The definition of a successful marketing app is one that users love.
It’s an easy definition to arrive at, but not an easy goal to reach for app marketers.
Today, savvy app marketers need to engage their users with segmented, targeted marketing campaigns in order to reach the right customers at the right time. The key to creating successful campaigns like this is wrapping together real-time analytics with contextual marketing. This powerful pairing will help create a valuable app experience that will delight the user.
Indeed, 86% of respondents in a recent survey by Regalix Research found that marketing analytics were “very important” for the success of their app. On the other hand, campaigns that aren’t supported by analytics are disconnected and simplistic.
Getting to know your users
The success—and reaching that all-important “beloved” status—of an app, depends largely on the frequency and intensity of its use, so it’s important to understand as much as possible about the preferences, response rates and day-to-day habits of users so that you can keep users coming back.
What are their morning routines: Do they go to the gym early or on their way home from work? Where do they buy their coffee? Even understanding these simple things can help you engage and take action on that information, encouraging people to come back to your app when it’s most useful and convenient to them. By basing decisions on a user’s past actions, the interaction becomes more trustworthy and actionable.
Making the most of campaign performance data
Campaign performance data is flexible. With a treasure trove of analytics, making tweaks both big and small—including real-time changes to segments or target groups—is easy. Integrating marketing apps and analytics makes campaigns fluid and tailor-made for marketers who want to experiment, test, iterate and optimize campaigns.
However, without an integrated database where analytics and marketing are combined, app marketers aren’t able to create truly personal marketing messages.
Understanding a variety of different data points, and combining that with marketing efforts, is a sticking point for many when it comes to creating the best campaigns possible. To be successful, app marketers will need access to every single data point it has ever received from your app. That way, you can use any combination of in-app analytics and marketing attributes to dictate both useful and actionable insights. Low-quality user data will only prevent meaningful and personalized marketing.
Taking your insight to the next level
According to a recent report from VB Insight, 80% of consumer-facing companies don’t understand their customers beyond basic demographics and purchase history. If that’s the case, how is a marketer to know how to best reach them when they’re on the go? No one is tied to their computer or smart TV, so for marketers, cross-channel insights are key for engaging and re-engaging—wherever he or she may be.
Think of it this way: cross-channel insights enable marketers to move from solely responding to the needs of the customer to anticipating what’s next, adding a more human approach to the app experience. It’s about delivering personalized marketing as people move from your store to your website, and from your website to your app. This vivid insight helps marketers connect more deeply with customers, allowing them to understand what they want and why they want it.
Winning the retention war
Bringing together marketing and real-time data puts you ahead of the competition, allowing your team to glean insights and take action at every stage of your user’s lifecycle. By harnessing the power of the data points that come from your marketing apps and users, you can create campaigns that are both a pleasant and useful experience for your users, and ones that are more likely to keep those same users coming back. In a world where one in five apps is only ever used once, this type of retention is key for creating an app that is both beloved and successful.
Josh Todd is CMO of Localytics.
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