The partnership is part of a new integration with Apple Search Ads Attribution API, making Tune the first mobile attribution and analytics solution to do so. The API will be integrated into the Tune Marketing Console, enabling marketers to track app installs and optimise ad spend through new measurement capabilities.

The update is said to provide additional transparency into conversions through its highlighting of new app downloads and redownloads, providing a new way for ‘marketers to segment and engage with returning, high intent app customers’.

“Access to this data will enable our customers to measure app redownloads accurately, then tailor marketing efforts to increase customer retention,” said Peter Hamilton, CEO of Tune. “It’s a huge win for marketers who want to create bespoke programs capable of deepening connections with customers.”

The post Apple partners with Tune on app reinstall data appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Peak App. App-plateau. Appocalypse. Call it what you like, the days of relying on mobile app installs as your primary measure of success are over. Why? Research from TUNE shows that between 5 and 8 per cent of installs you buy are outright fraud. Amazingly, the majority of real users, some 80 per cent, have no motivation to use your app and they churn just as fast as they download. 

As most newly acquired users churn in the first couple of months, mobile marketers are turning to re-engagement. Now the challenge lies in measuring the complete lifetime value (LTV) of a user who is being re-engaged multiple times by many campaigns. Add in retention and you have a situation where brands are struggling to connect with their most valuable users. 

At the end of the day, all good marketers want to know who their best customers are, because they want to keep them, reward them and build their loyalty. By measuring the LTV of users, mobile marketers can pinpoint their best users and create offers and promotions which reward them and boost retention. 

Also, with many established brands, the 80/20 rule kicks in, where you see 80 per cent of revenue coming from 20 per cent of users: so knowing your most profitable customers means you can reward them and retain them. Plus, ultimately, the success of an app depends on LTV. 

So, the real question is this: how do you turn all those new app users into valuable customers?  

This is where setting up your app for success and folding it in to your customer lifecycle strategy is key. At the end of the day, your app customer is your best customer. 

Examining deep funnel analytics and retention or app onboarding are key when it comes to converting new app users to valued customers. App onboarding requires a product tutorial, CRM push and paid advertising. The goal is to build engagement until the magic moment where customers ‘can’t live without’ your app takes place. 

Furthermore, brands can learn a lot from mobile gaming companies who have been the trailblazers of mobile player acquisition and engagement for years. They measure the customer journey with pinpoint accuracy all along the way. The goal is to configure the game in a way that leads the players to micro-transactions (e.g. coins to level up). In a similar manner, brands should be focused on creating affinity for their app through configurations that maximise loyalty. 

TUNE recommends some useful steps
• Combine your app store optimisation with your paid campaigns for a lower effective cost per install. On average, every paid install drives an additional 1.5 organic installs by increasing app store visibility. 

• A/B test push notifications, messaging, features and navigation flow to determine the best offers, messaging and user experience based on segments you’ve created.

• Add deep links to push notifications and in-app messages to deliver users to specific locations in your app and trigger automated actions like applying a discount at checkout.

Developing customer loyalty and increasing LTV with your app means going way beyond the install. Plus, these recommended steps will take you a long way to fulfilling your app goals – especially now in a post-Appocalyptic age! 

The post Beating the appocalypse appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

The figures come from a new whitepaper by Tune, Better Together: The Elements of Paid & Organic Marketing, which examines the relationship between paid, earned and owned marketing, and how those definitions are evolving in the mobile age.

The whitepaper calls for a more blended approach to marketing, supported by evidence from a number of high profile campaigns. Among the findings Tune detail are the fact that paid social ads can boost organic web traffic by between 15 and 35 per cent, while paid SEM and PPC campaigns can boost organic SEO up to 39 per cent.

“Connections between elements of paid and organic marketing are not always apparent,” says John Koetsier, author of the report. “Nonetheless, proven combinations exist and new combinations are being identified every day. Breakthrough marketing is driven by new connection points.”

The full report is available for free here, and provides both in-depth evidence on how paid and organic marketing relate to each other, and key strategies on how marketers can exploit these relationships to make their campaigns more efficient.

