friends and family to the app. If the user is happy with his in-app experience, he will be sure to recommend it in his circles – helping you grow organically, as well as boosting your in-app chat strategy. One needs to have his people around all the time, right?

And of course,

7. Email campaigns

Irrespective of what your app offers, email marketing is something you just can’t exclude from your user retention strategy. Emails serve as a direct channel for communicating with your users – they are more likely to only focus on what you have to say and convert on the same.

But the ground rules remain the same, your email needs to highly personalized and contextual in nature, or you’re just going to end up in spam.

For instance, here’s a user recovery email campaign by Runkeeper – it subtly reminds the user that he hasn’t run for a few days – at the same time pitching to bring him back to the app.

Over to you

Just like other marketing strategies, it is important to implement personalization in apps as well. It is not just about the acquisition campaign you run, but also about how well you’re able to optimize a user’s experience in-app and drive him towards a conversion

5 Best Growth Hacking Tools For eCommerce

A growth hacker is only as good as the tools he has.

With the right tools, a growth hacker is able to run rapid experiments across the entire marketing funnel, identify the right tactics that work, and scale them up efficiently.

What this means simply is – a growth hacker must constantly be on the lookout for the best tools on the market, those that can help them do his/her job better.

That’s why I’ve compiled 10 of the best growth hacking tools that you can experiment with to make your marketing processes more efficient.

These are tools I’ve used personally to acquire more customers, retain them or simply to scale certain tactics.

To help you get started fast, I’ve also added tactics that you can test immediately with each tool.

Best Growth Hacking Tools For eCommerce

1. Audiencefy

Audiencefy is the best customer segmentation and eCommerce analytics app. That will help you grow your Shopify sales and exponentially increase eCommerce revenue. Audiencefy integrates with your Shopify store to automatically populate customers’ order information, individual customer data, and journey, analytics, insights and more.

Top Benefits:

Executive Summary of Your Store
Predefined Customer Segment
Individual Customer Data & Journey
Order & Product Analytics

2. Colibri.io

Colibri is one of the best tools to scale up your traffic. It helps you to get in front of your audience. Colibri increases the results of your SEO efforts and enhances your online visibility.

Top Benefits:

Lets you know about conversations with your audience.
Provides information about people searching your competitors
SEO driven tool that allows you to make changes in your online marketing.
Shows you where customers are engaging online, so you can insert yourself into relevant conversations.

3. ClickToTweet

Click to Tweet allows you to promote your business on Twitter with a single click. This tool can be used in many ways. You can offer your audience to promote it on twitter in exchange for a gift or a free service.

Top Benefits:

Promotes social media sharing.
Tells you the exact number of times people have clicked on your tweet.
Easy to integrate into a variety of online resources, such as email, landing pages and social media posts.

4. Pay with a Tweet

Pay with a Tweet is a tool that is also geared towards content and/or product promotion via social media. This growth hacking tool makes it possible to see certain content only after you have shared the website via social media.

Top benefits:

Encourages social media sharing
Invite visitors to pay their posts via Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Xing.
Customizable to your own brand.

5. Outbrain

Outbrain enables you to reach new audiences and get your brand discovered on networks such as CNN, TIME, Slate and Fast Company.

Top Benefits:

Get your brand featured on CNN, ESPN and People and other top companies.
Turn-key set up and optimization in the amplify dashboard.
Outbrain dedicates a significant amount of human, capital and technology resources towards making sure everything we advertise is 100% safe and trustworthy.
Outbrain is a platform that helps you advertise.

8 Of The Best Ecommerce Metrics To Track And Grow Your Business

The most successful of the eCommerce stores make decisions backed by data. They always know the current scenario of their online store’s performance at all times which enables them to grow and take on competitors.

There are loads of data matrices that you can track, but only a few of them are actually be used as actionable insights to help you grow.

Let’s talk about the most important eCommerce metrics.

The most important eCommerce metrics

These are the 8 most important metrics every eCommerce store should track.

1. Sales conversion rate

Your conversion rate, quite simply, is the percentage of visitors who make a purchase. This is the metric you’ll worry about the most—that’s why it’s first on this list.

