Create an Addictive Mobile Application

TREAT MOBILE APPS AS EVOLVING PRODUCTS

Analysts stress that companies should think of their apps as long-term products that constantly evolve to meet customers’ changing demands. “Behaviors will change over time, so you need to pay attention to how people use the app,” Baker says—and, for instance, remove features that customers aren’t using.

New versions need to be delivered rapidly, Hammond says. “Because even if you get the customer’s journey wrong, or there’s something that you don’t understand about it, or if it changes over time, if you have the capability to quickly understand that, and react to it, then you can very quickly correct your mistakes,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons we recommend companies build development teams that can release updates eight to twelve times a year. Because the more often you release, the more often you have the opportunity to correct your mistakes, test something new, and see the customer’s reaction to the capability you’ve added to the application.”

Hammond says that about 60 percent of companies use outsourced help to build up their applications. Companies tend to work with small local design teams and systems integrators that are experienced in agile development, so they can handle faster cycles. But in the long run, he suggests, it might be cheaper to hire full-time developers, especially if a company plans to evolve the app consistently over a long period of time, and to make it one of the main points of contacts with customers.

“If you look at the average hourly cost for on-shore mobile development talent, you’re looking at $150 an hour on up. If you do the math on that, and look at a 46-week-a-year developer at that cost, you’re looking at $300,000 a year. There are a lot of places in the U.S. where you can get a good mobile developer for less than that.”

CREATE CUSTOMER AWARENESS AND RETENTION

Getting people to download and use an app is not simply a matter of releasing it—you have to “make people aware of it,” Baker says, a task that’s often overlooked. One simple way to promote it is to provide links to the app store on the company’s website.

However, getting people to sign up isn’t the only challenge. According to Cipolla, companies should work on maintaining mobile app users who stick with it for more than a day or so. Much of the job of retaining customers comes from the marketing and publishing efforts surrounding the application.

Companies can keep users coming back by sending them personal offers within an app, or in emails, giving them a reason to log in. Sephora’s app uses geolocation technology to determine when users are close to a store and send them promotional offers.

But there’s no guarantee such tactics will work. The top reason people uninstall an app, Cipolla points out, is annoyance over the amount of notifications they receive. According to a study from Localytics, the average U.S. mobile app user has a threshold of five such messages per week. Companies should leverage data as much as they can to determine their customers’ preferences, beyond simply allowing them to opt out of push notifications.

MEASURING THE PAYOFFS

While the payoff from mobile apps is not always so easy to calculate, there are several ways to get a read on performance, good indicators that a return on investment will follow—customer satisfaction, engagement, incremental value, and the growth of the customer base among them, Baker says.

Hammond notes that he typically recommends companies use three types of measures: technical measures (the functionality of the app, its speed, and its likelihood of crashing); engagement measures (how often the app is used—the number of daily and monthly users and how much money is spent in the app); and the business-level measures. An example of a business-level measure might be a hotel chain looking to discover how many rooms are booked through its app and what revenue it drives. Another example could be a retailer that wants to measure the number of purchases made directly through the app, or whether customers are using it for research to later make in-store purchases.

EXPANDING BEYOND MOBILE APPS

While the mobile app market is robust, it’s far from reaching its full potential. “There are some really big changes on the horizon,” Hammond says. Apps are continuing to expand into other mobile platforms. WhatsApp, Facebook, and WeChat enable brands to use chatbots or notifications to replace parts of the app experience on those platforms. And as people become more comfortable interacting with virtual assistants (such as Cortana, Siri, and Google Now) for functions such as scheduling appointments and finding nearby restaurants, apps will also have to be able to handle those requests. Increasingly, Hammond says, “companies [will] have to think beyond the boundaries of their own apps.”

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Associate Editor Oren Smilansky can be reached at osmilansky@infotoday.com.

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