The post Paid app installs can boost organic downloads by up to 150 per cent appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Mobile is the ultimate personal device for speaking to consumers, but between the complexities of app marketing, the ever-changing world of programmatic and the multiplying selection of messaging platforms, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, and that’s before we bring in innovations like AR, VR, the Internet of Things and smart cities. Our Brand Summit aims to be a knowledge hub for brand marketers looking to get the most from mobile, letting them discuss the challenges that they face with a wide range of experts and peers.

If you weren’t able to make it to the Summit, you missed out on some fantastic guidance from leading industry figures, but you can still access some of the gems of wisdom here, with our top 10 quotes from the day.

“When Theresa May announced the election, I had a personal mission. I knew our readers were young and engaged. They want to be entertained and informed.”
Sophie Tighe, Snapchat editor, The Sun

Sophie Tighe from News UK started the day off by exploring how The Sun reaches a new audience on Snapchat, often one that has never picked up the newspaper or even visited its website. She shared how the publisher adapts content for its Discover channel, ranging from celebrity gossip to political coverage, and how it has built up a relationship with the young consumers that make up Snapchat’s audience.

“During the process of building it, they found they were playing the game more than they were programming it, which meant they knew they were on to something.”
Tony Foggett, CEO, Code Computer Love

During his talk, Tony Foggett from Code Computer Love described how a side project at the digital agency designed to showcase its search data capabilities turned into a number one app with 6m downloads and 500m plays. He walked us through the making of The Higher Lower Game, how the firm used agile development and iteration to perfect it, and some of the mistakes the team learned from along the way.

“Who better to create content for your campaigns than customers themselves, who love your products and your brand. The influencer-created content is just getting so powerful, so beautiful, because the creative tools that you have on your smartphone are getting more powerful every year. You’ve seen the Shot on iPhone billboards – that campaign’s a testament to how great those cameras are.”
Jules Lund, founder, Tribe Group

Jules Lund from Tribe Group sang the praises of micro-influencers, those with between 3,000 and 100,000 followers on social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, and how they can take mass marketing messages and turn them into personal content that reaches huge numbers of consumers. He also explained how the market is evolving from just influencers as a channel to influencer generated content, which can provide brands with a powerful resource for marketing their products.

“90 per cent of our customers are under 35, and because of their demographics and their profile, we know they’re global, they’re very active on social media, but most importantly, mobile is the one thing that’s really important to them. They’ve grown up with mobile devices, and it’s natural to them to transact on a mobile device.”
Breffni Horgan, head of product & design, Hostelworld

Breffni Horgan from Hostelworld spoke about the importance of mobile to travel brands, where the personal nature of the device offers an opportunity to provide users with real utility and value while giving brands a direct line to consumers. She provided us with an overview of how Hostelworld is continually evolving the products and services it offers through its app, and how that’s driving both reach and engagement.

“If you have, for example, a website, a CRM, even a physical location, and you’re not using that to drive the data that you’re using on your mobile experience, you’re missing out.”
Simon Baptist, director of business development, EMEA, Tune

Tune specialises in helping brands optimise their app marketing, and Simon Baptist offered insights into how it’s not good enough to simply be mobile-first anymore, you have to be mobile-best. While billions is set to be spent on driving app installs next year, Simon argued that brands need to focus on engagement and retainment if they truly want to connect with customers.

“As we approach GDPR, people like telcos that have that first party relationship with a customer will be the lead that other people have to follow. There’s a value exchange in process and a trust already established.”
Martin Weller, managing director, Weve

Martin Weller from Weve addressed one of the topics that everyone in the room had questions on: the looming spectre of GDPR, and how it will affect the digital marketing ecosystem. Martin suggested that while ad tech firms may struggle, companies that have access to first-party data will be able to leverage their relationship with customers and maintain their ability to use data to target advertising.

“Clients don’t always have the opportunity to have completely bespoke video content, or a dedicated creative agency working for them, but working with the editorial and design team, we can take assets created for print or online, whether it’s a video ad, or just still images or text – and make them more dynamic, adapting it to the platform.”
Milton Elias, head of mobile & video, News UK

Speaking alongside Sophie Tighe, News UK’s head of mobile & video Milton Elias explained how the publisher partners with brands on Snapchat, and how News UK works with clients to create content that suits both the mobile format and today’s fast-paced millennial consumers.