According to Marketing Sherpa, a fair conversion rate for eCommerce stores is between one and five percent.

Most analytics tools will tell you the conversion rate, but you can find it manually by dividing the number of people who bought a product by the total number of visitors.

2. Email opt-ins

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools eCommerce stores have to drive repeat business. It delivers a 4,400 percent ROI. That’s $44 for every $1 spent. Plus, your mailing list doesn’t make you dependent on another platform (like Facebook or Google) to drive traffic.

Ideally, you want to get as many people on your email list as possible, even if they don’t buy your products. So it’s important to track your total opt-ins and your opt-ins by source. That is, you want to know the individual opt-in rates of every form on your website.

You can track email opt-ins two ways:

Use the built-in analytics in your email marketing tool
Set up a conversion goal in Google Analytics to track your opt-in’s “thank you” page

3. Customer lifetime value

Your customer lifetime value is a metric of the total you earn from a typical customer over the course of their life. If you earn $25 over six transactions from a typical customer throughout their life, your CLV is $150. (You’ll have to subtract your acquisition costs, but we’ll get to that in a moment.)

Knowing your customer lifetime value tells you how much you can spend to acquire a customer and how far you should go to retain them.

4. Customer acquisition cost

Naturally, it costs something to acquire a new customer. This value is called your customer acquisition cost.

In order to make money, your customer acquisition cost needs to be less than your customer lifetime value. Ideally, your acquisition cost should be less than your average order value so you make money off every new customer.

5. Revenue by traffic source

In our post on traffic quality, we talked about how all traffic isn’t equal. Some traffic sources send visitors who are more likely to become customers. It’s important to stop spending cash on sources that don’t work well or don’t work at all, and invest that money in sources that do work.

6. Average order value

Your average order value is, quite simply, the average value of each purchase. To discover yours, divide the total value of all sales by the numbers of carts.

Naturally, you want customers to spend as much as possible so you earn as much as possible. You need to know your average order value so you can find ways to raise it.

How do you drive this metric up?

Bundle products together so the customer gets a slight discount on the products as opposed to buying them separately.
Upsell your customer’s additional features or premium versions of your products.
Recommend products that complement their purchases.
Offer free shipping for higher total purchases. (E.g., If your AOV is $54, offer free shipping at $60 to tempt your customers to spend more.)

7. Shopping cart abandonment rate

This metric is the percentage of shoppers who add items to their shopping cart, but then leave your store without making a purchase. Nearly 70 percent of shoppers abandon their carts, but some of that revenue is recoverable, so it’s important to lower your abandonment rate as much as possible.

8. Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score is a simple survey that measures your customers’ satisfaction with your brand and products. It asks two questions:

How likely are you to recommend us to a friend? (Scale of one through 10.)
Can you tell us why you responded with that number?

Conclusion

Any store, small or large, should be paying attention to these metrics. As we noted initially, statistical significance plays a part in whether you can accurately measure changes in these metrics. Stores with smaller data sets should focus on improving non-rate metrics to start, like AOV, lifetime value, and customer acquisition costs. As your store grows to process a higher volume of orders and therefore has more data points, you’ll be able to more accurately track and influence change on other metrics, like conversion rate, to make the best decisions for your store.

Source: Jilt

2020: An Era Of Personalized Digital Marketing

Too much data often gives marketers a massive headache! Given the amount of information that is available in the digital space, this is almost inevitable. Today, there are multiple databases within divergent fields, functioning on distinct formulas.

This means yielding effective results in all marketing efforts is even a bigger task because customers now yearn for personalization. The point is any marketer, brand or organization can deliver products and services.

But a successful marketer, brand or organization will deliver the right kinds of products and services the way customers want, how they want and when they want. Thanks to personalized digital marketing, that is easily achievable.

The rise of behavior-based sales triggers

The foundation of personalization is customer data. This makes data acquisition an utmost priority. Despite the abundance of channels, the key is to ask the right questions and getting data-based answers that can give a clear picture of what the customers want.

According to a report by Kissmetrics, the more a customer is engaged with a brand, the better his or her response to the brand will be. Amazon, for instance, is known for sending out emails of recommended items – an observation made solely by the customer’s shopping history with it.

