It should be abundantly clear by now that it’s not enough to just think up a good idea for an app, build and ship it in order to be successful. The question, then, is:
What can you focus on to make sure you’re prioritizing the right goals and tasks in order to make progress on your business on a regular basis?
Simplifying and focusing your approach requires understanding the math behind your app business. When you understand the core drivers of your business, it’s much easier to measure your progress and to identify when you need to make a change in order to achieve your goals.
The app business has a simple equation. Here it is:
The beauty of this equation lies in its simplicity. When making decisions about your work you are able to quickly assess if you’re moving the needle on any of the components. Let’s explore how this works with the installs component, the “start” of the equation.
Installs: 2 common consumer paths
Everyone wants more people to install their apps, but how many people think critically about the path a consumer follows to install your app?
The consumer interaction that leads to the decision to download your app has 2 common paths: discovery and referral. That is, the consumer has either discovered your app in the app store in some way (most common) or someone whose opinion they trust referred them to your app.
Most Mobile App Downloads are the result of Discovery
In order to maximize your installations, it’s important to plan around both of these consumer paths. By regularly focusing on how to improve your referrals and to optimize for consumers in discovery mode developers see very positive impacts on their installations.
The Discovery path: it’s all about ratings & reviews
Most Viewers of Your App's Details Page Do Not Install Your App
Since the vast majority of downloads over time are driven by discovery, it’s very important to maximize the conversion rate of your app’s description page.
What’s that you say? You didn’t think about the conversion rate for your app’s description page? That’s understandable – most developers don’t.
It’s absolutely critical that you understand that the majority of the time, when someone looks at your app’s page in the app store, they’re choosing to NOT INSTALL your app. Based upon the data we have seen at Apptentive for free apps, fewer than 1 in 3 views of the app detail pages result in a download. As you can imagine, the conversion ratio is even worse for paid apps. The reality is this: whether your app is free or not, most people choose to pass on your app.
The good news is that you can meaningfully impact the conversion ratio because consumers decide based upon your overall ratings volume and the most recent reviews you’ve received. Our app ratings and feedback tools are helping developers really engage with their customers in order to ensure that customers are happy and loving your app.
Ensuring that every potential customer sees that your existing customers love your app results in a meaningful improvement to the conversion ratio. Whether you call it “social proof” or just plain old common sense, consumers care about what existing customers have to say when making decisions. Your app’s ratings and reviews are absolutely critical to increasing your installations.
The Referral path: create evangelists and prosper
The referral component of the app business is often discussed because it’s used to describe why an app like Angry Birds got to be so popular, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. Very few apps are fortunate to become part of mainstream culture. However, many apps are important to a loyal and loving audience. This is where your opportunity lies and why appbackr’s integration with Klout makes so much sense.
Your biggest fans are already out there talking about you. You can see it when you’re at dinner with a group of friends and someone pulls out their phone and shows off the latest app they’ve discovered. It’s happening when people are tweeting about your app and how it really impressed them. Every loyal app customer is a potential salesperson for you and your Backrs.
You can create hooks to truly engage on a personal level with your app customers. Making it easy to give feedback and then responding to each customer has an amazing personal impact. Your dialog with them creates an emotional connection, helping them understand that there are people behind the app who care about their opinions and experiences.
The customers you converse with are much more likely to talk about you to their friends and to share your app, because you’ve connected with them and communicated that you care about their experience. Although the referral path is much less predictable, as a developer you can meaningfully influence a portion of your customer base and inspire them to become vocal proponents as the result of simply talking with them.
Conclusion: Know your app math and how to influence it
As you build your apps, recruit Backrs and grow your business, make sure that you’re focused on the math of the app business. Keep the equation we’ve outlined above in mind and always ask yourself which piece of the equation you’re currently working to impact. We’ve outlined the key ways in which you can influence the installs part of the equation. If you’d like to know more about how to impact retention and revenues, download our free PDF on the math of the app business today. Feel free to ping us on Twitter if you have any other questions – we love connecting with developers and Backrs alike to make your app businesses more succesful.
About the author:
Robi Ganguly (@rganguly) is the co-founder and CEO of Apptentive, a company that powers in-app feedback and better app ratings for app developers on iOS, Android and Mac OS X. Robi writes about customer communication and relationship building on the Being Apptentive blog and you can find the Apptentive team on Facebook and Twitter @apptentive.