“The right communication channel is the one your customer wants, not the one that want to give them.”
Kevin Britt, country manager, UK and Ireland, Infobip

Messaging platforms offer brands a hugely valuable channel to reach consumers on a one-to-one basis, as Infobip’s Kevin Britt detailed in his talk. SMS and over-the-top messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Line are increasingly preferred over email, and offer brands unique features that they can use to offer consumers a richer experience, from in-app payments to chatbots.

“We did a great job up to the booking, but once the customer got to the destination, we didn’t really communicate with them. We tried to understand what kind of data we had to help augment their travelling experience, and we asked customers what we could give them that would make their travelling experience better. The top answers were weather, recommendations for things to do, and places to eat.”
Breffni Horgan, head of product & design, Hostelworld

As part of her presentation, Breffni Horgan from Hostelworld explored how the brand’s app gave them an opportunity to extend their contact with customers beyond the traditional transaction, and how customer feedback and data drove their ventures into new functionality, from the MyTrips information portal to the ‘Speak The World’ translation feature.

“It’s not out of the realm of possibility for a brand to be able to tell when you’re on that final five, 10 per cent of battery, send you a push notification inviting you in and letting you charge your phone wirelessly while you get a discounted coffee.”
Ben Phillips, global head of mobile, Mediacom

Ben Phillips from Mediacom closed out the days presentations by asking the question of if mobile had reached its perfect peak with the release of the iPhone X, which seems to bring together several of the most cutting-edge innovations and offer marketers rich new opportunities for personalised interactions with consumers in the always-online world.

The post The 10 Best Quotes from our Brand Summit appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Mobile marketing platform Tune has reportedly cut 30 staff – around nine per cent of its total headcount – in an effort to return to profitability.

The cuts were confirmed to GeekWire by Tune CEO Peter Hamilton, who said they were “necessary to ensure the health of the business”.

The move affects jobs across the company and its nine offices.

Originally founded in 2009 as ‘HasOffers’, the company has been profitable for most of its history, but expenses have recently overtaken revenues. Hamilton remained confident this would turn around following the cuts, however, saying: “There is definitely no shortage of growth opportunities.”

The company is still hiring for open roles.

The post Tune cuts nine per cent of workforce appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

The data comes from a series of research reports made available by mobile marketing tech firm Tune, which has released a bundle of its existing studies as the CMO Briefing, offering marketers an exclusive collection of mobile research reports focused on app marketing that cover everything from scaling revenues to balancing user acquisition with long-term value and maximising ROI on mobile advertising programs.

Among the information included in the various reports is data on how different consumers make download decisions in the various app store environments, how app ratings and reviews differ between the Google Play Store and App Store, and how Fortune 1000 companies are using mobile to power their success.

The reports are all based on the wealth of first-party data that Tune has access to, providing it with unique insights into the paths that marketers can take to make their spending more effective and reach the consumers who are most likely to engage.

Click here to download the CMO Briefing for free, and access over 200 pages of carefully considered data and essential insights into the world of mobile marketing right now.

The post 75 per cent of Americans are downloading at least one app per month appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Tune

Download this free collection of reports for help with:

• Scaling mobile app revenue
• Effectively growing user acquisition and LTV
• Retaining and monetising users that theyve spent a lot of time and money to acquire
• Maximising the ROI of mobile advertising programs

Click here to access CMO Briefing: An Exclusive Collection of Mobile Research Reports for free today

The post CMO Briefing: An Exclusive Collection of Mobile Research Reports appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

The rise of ‘mobile-first’ companies has changed the way people watch, listen, play and buy. The likes of Uber, Instagram, Tinder and HotelTonight – companies born in a mobile era – disrupted business models and dominated the mobile experience. However, the halcyon days of app discovery are ending, driven by app store saturation and the accompanying cost barrier associated with convincing audiences to download more apps.

It’s not just mobile-first marketers who have noticed that app downloads are slowing. Longstanding brands are feeling the app download pinch too, and are searching for mobile marketing best practices and new ad partners in the hope of jump-starting downloads. The real question they are trying to uncover, though, is this: are the rumours of the ‘death of the app’ true?

