What Constitutes A Good App

Understanding what will make people love your app

With millions of apps on Google Play Store and Apple App Store, how many actually get the much-coveted space in the users' mobile? How many Apps do we download and use on a regular basis? How many apps are uninstalled everyday?

While the exact answer to these questions would be very difficult to put in black and white, the obvious point is, there are successful and unsuccessful apps; apps that people use and apps that they don't. There are good apps and the bad ones.

So what constitutes a good app and how do you know one?

Value: A good app will be based on providing value to the customer. Either it will aim at solving a particular problem like call-a-plumber-or-electrician app, or it will aim at providing convenience to the user like news app or will be simply good for its entertainment value. A good app will always define a take-away for the user; the better the value, better the app.

Engagement: There are apps that we install on our mobile phones and absolutely forget about them and then there are apps that become a part of our daily lives. Good apps are the ones that can productively engage users on a regular basis. There should be notifications, alerts, offers, reminders and other ways to engage the user.

Moderation: Although user engagement is important but it strictly needs to be done in moderation. Too many notification and alerts will eventually turn off the user resulting into un-installation of the app. How many messages are appropriate? The answer to this would be different for very app depending on the nature of your app, type of user base and the scope of engagement.

Personalization: A good app learns from the user's usage habits, timings, spending pattern, likes and dislikes, builds upon that and presents user with personalized content. Though more the personalization, better it is, but then it's important to understand there is a very fine line between personalization and intrusion of privacy. And many a times users are put off by intrusive apps. Asking too much of personal information and taking permission for usage of personal information irrelevant to the app will definitely not qualify as a good-app feature. For instance an app for showing driving directions on the map does not need to get access to contact-list on the phone.

These are a few general traits that constitute a good app. the scope and flexibility of these traits will change from one app to the other depending on the user base, the value deliverance and scope of the app.

App Marketing

Reaching out to your target audience

App marketing, like any other marketing, is theoretically a breeze; identify your target market, reach your audience, convince them to download the app and it's done. But in reality, it's a lot beyond.

Each step of app marketing involves a whole gamut of challenges and complexities. For marketers the challenge starts right from identifying the target audience. Anyone who has a smart phone or mobile device is a part of the target market. In this huge segment, macro and then micro segmentation needs to be done. This would depend on a through analysis of the app, the benefits and conveniences it delivers, the problems it promises to solve and the demographic it will appeal to.

Once the segmentation is done, the big challenge is how to reach the target segment. Since it the mobile world we are talking about, reaching out to the target audience is a lot more difficult. Discussed below are some ways that will help reaching out to potential users for app marketers.

WHY

Why should the user download your app? What is the motivation for downloading your app (and not competition's)? Does the motivation change with age/operating system/place?

Most users are known to download apps that solve a specific task. For instance Navigation apps help users find directions to different places, or food ordering apps help people get food from their favorite food outlet or news apps that flashes the headlines and breaking news of the day.

Another motivation is (WOM) word-of-mouth. An app recommended by friend or family has a very high probability of download. Some app marketers caught on to this trend and have started marketing their products as recommendations from friends. Remember the emails you receive that prompt you to try out an app recommended by your friend or accomplice? How many times do we open such emails and actually try out the links? The point is it really has to be word-of-mouth for the receiver to trust it. WOM marketing through email lists and social media is not such a great idea until there's a well-thought-of long-term strategy involved.

WHERE

Markets have changed. The 'one-size-fits-all' marketing strategy is no longer applicable. Retailers need to understand their customer and personalize marketing for each customer keeping their convenience in mind. If Miss Mayers is a working professional and prefers shopping (even if it's online shopping) only on the weekends, sending her weekend offers would draw her to see the offers. If Mrs. Hopkins is a housewife and prefers shopping in the store at leisure on weekdays, then sending her weekday offers and updates will make sense. Similarly if a man's profile data shows he's traveling and while traveling he's surfing the store's site, a sudden push notification with a great offer may most likely result into a sale.

Top Charts: Most users surf for the app on Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Most users just surf the top ranking apps and choose their pick. Apps need to be optimized for app store ranking (this topic is covered in a different blog "App Store Optimization"). User reviews also play an important role in helping form an opinion about an app before using it.

Advertisements: Advertisements can be of various types: offline (non digital), online and in-app. For most online ads, the normal measure of ROI is through rate of click. But an important thing to note here is that there is this segment of people who look at the in-app ads but still go through Play Store or App Store to search and download the app. In such cases the ‘click' ratio of the ad is zero but the impact isn't. Hence an approximate measure of the success ratio of the ads can be the increase in overall sale from the time the ads started appearing. Depending on the need and type of industry/genre/segment you are catering to, you can take a call on whether offline ads and ads in different media will make practical sense.

Once the basic questions about who, why where and all are answered, the next big challenge becomes getting users to download the app and then keeping them engaged with the app. Getting users to download is heavily dependent on the way your app is presented on the app store and user reviews. And when the app is downloaded, a lot of planning needs to be put into devising a communication strategy that keeps the customer constructively and profitably engaged with the app.