The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Mobile Marketing Campaigns

Introduction

What really counts is getting users engaged, and driving true retention and revenue from those users over time. And whilst the quality of your app will have something to say about that, your success against those metrics will also depend on how effective your mobile marketing campaigns are.

Those campaigns can include in-app messages, surveys, push notifications, video content, and even changes to the native app content that are designed with ‘marketing in mind’.

Most mobile businesses understand that it’s important to create and deliver campaigns of this type. But many of them fail when it comes to delivering on the overall business objectives of the organization.

To put that right, we asked what it was that campaigns we’ve seen succeed (and we’ve worked with most of the world’s biggest and smartest app companies) had in common. And the result is right here, in our 7 secrets of highly effective mobile marketing campaigns.

Ever wondered why some mobile apps succeed and others don’t?

it’s often nothing to do with the quality of the core product. It doesn’t even necessarily relate to the number of new users that advertising delivers to the front door. No, a lot of the time it’s about what happens after all of that - in the app itself.

Question Here ‘s the thing

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1 They Are TargetedSmart marketing is targeted marketing. This has always been the case. Perhaps in the past it was acceptable to joke about how “50% of advertising spend is wasted - but I don’t know which 50%”. But in today’s world of big data and unparalleled consumer insight, there is literally no excuse to be in the dark any more.

There’s no credit in being able to simply send a push notification, for example. That’s the easy bit. The difficult bit is sending it to the right people - and that’s doubly important because poorly targeted push notifications aren’t just ‘less effective’, they are an active cause of uninstalls. Put it this way - if you think users are likely to make the time and effort changing individual app notification settings rather than simply delete the source of those notifications - you’re wrong.

But across the board it is essential to deliver the most targeted campaigns possible. Consider a music app, built on a subscription model, that offers a 30 day free trial. We could of course simply send a message to all users on the 28th letting them know that the trial is coming to an end as asking them to commit to a paid subscription. That’s targeting in a sense, but certainly not an effective way to approach this issue.

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Instead, let’s do the following:

Identify users who have listened predominantly to the ‘radio’ feature of the app, and create a specific radio subscription offer for the app, delivered via a creative highlighting the radio features available after subscription

Target creative to users focused on the genre of music they have predominantly listened to during their trial period. The offer remains the same, but the language, content and visual style directly address the individual’s interests beyond simply ‘music’

That’s just three ways that thinking in terms of highly granular campaigns - based on combinations of actions and events, can improve an overall number (the % of trials converting to full access).

Of course targeting can take many more forms that this. It can be based on engagement rates, revenue, device, language, locale, OS and any combination of these. But however they do it, all campaigns should be as targeted as they possibly can be.

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During the free trial period, actively monitor user groups who have failed to ‘find’ key functionality that adds to the value delivered by the app and deliver in-app messages (only to those audiences) highlighting what they are missing and leading them straight to it

2 They Are Tested

We’re privileged as digital marketers, both in the mobile app space and online. We have access to huge amounts of data, relating to almost every aspect of user behavior. And we’re able to deliver new user experiences and marketing campaigns at the touch of a button (if you’re not able to do that, have a word with your marketing automation provider!)

With that being the case, it should be obvious that every campaign you deliver should be tested. For the avoidance of doubt, that means that in pretty much every case A/B tests should be run that ensure that each aspect of the campaign (audience, content, offer, timing, creative) is optimized.

It probably helps to consider the alternative, which is either simply guessing what might work, or arguing about marketing decisions and (usually) going with the ‘Highest Paid Person’s Opinion’ or HiPPO as some like to call it. That’s both a waste of time and energy, and an easy way to ensure your campaigns aren’t effective as they could be. In every case, if you ever find yourself debating a decision: if at all possible test it and let user data decide.

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Some practical places to start testing might include:

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The content, both headline and body copy, of key notification and in-app message campaigns

There are, of course, an almost infinite number of aspects to any campaign to A/B test - but do remember to test only one variable at a time, and ideally one that helps the business learn which ‘type’ of message is most effective (rather than just which specific message was more effective in one instance).

Lastly, always ensure you use a control group for whom no campaign was sent. You would be surprised how often campaigns have negative effects, certainly on KPIs such as engagement and revenue, but that won’t be possible to establish if you don’t leave a control group, and compare end results with those who received your test campaigns.

Timing - which time of day a message is most successful, in terms of both opens and the effect on KPIs?

Audience - which groups respond most effectively to a specific message?

Creative - which visual look and feel works best?

Offer - if you’re making one, which concession is most likely to drive your desired behavior?