Such triggers witnessed a 125% higher open rate than other types of email marketing. This is just one example of personalization. Content is of prime importance too! Boring content won’t generate the number of leads marketers desire.

Amazon targets the right person at the right time via product recommendations. Check it out:

A study by Aberdeen Group Research suggests a rise in conversion rates by 10% provided the content is tailored as per the needs and requirements of the customers. Marketers can curate the right kind of content by asking three questions:

Is my content responding to their interests?
Is content relevant to them at this moment?
How am I going to distribute my content?

When it comes to targeting consumers, marketing efforts can never be too customized. That has major brands working hard to uncover new innovations.

The struggle is real

Despite a significant rise in popularity of tailored marketing efforts, marketers still struggle with effective personalization and online targeting. And there is data to prove that such is the case.

According to a study conducted by mobile marketing platform “Kahuna”, 36% of marketers report that personalizing behaviors across channels is still an expected channel in 2016.

46% of companies that technology legacy is one of the biggest barriers to their personalization efforts. Majority of brands ranked themselves below average when it came to extracting useful insights from their customer data.

How to give the present scenario an uplift

There are three types of personalized information that marketers can make use of:

1. First-party

It is that kind of data that you have gathered as a part of your business operations. Here, the customers consent to share information. It is easy to learn from customer-browsing patterns, point-of-sale transactions, etc.

2. Second-party

This is the kind of data that comes from the competition. Apart from all the benefits of first-party information, the data is received from those partners who are usually connected to the same customers in more ways than a direct transaction.

3. Third-party

This refers to the marketing lists that companies buy to identify and understand the target audience better. Unfortunately, this might not always be a wise option.

There are many data vendors who, under the pretext of discounted prices, sell irrelevant or invalid customer data that ultimately hamper the marketing activities of the companies.

So to make the most of third-party information, marketers should be sure of the sources.

A digital marketing strategy needs to be frequently revised to stay successful.

The latest trends to keep an eye on in 2019

Technology keeps evolving and we all need to keep up with these latest trends to make sure that we develop successful marketing tactics. It’s the perfect time to reflect on what worked the past year and how the latest trends will affect our marketing strategies this year.

- Artificial Intelligence: AI will supposedly take over the world! Or may just the world’s simpler jobs. It is great to analyze consumer behavior and search patterns, utilizing data from social media platforms to help businesses understand how users and customers find their products and services.

Chatbots: this will continue to be an important part of digital marketing this year as well. This AI-based tech uses instant messaging to chat in real-time, day or night, with your customers or site visitors. Many customers tend to prefer chatbots as they are responsive, prompt in answering, recalls their business history well and also never lose patience.

Video marketing: Don’t just think of Youtube here. To witness higher engagement with your video marketing, make video posts, start live broadcast on various social media platforms. It is gaining steady popularity with a large number of businesses using it in the form of interviews, product demo, and ‘behind the scenes’ events, how products are made etc.

Social messaging apps: Since people are spending more of their time messaging with each other, it makes total sense to market your company’s services where your potential customers are spending time. Implementing this can be very useful in sending messages to customers directly as they allow personalization, further adding value to the customer experience.

Voice search and smart speakers: The increasing use of voice search has made it important for companies to rethink their digital marketing strategies this year. Voice search plays an important role in providing all the relevant information that users are searching for through audio content. Many brands have included it already in their digital marketing strategies to be able to deliver value-based content effectively.

Wigzo: A perfect tool for delivering new-age personalization services

Every customer is different and desires to engage with the brand in a different way that is driven by personal preferences and interests. In this time and age, customers are the “king of the market” in the truest sense.

Therefore, it is a challenge for marketers to consider all such individual differences and personalize their communication with the target audience to fit their expectations.

Wigzo, a marketing automation suite, offers solutions that create personalized experiences across all customer touchpoints from a single, integrated digital marketing platform.

It helps brands forge an interactive relationship with the customers based on real-time, bespoke communication, spurring them to convert their purchasing intent into action.

It leverages Big Data Technology to bring relevance to the customer data, and empower it with predictive insights and intelligence to communicate the relevant and the right message to the customers.

