Experiment with your app listing

Your app listing is the most critical touchpoint in your app’s conversion journey. It’s on your app listing that users decide if they want to download or purchase your app.

That’s why, to help you build your best-converting listings, both the app stores let you run experiments on them. Both Google Play and the App Store let you:

1. Set up multiple app listings.
2. Split your traffic among all the different versions.
3. See which listing converts the best.?

You can use app listing experiments to determine the best copy for your app—you can test titles, subtitles, and descriptions. You can even experiment with different icons, screenshots, and videos to discover the ones that drive the most downloads. You can also test multiple localized listings and see if they boost your conversion rates across your different target markets.

App listing experiments are a great way to optimize your app listings for better conversions. However, if your app listing gets just about a 100 or so visitors, you won’t be able to get statistically significant results. In other words, if some new copy you try boosts your conversion rate by 10%, the results you see may be flukes and may not hold. In these cases, you can try user testing. Hire users that fit your ideal user profiles and get them to review your app.

Experiment with different in-app products

If you’ve got a subscription-based app, you can still experiment with creating one-time payment products. For users who aren’t interested in signing up for subscriptions or don’t want to, as the free version suffices for them, such in-app purchases offer a more enriching app experience while still not tying them to any recurring charges.?

Monetarily, too, such in-app purchases are rewarding as they improve your average revenue per user metric.

Take the lunar calendar Moonly app, for instance. While Moonly is available for a subscription, it also offers one-time payment products for generating revenue while boosting engagement:

Add paywall experimentation to your business mix

If you monetize your app with in-app purchases, your paywalls make the core of your conversion funnel. And everything that lives on your paywall—from its graphics and copy to the color of the CTA button—impacts your conversions.?

And we aren’t only talking about the cosmetic stuff here. We’re also talking about your products, their pricing, and any offers you might be running on them.?

For example, if you’ve built a subscription app, your subscription plans are your products. And they can take many forms: weekly, quarterly, or annual. How would you know what your users’ preferred billing cycle is? For some industries, users prefer to be billed monthly, as the subscription fee is manageable, and an annual subscription can seem like a big, upfront “cost.” Offering the right billing schedule can make a difference. The only way to find out is to test.

And then comes pricing. We’re talking about pricing in detail in the next section. But for now, let’s repeat that most app users (about 3 in 4) expect apps to be free. That’s why pricing remains one of the most essential considerations when users download apps, especially paid apps.?

Since the only way to find your best-converting copy, design, products, offers, and pricing is testing, you need to start with paywall experimentation. By experimenting with your paywalls, you can show different users different versions of all these elements and determine which ones convert the best.

So how do paywall experiments work?

Running a paywall experiment typically means creating a test build, adding it to the app, and codifying the test logistics, among other things.

This entire process can take a few weeks, even with expert development resources. And if you wanted to test all the things we just discussed, you’d be looking at development cycles lasting months.

But…

… Enter Adapty.

Setting up a paywall experiment is easy, too. Just convert the paywall you want to experiment with into an A/B test, and Adapty will duplicate it. Now edit the elements that you want to test in the duplicate paywall—again no coding is needed here! Finally, launch the experiment. That’s it.

As soon as you start a paywall experiment, Adapty starts capturing its conversion data, so know exactly how each paywall you’re testing is doing:

Once you integrate Adapty into your app, you can perform extensive paywall experimentation without spending any of your development resources on it—they can keep working on your app.?

Test pricing

If you monetize your app with in-app purchases, your pricing strategies will directly impact your revenue. Pricing is a consideration for every 4 out of 5 app users.

So, first up, you want to ensure that you’ve priced your in-app purchases right, because setting higher prices, especially for a new or an upcoming app, can cost you sales. App users hardly ever download a single app for something. They get a handful. And so they have a sense of what the different apps like yours are charging.

Slashing prices can (understandably) translate to more sales, but so can increasing prices. Sometimes, you discount your app’s value by discounting its price. Users might be willing to pay a premium to access your full app, but maybe you’re getting in your own way. Price elasticity is real; maybe your users can and will spend more!

Finally, users from different regions have different pricing sensibilities. Said another way, making your app or your in-app purchases available at different prices for your different target markets can make a real difference. Think of this as some “pricing localization. For Space App, price experiments alone increased their purchases by an average of 20% to 40 % in their different markets.

Work on retention

App abandonment is the single biggest challenge to your app growth strategy. Any work you do to help a new user discover your app, download it, and start a trial gets wasted as soon as the user abandons it. First things first: You can’t fix this fully. Because if a user wants to start with, say, intermittent fasting, they’ll likely download 3 or 4 apps at least. And then they’ll choose the one they like the best. The only thing you can do is make your onboarding so good that your app becomes their favorite! This can help you bring down your app abandonment significantly.?

Also, seek your users’ emails and their permission to email them during onboarding. This way, you get yet another way to “stay in touch” with them and keep prompting them to return to your app. This isn’t just great for engaging your current users but also your ex-users. For instance, sending an email about a new feature to your ex-users can actually get them to re-download and re-engage with your app. Emails also help you promote your offers. And you have no idea how many of your users might simply be waiting for an offer to upgrade.

Push notifications, too, are crucial in an app’s post-download journey. If you use push notifications, you can keep prompting your users to return to your app. If you’ve tied a specific in-app action to revenue—for example, if you find that users who do three workout sessions with your app tend to take up your subscription—you can use push notifications to get more users to this stage. Push notifications are also handy tools to convert your trial users, as with push notifications, you can keep reminding them about all the cool things they can try during the trial and help them unlock more value from your app so they convert when the trial ends. Emails can also help with this.

You must also work on your overall app to keep your retention rate high. For instance, performance issues cause a lot of app uninstalls. So this is ongoing work.

Use tactics like seasonal marketing

When you think about holidays, you assume that people aren’t likely to hang out in the app stores during this time. However, this is the busiest time in the app stores, with many people discovering, downloading, and re-downloading apps.?

In other words, holidays are the time to go all out to acquire new users, engage the existing ones, and re-acquire your ex-users. How?

In crux, holiday marketing for mobile apps comes down to:

1. Crafting happy holiday offers and adding festive paywalls to reflect the users’ mood.
2. Making your app store listings all festive and possibly even setting up an entirely different seasonal app listing to test against the regular one.
3. Setting up events and stories targeting both existing and ex-users, as this is also a time to reinforce user loyalty and win back the ex-users!

Wrapping it up…

There you have ’em: ten proven strategies to grow your mobile app in 2024 and beyond. But before trying them, analyze your app’s current conversion funnel. Doing so will help you prioritize the strategies to use first. For instance, if you aren’t getting enough traffic to your app listings, you’d want to start with optimizing your listing for better app store visibility and outreach programs.?

If you notice that the app listing page doesn’t convert well, you might want to start by optimizing that touchpoint. You could start with listing experiments and even test pricing.?

If in-app purchases aren’t converting, you’d need to experiment with pricing and paywalls.?