3 They Are Aligned With User Experience

It’s one thing to talk to the right people. That’s what targeting, which we discussed earlier, is about. But targeting alone won’t deliver real success unless you are talking to them at the right time. It’s necessary to consider when the right time to show a particular offer is.

When is it meaningful? When is it helpful? When does it help drive revenues? Answering these questions is an essential step if you want to make your campaigns as effective as possible. The alternative is delivering campaigns out of context - which is a sure-fire way to damage effectiveness and worse - actively alienate your mobile users.

To give an obvious example, there’s not much point promoting a specific item or feature to users who have no concept of what it is, how it might help them, and perhaps just have no use for it at this time. That makes no sense. What does make sense is aligning your offers with the ‘demand’ that is naturally generated within the app.

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Display cross-promotional messages at the right time (if you display them at all). Although these campaigns, which encourage users to install other apps, are not technically ‘in-app marketing’ as discussed here, they can certainly damage your attempts to maximize LTV within your own app. Make every effort to only cross-promote when appropriate - either at the end of a typical lifecycle or when you are confident that the user in question is unlikely to monetize in any other way. Try to avoid cross-promoting early in the user lifecycle or when a user is actively monetizing. Why move on a profitable user?

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Align with what the app ‘economy’ is doing at the time.Most apps that rely on credits - think dating apps for example - incorporate points in which a user feels a ‘pinch’ that encourages a first ‘top-up’ purchase. That is the time to construct and deliver compelling in-app marketing campaigns.

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Don’t attempt to sell what has no value at that moment in time. To use a games-specific example, if you have an offer on gems (the currency used in the game), don’t show it to users at the beginning of the game when they may still have a large amount of that currency available to them. Why would they buy more right now?

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When you’re doing that, remember these three rules:

4 They Focus on Revenue...

If you want to deliver quick results and generate buy-in for your in-app marketing campaigns, concentrate your efforts where they will make a tangible difference to the bottom line.

Every business has KPIs, and ultimately those KPIs add up to revenue. It makes things a lot easier if you start out with a very clear understanding of what you are trying to achieve with a specific campaign, and which KPI you are hoping to influence. And if you have a direct impact on revenue, so much the better.

For these and other reasons, conversion - turning your users into paying customers - is a great place to start in-app marketing. There’s nothing more binary than whether someone is paying or not paying when they use your app after all, and most app businesses in retail will have a laser-like focus on getting users through the ‘first mobile transaction’ hurdle, whether they have been migrated from their online platform or are ‘green-field’ customers new to the business as a whole.

Fortunately, conversion is a KPI that you can expect in-app marketing campaigns to have a big effect on. And putting a compelling offer in front of the right people, at the right time – in order to get them to make a first purchase. That’s an approach that will get your business understanding just how valuable this activity can be.

When you’ve mastered conversion, there’s plenty more to work on. Lifetime value (LTV) is another KPI that responds well to in-app marketing investment. Build campaigns to encourage repeat purchases, target your best customers and ensure they receive the best possible user experience. Look to reward and retain at every stage in order to maximize your revenues.

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Build campaigns to encourage repeat purchases, target your best customers and ensure they receive the best possible user experience.

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5 ...but They Don’t Forget Your Other KPIs

It’s important to measure your mobile marketing campaigns in the right way, and consider the effect they have on your business as a whole.

To help explain what that means, let’s start by defining the wrong way, which also happens to be the single most common way to measure these campaigns: click-thru rate. If you are measuring your mobile marketing campaigns, whether push or in-app by using click-thru rate, I have some bad news for you: it’s the single dumbest statistic out there when it comes to evaluating success.

No CEO ever sat down and listed ‘higher click-thru rates’ as a business goal, and smart mobile marketers know that:

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There’s no clear link between click-thru rates and the metrics that actually matter to a business.

It’s really easy to manipulate click-thru rates if that’s how you’re measuring success.

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The sole exception to this rule is if your business only cares about app opens and app page views, as some media apps do - if that is the case, go right ahead and factor in click-thru, but make sure your campaigns are not having a negative effect on long-term retention, as they may do.

So, for everyone else, what does matter? Well, most campaigns are created with an immediate goal (a purchase, the discovery of a feature, etc), so in the same way success should be defined by the achievement of that goal. That makes perfect sense, but you would be surprised how many organizations don’t get that far.

Next is revenue. Ultimately you want to be able to take each group exposed to a campaign and compare their medium term revenue performance against a control. Remember, buying one item (which was promoted in a campaign) may simply cannibalize revenue from others, so it’s important to look at this number in the round.