If that sounds shocking, it shouldn’t be – we live in times of increasing marketing complexity and noise. Not all is lost, however. There exists a new opportunity to capture attention, streamline engagement and build life-long brand loyalty.

Cutting through the noise
Amidst all the noise, brands need to keep one simple rule in mind: what’s best for your customer is what’s best for your brand. That’s the essence behind the concept of ‘mobile-best’.

Mobile-best is the ability to engage with customers in the most impactful way, be it on the web, mobile web, in app or on other emerging channels. Being mobile-best brings the best of all channels together, while keeping the most ubiquitous and personal computing platform ever created – mobile – at the core of every marketing programme.

Tune is on a mission to help brands become mobile-best. We see ‘mobile’ not just as app, but as web and app together. Apps deliver customer insights, customer engagement and customer share-of-wallet in a direct and powerful way. They also provide instant and real-time updates to your customers on a one-to-one basis. As the top mobile marketer at GameSpot told us, the brand’s app customers are more valuable than top-level customers in its loyalty programme.
But apps alone do not make for successful marketing. Savvy brands like GameSpot use the mobile web as a discovery and new customer acquisition channel, before migrating those customers to the app, which is their retention tool.

The mobile-best reality
Because we’re nearing peak app, it’s not realistic to expect that everyone will install an app for every brand they do business with. In fact, very few will – so your mobile web experience needs to be top notch. In a mobile-best world, the mobile web is for prospects, casual customers and some loyalists, while the app is for loyalty, engagement and retention.

When melded into one cohesive strategy, mobile web and apps cater to different customers’ needs. This is especially true when trying to capitalise on new technology coming our way, such as voice search devices like Google Home or Amazon Echo, connected TVs and chatbots.

A recent Tune report found that Fortune 1000 companies defined as ‘mobile leaders’ had higher valuations than their competitors. Companies that had more than five apps outperformed those that didn’t by 8.5 per cent, while those with over 5,000 mobile customers were ahead by 15.1 per cent. Mobile leaders in the F1000 are also twice as likely to lead in stock price growth.

If you look at many FTSE 100 companies, they’ve been around the block. They make actual, real, physical products. Their products are industrial, B2B or resource-based. And yet, these companies have a modern mindset. They think deeply about technology. They build and deliver modern mobile apps. They ensure their websites work brilliantly on mobile devices. In short, even though they are not mobile-first, they understand mobile-best.

Three tips to be mobile-best
The average UK mobile user spends 66 hours a month browsing the web via a mobile device, yet competition to get that same mobile user to download an app is fierce. There are an estimated 5m mobile apps to choose from, and it’s really difficult to pack amazing purchasing or ad moments into such a small bit of digital real estate.

This is where app search, app store analytics and optimisation play a vital role in winning and keeping mobile users. To win mobile users, you have to win in search first. To crack the top 150 apps in the Google Play store, app marketers need to use 15-25 different search terms to grab enough users. For the iOS App Store, it’s more like 25+ terms to crack the top 150 in a given category. Savvy app marketers use app store optimisation software to carry out keyword analysis, in order to figure out what people are searching for, and then optimise accordingly.

1. Think Organic
Organic traffic is the most valuable traffic because, as intent is high, conversions in app will be high too. There are tools you can use to optimise your titles, keywords and descriptions. You can run experiments using Google or Tune to optimise your design assets. The app store listing should be optimised as much as your web homepage to maximise conversion.

2. Marketing acquisition
Make sure you have an attribution tool to measure the quality and effectiveness of the various channels you use. Make the most of your own assets: website, customer support, social communities and shops. This will give you loyal customers at very low cost. Paid acquisition should look at quality of traffic beyond the install. Did you acquire a potential customer or a pool of dead downloads? There are a lot of partners out there ready to sell you installs at good CPI, but the quality isn’t always there, so be clear about your KPI and optimise, optimise, optimise.

3. Marketing retention
Don’t be fooled: a download does not represent a user or a customer. Engagement and retention are the keys to success, especially when you consider that, just a week after download, two-thirds of potential users don’t come back to the app. App onboarding requires a product tutorial, a CRM push and paid advertising. The goal is to build engagement until that magic moment when customers can’t live without your app.

