Grabbing users by the push...

So tell me, how is your app performing? A million downloads you say? That’s great! … or isn’t it? Looking at the downloads, to me sounds like hits, similar to what we talked about back in the early days of the internet.

Remember, a hit is a page visit, together with the downloads of all the elements (images, javascript, css file) on that page. Not really an accurate number to look at, if you want to tell how many people visited your website. Now, with mobile apps, all that should matter to you is how many users actually have your app currently installed on their phone and how many (want to) keep the app installed.

Downloads vs installs

When looking at the number of downloads, it does tell you something: it shows you the acquisition of new users. People actually found your app and took the effort to install it. But what if they never bother to open your app after the first launch? Even worse, what if they installed it, opened it once, but then removed it after a day or so… that shouldn't happen right?

Installs vs Users

In Notificare, an Active User is a user profile with one or more devices, and all together they make up your active install base. Active users are eligible to receive remote or silent notifications. After installation, users are usually registered anonymously and will only have a single device. Installs are a metric collected by the Notificare SDKs whenever an app is installed and is opened for the first time.

There is another reason to look at the number of downloads and that is if you want to compare it with your install base. To register an Install by an analytics SDK, the app has to be opened at least one time. If installs are lower than downloads, it tells you that potential customers install the app but some of them never actually open it. No marketing platform can solve this, you are persuading people to do something they actually don't want to do.

Best practise: Moving from anonymous to an identified user

But a Marketing Automation Platform can help you to convert an Install (anonymous user) into a real, known user (and, eventually, an engaged user).

“Once the app is opened, Automated Campaigns will keep the user aboard”

Once a user downloads your app and opens it for the first time, you don't really know anything about this person. You get a device identifier. This identifier will allow you to discover many things about the device: device language, country, app version, platform, OS version etc. The only thing it cannot tell you is who is holding that device in their hand. That's why you want to move as fast as possible from this anonymous user to an identified user. Once you know who you are talking to, you can connect the user to existing data (segmentation) to better target them.

With Notificare you can easily target all anonymous users. By using Criteria-based audience selection, a message can be sent to all people that forget to sign in.

Automating the on-boarding

By using actionable analytics you can automate all this. Most of the apps have a 3 or 4 screen on-boarding flow. This is normally used to explain how the app works and most of the times convert to an account creation or a user logging into the app. Of course this totally depends on the purpose of the app, but let's say you are a retailer and because your app and digital member card will replace the old plastic one, you want to sign them up for your loyalty program. With actionable analytics you are now able to gather data where the user left off in the on-boarding process (or any other specific step) and re-engage this user at the right time to hop on again.

This is the perfect way for grabbing your newly acquired users, by using push notifications the right way. Keeping your installs in sync with the downloads increases the ROI of your marketing budget and staff effort. This will organically result in more active users!

Ready to start using it? Drop us a message!

First published at: notificare.com/blog/