Growth

Let’s talk about growth. Growth comes quite simply from marketing/attracting new users to your product while and most importantly taking great care of your existing users so that they do not leave. This means working on every small detail and flow in your app and company wide processes until you reach an ideal state. This is a relentless pursuit. Thats what makes growth difficult.

This got me thinking if it was possible to define a structure on how to go about managing this entire process. While its unfeasable to capture this in a single post, I hope to go through the macro points. Lets get right into it.

Here’s how users reach your app/product

1. They see an ad (inorganic) or their friends tell them about it (organic)
2. They go to the app store or play store to download your app
3. They open the app and use it to discover its utility
4. Based on how step number 3 goes they decide if they want to use the product or not.

We wont talk about organic growth since that’s authentic and usually costs nothing. This, is your product appealing to a certain segment of users who in turn spread the word.

Marketing

Inorganic growth though is a different ball game. Its your marketing team trying to attract users by highlighting certain qualities about your product which they feel the user wants to see. It is important to understand here, that different audiences resp0nd differently to the same marketing message. It is important that the right value proposition is being portrayed to the right audience to peek their interest. Segmentation of users can be done based on a variety of factors like age group, sex, location/neighbourhood etc.

For user segmentation, if you happen to be an app which has access to a users contacts for legitimate reasons (respect privacy please), you can use this data to form another factor using social graph to understand your customers better. Drawing this graph you could figure out the virality of the app. Figure out the degrees of separation between contacts who have registered on your app and are active on it. Once you figure out the degrees of separation, which is the most popular and dense for active users, you could extrapolate this finding and try to target the remaining contacts having similar degrees of separation but are not on your app yet. Combining this factor, with the ones mentioned earlier, many interesting insights can be developed which can aid forming accurate segments allowing for better customer targeting.

Personalisation

Personalisation is key. But it does not end with the marketing. Follow through on this once a user clicks on the ad and downloads your app. On opening the app, show him the value he saw in the ad as soon as possible. This can mean taking him straight to that delicous cake he was shown in the ad or straight to a particular feature you highlighted about your app. Keep things extremely relevant. The marketing and product team must work extremely closely to accomplish this. Pushing features, products or prices in marketing ads which are difficult to find or worse not present in the app will lead to heavy uninstallation rates. One way to see if you are doing this right is to check uninstall rate for organic VS inorganic users. If its way higher than the uninstall rate of organic users, there’s a disconnect between marketing and the product team.

Some general house keeping tips

1. When you are starting out, adwords and facebook ads usually do give away some amount of free credits. Use these free credits wisely and target influential folks like tech journalists and bloggers. If they download your app and like what they see, one tweet could get you a buttload of attention.
2. Keep the app size as small as possible. Internet connectivity in India is not the best. Additionally the smaller the app size, the lesser the amount of time users have to wait to jump into your app and closer to discovering your value in their lives. Patience and memory is at a premium. Use services like Progaurd and Lint to help out with this.
3. Make sure your app is crash free. To the average user a crash equals unreliable brand and at worst they fear your app may harm their device. With Google play, you have the advantage of rolling out updates in a staged manner. Start with 10–20% of your users. Once your build is stable, push the update to all users.
4. App store optimisation is often ignored. Do not make that mistake. Additionally play store listings have scope for optimisation too. Google has introduced tools for A/B testing. Remember this is your landing page, people have to like what they see to download the app. Last thing you want is to do all the hardwork in getting the user here and they decide to bounce.

5. Onboarding is hugely important.

a) Do not just ask for all the permissions at once. Ask permissions as and when the app actually needs access to them along with a nice explanation. Check out some examples below:

b) Avoid forcing the user to login on starting the app. Let him explore, discover the app and see its value. Forcing login is the equivalent of asking way too many personal question on the 1st date.