Similarly, although revenue is of course your ultimate goal, remember to check other metrics, and over the long term. It can the the case that a campaign delivers greater revenue in the short term whilst affecting retention and engagement in the medium or long term. That’s a situation you need to actively monitor - to ensure you’re really making the right kind of difference to your business.

Ultimately you want to be able to take each group exposed to a campaign and compare their medium term revenue performance against a control.

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One campaign on its own can be effective. But when two or more work together - that can deliver even greater results.

That is why it is necessary to consider the effect that any one campaign may have on others around it. And remember that those effects could be negative, and they could be positive.

To give one obvious example, we would experience diminishing marginal returns if we sent an identical conversion campaign, seeking to convert trial users to a subscription, to the same audience every day for several days. And in fact, we’d almost certainly do worse than that – after a while we’d be having a net negative effect on that group of users and we’d see retention and probably subscription rates suffer. In this instance, each individual campaign could work in isolation. But as a whole, they do not.

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6 They Work Together

That is why it is necessary to consider the effect that any one campaign may have on others around it.

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In order to structure campaigns to avoid these effects, it’s necessary to schedule in-app marketing activity with care. Use a calendar to ensure you know exactly who you are targeting, with what offer, and when. And then start looking for the positive externalities that can make campaigns even more effective.

Let’s show how that would work using the same business case - the free trial to subscription model. If we want to make that happen, it is important to ensure that trial users experience all the great features we have in our app, so it makes sense to deliver a series of in-app messages advertising those features to users who have not already used them, and leading them to them.

We can and should combine this activity with a follow up subscription offer that talks to exactly those features the user has most engaged with, increasing the likelihood of ‘getting to yes’ via a co-ordinated set of campaigns.

That’s the kind of positive feedback you can begin to develop with clear scheduling of campaigns, with each supporting those around it. It also has the pleasant side effect of not driving your users demented!

7 They Don’t Take ‘Default’ For An AnswerThere are a number of ‘default’ options within the mobile app ecosystem for engaging with your users. As a rule of thumb, you should ignore every single one of them.

Let’s illustrate why great marketing campaigns do that using two simple examples: firstly asking for permission to use push notifications, and secondly requesting a rating in the app store.

Push notifications are a key part of the ongoing conversation with your users. As most of us know, they can be especially useful for re-engaging users who haven’t visited in a while, or reminding dormant users that there is something new and interesting such as a promotion or an app update.

That’s why you can’t leave your push opt-in rate to chance, and you certainly can’t take the default option - asking users for push opt-in the first time they open the app, and without providing clear context around why opting in might be a good idea (for them, everyone knows why it’s a good idea for you - that’s what they are afraid of!)

Instead, any request for push permissions should be preceded by a relevant, timely (and tested!) in-app message explaining the benefit to the user in question. This in-app message will explain why the app is asking for push permission and will ask the user if they are willing to accept push notifications. If they respond yes, then it’s time to show the native push permissions dialogue. You’d be surprised how easily this can drive your opt-in rates.

Push Opt-In

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If there’s one thing that any app business likes it’s a five star review. We probably don’t need to explain why that’s the case, but the long and short of it is - higher average ratings, better chart position and more downloads.

So far so obvious. The real question is how do you get good rankings? It might be profitable to acknowledge that some users will love your app, and some will love it a little less. The question then becomes “how do I ensure the former give me a rating, and the latter do not?”

The answer is pretty simple. By initially using an in-app message to ask the user whether they are enjoying the app or not, it is possible to ensure that users who love the app self-select - and at that point are shown the second, default ‘Rate the App’ screen that takes them to the app store. It’s an almost fool-proof way to ensure that your biggest fans are telling the world about you - and increasing acquisition as a result!

App Store Rating

It’s an almost fool-proof way to ensure that your biggest fans are telling the world about you - and increasing acquisition as a result!

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ABOUT SWRVESwrve is mobile marketing automation.

Swrve is the world’s leader in driving engagement, retention and revenue in mobile apps and games.The Swrve platform delivers everything product and monetization managers need to ensure their mobile apps succeed where it counts. We do this by building long-lasting, profitable relationships with their users and driving the bottom line as a result.

Swrve includes:A/B testing - to optimize user experience and improve retention rates

Targeted in-app campaigns - delivering the right offers, to the right audience, at the right time

Push notifications - driving engagement even when users are outside the app

Real-time optimization - automatedcampaigns reacting in real-time to user behavior in the app

All the analytics and segmentation you’ll ever need

Swrve is trusted by some of the world’s largest and most successful mobile app businesses. We handle billions of events a day and pro-cess data in real-time for multi-million DAU titles.

If you’d like to join them, drop us a line at sales@swrve.com

www.swrve.com