Wigzo syncs Prediction Technology and Algorithmic Merchandising to generate content based on customers’ browsing data, app behavior, purchase behavior and search behavior to enable personalized communication across all channels such as Email, Onsite, Push, and Social.

Conclusion

48% of customers agree they purchase more when marketers leverage their interests and buying behavior to personalize the experience across channels. In short, customers today expect an individual experience. Personalization is not an option anymore. It is a mandate that all marketers, brands, and organizations must take seriously!

6 Reasons Why Data Marketing And Growth Hacking Are Best Friends

If you have been keeping a close tab on what’s trending in the digital industry, you would have surely stumbled upon two terms being thrown around everywhere – growth hacking and data marketing.

Growth hacking being referred to as businesses finding hacks to grow their customer base exponentially at a modest marketing budget. While data marketing refers to using big data to tap into the target market potential.

But the funny thing is, that most marketers don’t see the relation between the two?

If you didn’t either, then here’s something to consider – to find a hack that helps you grow your customer base, you need to know what your target market is looking for and whether or not another business is offering the same. Both of which is data that gets collated from across the internet – the exact same definition that is used for data marketing.

Correlated? Yes, definitely.

Here’s taking a look at how big data and machine learning are helping business growth hack their conversions.

6 Reasons Why Data Marketing And Growth Hacking Are Best Friends

1. Welcoming quick acceleration

Before we find out the other myriad benefits of the killer combination of growth hacking and data marketing, it becomes a given that this combination brings you accelerated growth. Think of it as an elevator and other forms of marketing as escalators. Bringing the two together means that it quickly accelerate you to the platform you need to arrive at the post which you can jump on different escalators to keep it up.

2. Understanding their target market needs better

Digging deeper into big data collated from across the internet, it becomes possible for the businesses to understand their target audience better. It makes it possible to go beyond the general demographics of the target market and look into data points like their internet usage, the devices they use, what they are looking for and their purchase triggers. And with machine learning tools, it is also possible to keep a tab on their changing data points to remain up-to-date.

3. Bettering customer experience and increasing conversions

When a marketer is able to understand his business’s target market better, he able to better personalize his approach to them. And considering how important customer experience is today, personalization has become a vital element of a growth hacking strategy.

According to a study by Kahuna, 36% of marketers report that personalizing the experience for customers across multiple channels is important. Despite the rising popularity of tailored marketing efforts, marketers are still struggling with effective personalization.

A report by Kissmetrics suggests that the more engaged a customer is, the better is his response to a message or promotion from the business. In simpler words, the more you tailor a customer’s journey, the more likely he is to convert on a campaign.

4. Identifying the untapped opportunities in the market

Since big data gives you deeper insights into the market data, you’re able to better understand what it already offers to your target audience and where your business still has the chance to make a mark. This is important for growth hacking your business, as there are at least ten other businesses in the market who are offering similar products/services like yours.

It also helps businesses create an effective messaging for omnichannel marketing. Read more about it here.

5. Getting a competitive analysis (and edge) from other businesses

Big data also helps businesses identify their market competition. They are able to achieve a competitor analysis that helps them understand how other businesses are acquiring the market. Knowing what your target audience is being exposed to, and what is or not working with them, can help you get a competitive edge with better campaigns at optimized costs.

6. Staying ahead of the market competition with predictive modelling

Apart from an in-depth look into what’s already available in the market, how your business is faring and what your audience is really looking for, data also helps with predictive modelling. Predictive modelling is all about leveraging machine learning to predict the future of your business – be the changing needs of your audience, their demands, their purchase behaviour, etc.

Be it the B2B industry or the B2C companies, this helps you better prepare yourself for the future market and stay ahead of your competition.

While traditional marketing involved using mass media and broadcast messages as well as multiple campaigns to hit the market – those still work, by the way; growth hacking focuses on mixing what the business offers with pertinent data and applying nimble marketing tactics to create a fast growth path at an optimized marketing budget.

Companies like Wigzo equip marketers with automation and personalization tools that are powered by machine learning to help them create effective omnichannel campaigns. The tool tracks user behaviour closely, understands our content and creates detailed global profiles that let marketers engage with their target market, at the right time with the right message.

Ready to growth hack your conversions?