A good place to ask for login is just before the user is about to place an order. Do this such that the user understands the benefits your offering him if he logs in.

c) If you have a referral system personalise it. By this I mean have a special landing page some what like the example below

d) Send users a nice welcome mail highlighting some of your USP’s and do tell them there are some steps he can take inside the app to discover the full potential of your app. In android its possible to get access to a users email id by using the accounts manager library. This email id can be used to passively associate a users actions to an id and if needed retarget them (if they go dormant). In android Nougat extra permissions are needed to get this data.

e) Reach to users just when they drop off. For example: If a user abandons a form post filling 65% of it and does not complete it within 10–30 mins, its great time to immediately contact the user asking if they need any help. Since he has completed a good portion of the form, thats definite intent and thus a call/email to help out would be relevant and delightful.

f) Marketing push notifications should be personalised and limited to 1–2 in a week. Ideally have a section in the app where the user can choose what type of push notifications he wants to recieve. The greater control the better. The Times of India app does a great job at this. If your sending transactional pushes, do not send an sms, email and a push about the same thing. Send a push and incase the user does not interact with it or he has switched off push notifications for your app(tools like clevertap allow to identify this) send him an SMS or an email. SMS is generally considered a better medium for time sensitive communications.

Remember: Sending users irrelevant pushes leads to high uninstalls. Most users do not bother with going into settings and switching off push notifications for an app. They simply uninstall it. Similarly be careful while trying to activate dormant users with pushes. If they deem it uninteresting, it simply serves as a reminder to uninstall the app.

Now lets talk about when the user is inside your app. Few basic metrics which are important to monitor in relation to marketing campaigns are the following. You can use branch.io to track these.

Cost per download

This tells you how well your marketing campaign is doing in attracting users. If the cost is too high, the value prop showcased is not something users are interested in and/or your google play store page is not optimised.

Cost per registeration

If your app forces the users to register before using it (avoid this), this metric will measure effectiveness of that funnel. In the case where you offer registeration at a later stage to the user e.g. just before completing his transaction, this metric is important to track in order to compare it to the cost per download. The larger the difference, the greater the scope to optimise.

Cost per goal

This metric basically helps you measure the cost for you to make a user complete an important goal in your app. Goal could be placing an order, doing a recharge or booking a cab. This is most likely the main function of your app.

You should be obsessed with making users reach this goal in the most intuitive and fastest way possible. If your app offers multiple things, show the feature or product which the user has seen in the ad, upfront. Such features or products should be put front and centre either by taking the user to the appropriate screen inside the app or better yet putting them on the homepage itself. Approximately 50–70% users lose interest in the app within the first 7 days and hence “activating” a user within the first 24–48 hours is critical. What does activating a user mean? It means taking him to the point where he understands and sees the apps value proposition. This can be done via meaningful push notifications, email, sms's.

Retention

The foundation of growth is retention. Growing without retention is like having a leaky bucket your trying to fill with water.

An important lesson people tend to forget, which is highly relevant especially in the early days of a startup, is look into why users who are loyal to you are staying. See what your power users are doing and their usage patterns. They have discovered something about your app they like. You need to find what that is and try and make similar other users discover the same value. This analysis comes in handy while prioritising future product pipelines as well.

When users do leave your app its time to buckle up and analyse the situation. What did these users do before they abandoned your app? Did they drop off while trying to reach a goal? Were they unhappy with the customer service? Did they get a late delivery on their last order? Did their app crash or get stuck?

Every goal inside your app requires user interactions to complete them. Your job is the optimise these interactions. Figure out screens which have the most drop offs, issues in your customer service, company processes or technical glitches.

In order to solve these issues its important to have a clear understanding of them.

1. Build a few hypothesis’s around why users are dropping off and what are possible solutions could reduce that number.
2. With these solutions in mind, your UX and product teams should speak to users or better yet meet them in person. They should ask them to go through the steps leading to the goal and see if they get stuck at a certain point. These meetings will give you the best insights on how to solve problem areas in your app/process and come up with the next great new feature (more on this in a future post)
3. Based on your meetings with customers put out an improved version of the app/process. Monitor its performance VS the old using an A/B test. If its improved you are on the right track and if its gotten worse go back to the drawing board and consider another hypothesis.

Retention is also about understanding the value of each user and recognising that not all users are of the same value. Design your processes to be biased towards users of higher importance. Users should be given scores based on a variety of factors like number of transactions, value of transactions, frequency of transactions, app usage patterns, social popularity etc. These factors should be dependant on your line of business. Right from levels of service to the actions taken to avoid losing such users, should be varied from user to user depending on their score.

All in all measure everything.

If you do not measure means you dont care and users wont care about your service too. Measure things honestly and carefully. You are what you measure. Remember growth is a way of thinking. It is something which should be felt and adopted company wide. Laying down the principles and foundations for growth thinking is important for this belief to spread and be imbibed across.

Growth = Marketing the right value prop to the right customer + retention of the customer.