Our advice to app developers is to make a great app that makes customers’ lives better. If you haven’t done that, then don’t bother marketing it. Once you’ve built something that’s truly great, take a mobile-best approach to marketing it – configure your marketing efforts to catch people in app, in others’ apps that use deep links, or on the mobile web. Ultimately, the goal is to build a connected set of touchpoints with your mobile customers that reinforce how great the app is, and keep them coming back for more.

The post Becoming a best brand in a mobile world – Tune appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Fast forward a few years – nine to be exact – and things look somewhat different. While mobile phone OS fragmentation has eased somewhat, leaving iOS and Android as virtually the last men standing, the fact remains that there are more than 2m apps in Apple’s App Store, and another 2m+ in the Google Play store.

And while clearly there’s a massive amount of duplication, as developers build and release for both platforms, even with 2m other apps competing for attention, it’s hard to stand out. Factor in the thousands of new apps released into the app stores every single day, and it’s clear that getting your app discovered and downloaded is becoming harder with each passing day.

Even if you get that far, the numbers around app churn are truly scary for brands. According to research from Urban Airship, based on a study of 63m app users, only five per cent of people who download an app will still be using it 90 days after they open it for the first time. So all that time, energy and, let’s face it, money spent driving downloads of your app, is wasted.

So given the competitive nature of the app landscape, how do you cut through, get your app downloaded by the right sort of people, and then encourage them to open it once and keep going back to it, once installed?

For Simon Spaull, MD, EMEA, at AppLovin, the process starts with the app itself. “People spend millions on TV ads and then come to us with a crappy app where the user journey is awful,” he says. “People like Amazon have nailed this, minimising as many processes as they can, but it is amazing how many people come to us with dreadful apps.”

Josh Todd, CMO at Localytics, tells a similar story. He says: “People need to ask themselves, ‘What is the purpose of the app? What unique value does it provide?’ Creating an app for the sake of creating an app is a recipe for failure.”

Download duties
Assuming the app is fit for purpose, the next job, of course, is to get it on consumers’ handsets. In recent years, Facebook has taken billions in marketing dollars from brands and app developers looking to do just that. While his company spends no money with the social giant, AppLovin’s Spaull says he understands the platform’s appeal.

“People go to Facebook first, and we will push them that way, because the data is strong and it converts very well; there’s no hiding from that fact,” he says. “Then once you start seeing success on Facebook, we can get you to the next level. You’ll get maybe 50 per cent of your coverage on Facebook, but there are people on apps outside of Facebook and we are happy to play in that space.”

When the talk turns to mobile ad spend and Facebook, Google is usually not far behind, and according to Mick Rigby, CEO of Yodel Mobile, search is becoming increasingly important to drive app downloads.

“App indexing is becoming essential for app discovery via search through Chrome and Safari,” he says. “App packs are the tiles that come up on mobile search when you type in a request. If you type in a search on your mobile for something like ‘Cheap hotels app’ or ‘Luxury hotels app’, if you scroll down past the usual paid results at the top of the page, you get three tiles, each promoting a different app matching that description. And if you click the ‘More Apps’ arrow below the tiles, you get a full screen of app tiles. If you know what you are doing, you can steal a march on the big brands and spenders. You can get into the top three or six and completely outplay the big names at a fraction of the investment – by being smart. Lots of marketers are missing out on the opportunity of app discovery through search on mobile handsets.”

Simon Baptist, director of business development, EMEA, at Tune, puts it even more forcefully. “To win mobile users you have to win in search first,” he says. “To crack the top 150 apps in the Google Play store, app marketers need to use 15–25 different search terms to grab enough users. For the iOS store it’s more like 25+ terms to crack the top 150 apps in a given category. Savvy app marketers and makers use app store optimisation software to do keyword analysis to figure out what people are searching for and then optimise accordingly.”

But app discoverability is not all about reaching random consumers online. If you’re an established brand with established lines of communication with your customer, then clearly it makes sense to use them.

“Owned media is one of the biggest opportunities for brands that are more established,” says Localytics’ Todd. “We know more than half of emails are opened on mobile and a lot of companies have an email newsletter, so this is a great place to promote your app to your more engaged users. Companies like Staples and CBS have done a great job in this respect over the past couple of years, but a lot of others are still ignoring the opportunity.”

