8 Best Practices to Generate Mobile Apps Revenue
Startup News
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Mobytelab Team
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It seems like everyone can create an app nowadays. Turning your idea into a real app is a great achievement, but the app development is becoming a real business now. Therefore, generating your app’s revenue should be the top priority because it will allow you to not only pay for your team but also invest in future innovations.
To increase the app profit you should know where it comes from. We went from the root and find out that Improve your app’s margins is the essence of getting more profit from your app.
There are two metrics you need to know first before trying to improve your app’s margins:
The first one is the cost per action (CPA), which means how much it costs in advertising to convert one person from a visitor to a paying client
The second one is Customer lifetime value (CLTV), which is the total value a customer contributes to your business over their lifetime using your app.
To improve your app’s margin, you should increase the CLTV while keeping intact or decreasing the CPA. By this method, you can get more money go into your pocket!
Tactics
Let’s go with some great tactics to fulfil this goal:
1. Squeeze more value out of current users:
Your current app users are the one who provides you with ongoing revenue from in-app purchases or subscription services. There are many ways to stimulate their payment.
2. Be flexible in offering purchases:
If your app offers paid features or versions, you can apply these 3 tactics of selling.
Upselling by prompting users to purchase a premium features or versions after they have shown enough interest in your app.
Downselling by offering a slightly cheaper, introductory product to users who you have not seen any potential yet.
Cross-selling by prompting users to buy related products that they might find valuable, based on what they have already purchased.
3. Reviews and ratings
One of the most visible benefits you can get from your existing users is the reviews and ratings. Reviews and ratings are the trustworthy persuasions that drag potential users into engagement with your app. Through reviews and ratings, you show your potential users that other people just like them, are having a great time using your app. You gotta believe it’s a very powerful tactic as people tend to believe in some kinds of social proof like that. It’s the same situation as restaurant customers order a specific dish more often when it’s highlighted as a best-seller item. You can take advantage of these social proofs to boost your app revenue. In this way, you will be in a better position to attract new ideal users.
The first thing you have ever been done is to get current users leaving as many positive ratings and reviews as possible. See some great ways to entice users to leave positive reviews.
4. Expand your ideal user base
To state in a simple way, in case your spend stays the same, the more loyal users stay engaged with your app, the more profitable it is.
An ideal user is an ‘ideal customer’ of an ordinary business, who takes the actions within your app that generate revenue, such as: use the app frequently and for long periods of time and contribute to generate revenue through ads; make in-app purchases; buy the app; upgrade to paid version, invite or recommend their friends…
You should define what are these types of users like, track the feedbacks to understand their behavior and taste. Then look for ways to add more value to their experience by adding features that they’ve been asking for; improving features that attract them the most or removing features that people aren’t using. It is worth doing so because the wider ideal user base you want to appeal to is going to have the same problems. So making a version which seems to be perfect for this kind of users can make them flock to use your app.
Having more ideal users means even when your app might not get tons of downloads, each download can turn into a tidy profit.
5. Comprehensive app measurement
The very first step you need to take is to measure your app performance. Because you can’t manage and do anything to improve your app unless you know how it is performing.
The results may tell you why your app may or may not appeal to a larger audience, so you will have a better strategy. App measurement is now hardly impossible thanks to app measurement tools, which have become more and more popular in the mobile app development community.
Spend some time analyzing key drop off points and dig down to find out what’s causing this issue. Can you remove the obstacles or highlight key actions that you want the users to take?
See some effective ways to do the full measurement for your app.
6. Create a seamless road from using to buying
Your mission is to drag users along the journey from downloading your app to paying their money. The road is sure to be rough. You should know how to make it smooth and seamless to ensure that the users get to your final goal.
Tell a story, put in some enchanted baits that make users eager to pay for advanced features. In parallel with that, you need to track your users’ experiences to identify what works and what blocks people from paying their money. By step #3 you can figure out easily these blocks. Don’t wait, try to address their concerns as soon as possible. The key points to convert a user to a customer are constantly tracking and rapid resolution.
Once you have made the change, remember to re-analyse to verify if they make positive or negative differences. Make sure not to test too many changes so you won’t know exactly what caused the issues. Find out how you can solve more of their problems without confusing them or cluttering the experience.
7. Gamification
Gamification is the concept of implementing game design elements and principles into non-game contexts, within a normal app, for example.
According to statistics, most successful app categories in recent years all have gone to games, due to the tremendous engagement they get. What makes people engage a lot to games is the concept of being rewarded for doing something. This concept taps into users’ inherent need that impulses them to take desired actions that you want them to do.
As developer start to realize this is one way to increase engagement with current users, gamification is being seen more and more in non-gaming apps. Some popular practices are using badges or achievements to reward people for taking certain actions, letting users accumulate scores and awaken their competitive instinct by putting a leaderboard.
For example, Dropbox gamified the signup experience through the use of words like ‘quests’ and ‘reward’. It is worth noting that the app needs to have already been working well in order for any of this actions to work. None of the gamification can save an app idea that was bad from the beginning.
8. Build a cost-effective marketing strategy
Launching a new app entails a considerable marketing budget. You must have a comprehensive strategy to prune your expenditure. Setting up thorough analytics to answer some question like: What are new acquisitions coming from? Therefore you can find some alternative channels to lower the cost or redistribute your marketing budget. For example, organic search, word-of-mouth, offline marketing, physical engagement, paid campaigns or in-app referrals.
Conclusion
An app is the result of your or your team’s hard work. Even if you’re willing to give it for free, isn’t it great to reap the fruit of your labor?
Revenue doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It comes from the sound process of building and innovating your app. If you can make your users enjoy not only your app but also your vision, you will guarantee a promising long-time growth in revenue.
There are lots of different ways to increase your app’s revenue, and the five tactics above are by no means an exhaustive list. As app development business is growing bigger and bigger, the chance to earn a lot of money from an app is huge now. Whatever you are gonna do, you need to make your app at all time the best as you can. If you don’t have one, build one now!
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