There are more mobile devices in the world than desktop computers and this phenomenon has opened a whole new world for developers as they can access a much larger customer base than before. Of course there are billions of mobile users who are developers’ potential customers but there are millions of mobile apps too. This makes it harder for new developers as well as existing developers to reach excellence. This is not just about the number of apps but users are also very sensitive.
In other words, the error margin for developers is almost zero. On the other hand, developing a functional, productive and stable app is a different task than marketing. In order to get more number of downloads, you need to maximize your exposure and help your app get in the top charts. Following are some growth hacks to skyrocket your mobile app.
Offer Paid App for Free
This is one of the most common and highly effective marketing strategies that help developers get lots of new users and skyrocket downloads. However, as you can anticipate this technique is only effective for apps with established user base. Many developers all over the globe put their apps on sale for few days and even few hours in some cases and get significantly large number of downloads. Interestingly, your app doesn’t have to be a paid app to use this strategy.
Apps with IAPs can also use this technique by offering some of their IAPs for free for a limited time period. A pre-defined end date of the sales works psychologically on users and more downloads in short time span.
App Referrals
In-App Referral is a cheap and effective way that app marketers use for user acquisition. People love recommending good apps and games to their friends; most of the times they recommend apps via messages or email as most of the apps do not provide in app-referral option. That means this area is still unexplored and marketers can use the potential to get more users. Interestingly, many popular companies like Uber and AirBnB have been using this strategy for years. In order to make it more effective, the sharing can give some kind of incentive to both parties.
Ads Analytics
Analytics are like a secret weapon; your competitor apps and companies might have deeper pockets than you but you can optimize your marketing strategies and bring your efforts to the highest efficiency. In order to successfully use analytics in your favor, all you have to do is follow three steps: test, analyze and repeat. Unfortunately, you can do this for a limited time because your CPA will otherwise increase. Fortunately, there are lots of different platforms so switching to a different network shouldn’t be an issue.
Free Your App from Bugs
Developing bug-free apps is a myth. Especially now, when iOS and Android platforms as well as their devices are more complicated and numerous than ever, it is impossibly difficult for developers to make a complex app without any bug. That’s where remote logging tools like Bugfender come in handy. We’ll discuss these tools at the end of this article.
Encourage Users to Give Feedback
In order to skyrocket your mobile app, you need to understand the mentality of users. It is not a secret that people who dislike or are dissatisfied with the app (whether it is paid or free) are more likely to give a negative feedback. While people who like the app do not give feedback at all because they don’t need to; it is developers’ responsibility to reach out to their users and encourage them to give a sincere feedback. These reviews would help you understand the parts your users like the most and parts that need to be improved.
Targeted Campaigns
The concept of marketing has been around us for hundreds of years and now we can use highly optimized tools like Facebook ads to start highly targeted campaigns. The idea of “Targeting everyone” no longer applies and marketers understand the inefficiencies of this technique. Targeted campaigns help developers keep their costs at lowest and target highly relevant users with the most effective channel. However, nothing is absolutely accurate so you need to use test/analyze cycle to optimize your efforts.
Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Regardless of how effective modern marketing strategies are, word-of-mouth advertisement and marketing is still the most effective one and certainly the cheapest one that requires zero budget; people trust their friends and family members. And more importantly they understand the needs of their friends more than a marketer. For example, if I like a specific app, I would know which of my friends would like that too. Basically this works by allowing users to recommend the app to their friends via a number of ways like WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and others.
Bugfender Can Help You Skyrocket Your Mobile App
Bugfender is a revolutionary remote logging tool and platform that is specifically designed to help developers provide a better user experience from every aspect even on complicated platforms like iOS and Android. Nowadays, developing teams spend lots of time, efforts and other resources on the testing phase but it is still impossible to guarantee that the app would be bug-free. Bugfender allows developers to see the behavioral pattern and insights about their app on actual devices run by actual users.
There are many different benefits to this approach. First of all, developers can test their apps on real devices with multiple different variables without increasing their costs dramatically. By using the actual data and app behavior on different devices, they can find the bugs before their users do and fix them in the next update. Unlike most of the remote crash reporting tools, Bugfender does not rely on total failure or app crashes because not every bug results in a crash. Some bugs lead to instability and performance reduction as well as security issues.