Engaged users
This notion of the more engaged user is one that has come to the fore in the past year or so as the app marketing business has matured. Previously, the only KPI anyone really worried about was the number of downloads, but given those scary app churn figures mentioned earlier, there has been a gradual realisation among the app marketing community that you get what you pay for.

“Sure we can drive installs for $1, but that will only get you crappy audiences,” says AppLovin’s Spaull. “If you’re prepared to pay $5 or $10, you’ll be bidding for higher-quality inventory and, ultimately, you’ll attract a better customer and make more money in the long run.”

This is the approach taken by Francesco Loschiavo, digital marketing and CRM manager at NBC Universal’s Hayu reality TV on-demand service. Hayu works closely with Yodel on its app marketing and Loschiavo concedes that in the early days “we started out being concerned about volume but now it is all about quality.”

To find higher-quality users, Hayu uses AppsFlyer tech in the app. ‘Events’ are flagged in the app, such as when someone makes it past three months as a paid subscriber, or completes a given number of programme views. The app then sends a signal back to Hayu’s media partners to say that the channel this user came from to the app is delivering better-quality users, so spend should be optimised for that channel. In addition, on Facebook Hayu will identify, for example, The Kardashians superfans who have watched more than 50 episodes and spent a certain amount, and who have a high number of app logins. It then layers its customer data against Facebook interest data to build a strong lookalike profile to find more potential customers of the same quality.

Onboarding
So you’ve lovingly crafted your app, you’ve optimised your app store presence, you’ve fine-tuned your media spend so that your ads are appearing in the right places to attract high-quality users and, happy days, the downloads start rolling in. The next thing the savvy app marketer needs to think about is the onboarding process, when the user opens the app for the first time and you, as the app developer or the brand briefing the app developer, have to decide how far to push things on that first engagement. If the app is on an iOS phone, it will ask the user’s permission to send push notifications on first open, though Leanplum, which specialises in post-install engagement, has a piece of tech that can circumvent this.

There are lots of permissions an app can ask for, in addition to push notifications. The most obvious ones are permission to access your location, the phone’s camera and its address book. “There are two types of onboarding: initial and progressive,” says Yodel’s Rigby. “Initial onboarding is getting the user to understand the app and if there are any essential elements you need them to opt in to, get them straight away. So if it’s a dating app with a ‘People Near Me’ feature, you need to get them to opt in to location from the off. Progressive onboarding is stuff they can come back to at later stages. There’s no one right way to do this because every app is different and requires different data, but as long as you understand this, you can build a strategy.”

But of all the permissions an app can seek, push notifications are undoubtedly the most important, offering the app owner the opportunity to re-engage users who have downloaded the app but haven’t opened it up for a while. So what does best practice look like here?

“You have to show them a little bit of value then earn the right to ask for those permissions in context,” says Localytics’ Todd. “RetailMeNot did a great job with this. When you got inside the app, the first thing the user had to do was to select which brands they wanted to receive discount coupons from, so when the app asked permission to send push notifications, it was in the context of getting deals from the brands they had selected.”

According to Leanplum, the average opt-in rate for push notifications is 43 per cent, but the retention rate for users opted in to push is 20 per cent higher than for those who are not. “For an app like Pokémon Go, that number means you would have an additional 1.2m players by day 15,” says Joyce Solano, Leanplum’s VP of corporate marketing. “What an arsenal that is in terms of retaining users and being able to monetise them.”

Frequency
The other $64,000 question where push is concerned, is frequency. As the app owner, it’s tempting to reach out to your users every week or maybe even every day to get them re-engaging with the app and, hopefully, spending money with you. But common sense dictates that if you turn up the dial too high, users will see you as spammy, tune out, and probably uninstall. So what is the golden number of push notifications an app owner should be looking to send?

You’ll struggle to find anyone to give you a definitive answer, on the basis that every app is different. News organisations probably can get away with a daily push, or even more, but a retailer might start to look a bit desperate if they adopted the same approach.

Emily Buckman, global strategic consultant at Urban Airship says: “Frequency is more about relevance than cadence. Our studies clearly show that among hundreds of apps analysed, more frequent engagement through messaging will drive better retention rates, so long as you have something relevant to say that is aligned to the customer journey and experience. But the messaging must be relevant, personalised and contextual. If not, if you’re just sending a message with a flash sale every day, it will have the opposite effect to what you’re trying to achieve.”

