SocialSign.in Matt Flamman, VP of Business Development matt@socialsign.in 631-807-6494 1 of 6

Once a great app is built—that’s when the real work begins.

The biggest challenge quickly becomes effectively marketing your new app to grow adoption and usage by your most valuable customers. Without a growing user base, all the business goals you originally hoped to achieve with the app goes to waste.

Acquiring high-quality engaged users for your app is a journey with multiple touchpoints, similar to any sales process. These are the key strategies we use in each phase of the funnel to help turbo-charge adoption and usage for our clients who have invested in a suite of apps to achieve specific business goals.

APP AWARENESS top of funnel

All customer journeys begin with awareness. At this stage, the goal is not only to communicate the existence of your app, but also why your visitors should use it. With 1.4 million apps in the Apple app store alone, people today no longer react to the mere availability of an app. In a shocking comScore report, the majority of US smartphone users don’t download new apps over the course of a typical month.

Instead, people need to be convinced why this app deserves a place on their phone. What is the benefit of the app to them right now? What pain does it take away? What are they missing out on?

Instead of a call to action like “Download our new app in the App Store!”, try something contextually relevant, such as “Why wait? Get the free app now to skip the line.”

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APP DOWNLOAD middle of funnel

Once they are aware and sold on the app’s benefits, the next step is to reduce the friction of downloading the app. The traditional app download process is problematic; you rely on your visitors to complete a multi-step process without getting distracted, coming across technical roadblocks, and abandoning midway.

These are the common pitfalls at each stage in the traditional app download process.

1. Become aware of the app and develop interest in using it.

2. Open the app store. This requires people to switch from what they’re currently doing—whether it’s texting their friends or abandon the e-ticket they have queued up. This also potentially create a negative experience if the app isn’t available in their device’s platform.

3. Search for your app by name. Hoping for no spelling errors and that they’re typing in the correct search terms

4. Pick your app out of the search results. Especially a challenge for newer apps, ensuring your App Store SEO propels you to the top result can be a tricky feat.

5. Tap to download. Depending on carrier limits, apps over 20MB may be subject to download via WiFi only. Even people with unlimited plans often face lag in places with concentrated usage, a common issue among popular arenas. Even this far down the process, this is the final roadblock preventing an otherwise successful download by a valuable customer.

Our team has developed and iterated on a process to not only promote awareness, but also bypass the above steps and skip the technical roadblocks. Compared to a regular app distributer, venues have the unique advantage of the physical presence of ideal users. These are tens of thousands of people constantly entering the top of the funnel who just need a frictionless path to conversion.

We analyzed visitors’ current behavior patterns for a method to tap into their common habits. Besides bathrooms and concessions, we discovered WiFi is the third most requested and used guest amenity. Since visitors are already in the habit of looking

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SocialSign.in Matt Flamman, VP of Business Development matt@socialsign.in 631-807-6494 3 of 6

for free WiFi, we use this opportunity to introduce a screen on their device. This is an opportunity to greet and present them with relevant offers from your venue. This is the key to take advantage of their captive attention on their personal devices.

Here’s how our streamlined download process works:

1. Tap the unlocked guest WiFi network An action guests are already in the habit of doing regardless of app awareness or interest in engaging with your marketing programs.

2. Tap Facebook or enter their email address to access. One-tap entry for your visitor, and additional customer information for your venue to power future smart marketing and CRM decisions.

3. See compelling promotions for your app, only if the app is supported by their current device This ensures a positive customer experience that they’ll seamlessly jump to the right app for their device.

4. Tap to download on a stable connection, bypassing carrier limitations

So how well does it work? In practice, nearly a quarter of visitors (based on ticket sales) connect successfully to our promotional WiFi, and over a third of those connected tap through to download the app.

IN-VENUE APP ENGAGEMENT middle / bottom of funnel

Downloading the app doesn’t guarantee usage. There are two main challenges past the initial app download that we’ll unpack: maintaining the app’s presence and ensuring permissions are enabled (such as notification permission).

If your visitor doesn’t open the app after download, the app is in danger of deletion. People tend to try apps, then decide whether they’ll keep the app within the first few days. The key to success, according to tech industry experts, “is to get the users hooked during that critical first 3-7 day period.”

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Ensuring permissions are enabled is especially critical for venue apps that hinge on a beacon experience to trigger in-venue notifications. If your visitor downloads the app, but doesn’t go through the process to authorize notifications and turn on Bluetooth, they’ll never see the beacon experience your team worked hard to design.

We’ve found success addressing these challenges by sparking engagement with the intention of forming usage habits. People don’t delete apps they use; they instead take time and effort to maintain their profiles and permissions on the apps they use and love.

This is done by continually incentivizing visitors who have installed the app with contextually-relevant content directly tied to the their stage in the journey. Again, ingraining the messaging into their existing habits, we use the opportunity created by the visitor’s usage of your WiFi network to nudge them along.

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Standing by the food court? Use the app to pay and get 10% off now!

Liked Beyonce on Facebook? Get tickets in the app now before it sells out.

Seats in the upper deck? Upgrade instantly with the app.

SocialSign.in Matt Flamman, VP of Business Development matt@socialsign.in 631-807-6494 5 of 6

Prompting a user to take a specific beneficial action at the right time is a sure-fire way to ensure the app is opened, properly permissioned, and used to the delight of your visitor. Right message, right time, right person, right context.

POST-EVENT APP ENGAGEMENT bottom of funnel

Your customer’s place in the sales funnel doesn’t stop progressing once they leave your venue. Two of the most valuable channels we’ve helped clients deploy are continued engagement with triggered emails and targeted social media.

One easily deployed and effective method is to continue the conversation with hyper-targeted triggered emails post-visit. An email strategy should be informed by their unique behavior and tailored to their position in the funnel. For example, remind fans who downloaded the app but didn’t engage the compelling reason why they downloaded the app in the first place, with a deep link into your app—landing them in the exact spot inside your app. For visitors deeper into the funnel, trigger an email for an upcoming show from an artist they like on Facebook (as we identified earlier in the WiFi connection flow).

Complementary paid and organic social strategy is another powerful way to continue engagement. Try retargeting your visitors as a custom audience with the same hyper-targeted strategic messaging to reinforce the value of using your app, remain top-of-mind, and drive engagement. Use lookalike audiences derived from your visitor custom audience also people similar to them to grow your community and top-of-funnel leads. In addition, your paid efforts will further your social community growth, encouraging word of mouth and loyalty through earned media.

RESULTS FROM AN EFFECTIVE APP MARKETING STRATEGY

While no two venues nor apps are identical, it is crucial to benchmark against actual industry numbers to measure success. We strive to exceed these baseline goals while working with our clients, which includes several of the most-respected venues in the world.

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CORE METRICS

App see app usage from > 5% of the visitors

WiFi see ROI from > 25% of attendees who connect

Emails > 30% open rate

Emails > 10% click through to open rate

We are constantly updating our best practices and these guidelines have served our clients well in delivering real ROI from their app investment. By taking the time and effort to architect an app marketing strategy, you position your app for success.

If you’re currently in the trenches of app marketing, we want to hear from you.What’s working? What’s not?

Email me at matt@socialsign.in with your observations and thoughts.

Matt Flamman VP of Business Development SocialSign.in matt@socialsign.in 631-807-6494

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