The other thing that can help where push is concerned is a bit of variety, something beyond plain text. iOS 10 – in addition to enabling app users to leave a rating for the app from within the app, rather than being redirected away to the App Store – also enables app owners to send rich push notifications, including GIFs and videos. It also enables a brand to personalise the app icon on the user’s phone, so that a Starwood hotel user who hits Platinum status in the company’s loyalty program, for example, could see that reflected in their app icon.

In the same vein, app marketers are seeing great success with that other unlikely marketing success story of the past 12 months, the emoji. “Our customers see great results when they use multimedia and non-text-based communication to re-engage users,” says Tune’s Baptist. “Emojis and GIFs are two great examples of fun tools that app makers can use to engage with mobile customers. Data suggest that sending mobile users personalised, emoji-based notifications can boost open rates by as much as 80 per cent. Why? Pictures are valuable, lasting and fun. That’s exactly what you want mobile users to think of your app.”

At The Economist, audience development director Tom McCave says push notifications have increased in importance in recent years. McCave is responsible for The Economist’s ‘World In [2017]’ series, published annually. He says: “People are engaging with apps in different ways than they did three or four years ago. There are fewer people looking for the apps they want to open by browsing their phone; it is much more prompted. We put out a notification when the new edition is published but that would only be once a year, so we go further. ‘The World In’ predicts how the year ahead will unfold, so when some of these predictions come true, we can re-engage with those users through push. It gives us a way to have a continued conversation throughout the year. This is one thing push is really good for.”

At Hayu, Loschiavo says the brand is taking a tiered approach to push. “We do a lot of A/B testing to see what works, and carefully manage that we aren’t overusing the frequency of the channel,” he says. “If it’s a C-level show, not a big premiere, we might just do an email. But if it’s a new series of the Kardashians, we will roll it out across all channels and stagger the messaging through the day, so you might get an email in the morning, an in-app notification during the day and a push notification in the evening just before the show goes out. We also use push notifications for early engagement, as an educational tool, when someone has installed the app but not subscribed yet.”

Analytics
So what next for app marketing? Tune’s Baptist would like to see brands take analytics more seriously. In this respect, he says, they can learn a lot from the gaming companies, who lead the way in mobile user acquisition and engagement because they use deep-funnel behaviour analytics to drive action; they rely on rapid testing and adjustment as a core strategy; and they are quick to jump on new opportunities and cultural trends.

“Analytics can make a real difference,” says Baptist. “Mobile games are free to play and are designed to drive players through a carefully scripted series of tutorials and events, with the objective of creating affinity for the game. At the end of this journey, or funnel, are micro-transactions like buying coins to level up faster. Gaming companies have designed their mobile product specifically to move players efficiently through this funnel to a point of purchase.

“They measure the customer journey with pinpoint accuracy along the way. By focusing on deep-funnel analytics, i.e. what behaviour a player takes just before and just after a point of purchase, gaming companies can constantly configure their game to maximise this action. It’s this level of attention and data that informs both marketing strategy and product strategy, which leads to a constant evolution of rapid updates to make the game better.”

Urban Airship’s Buckman believes brands are improving their messaging capabilities. “Businesses, especially larger ones, are finally starting to shift the culture towards being more mobile-first and data-driven, implementing DMPs and data warehouses to send the right communications at the right time, so messages are becoming more contextual and relevant thanks to better data and analytics,” she says.

Meanwhile, Hayu’s Loschiavo says he is already looking towards what comes after apps. “These are interesting times,” he says. “I read recently that people only use seven apps on a daily basis and it’s mostly between two companies, Facebook and Google, with maybe a bit of Snapchat and one or two others in there. This is the evolution of how your brand is going to talk to your customer. It might not be in the app store or in other apps that you do your marketing. It might be natively in Facebook or in chatbots and messenger bots. We are looking at this and we’re seeing how chat is becoming a global leader in terms of where people are spending time on their phone, so it’s going to be really interesting to see how this all plays out.”

This article first appeared in the June 2017 print edition of Mobile Marketing. You can read the whole issue here.

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