By Bhaval Patel
Do you want to reach as many users as possible through your mobile application?
You might think that developing a user-friendly app is all that you need to attract users. But that is not enough. To reach the maximum number of users worldwide and increase downloads to your app, implement user acquisition strategies.
Mobile app user acquisition is highly competitive but if you use the right strategies, you may increase the company’s customer base. Being the best mobile app development service provider, our app developers know what it takes to make an app worth downloading.
Let us understand the importance of user acquisition in business and strategies to implement for more app installs.
Table of Contents
Why is User Acquisition Important?
The top three reasons why user acquisition is important are
- User acquisition helps to increase the decline in app downloads. With the help of various marketing tactics, businesses will gain revenue with an increase in the number of users.
- Customer acquisition motivates users to check and use your products and services. This helps to boost the app store and increase new users.
- One of the reasons for adapting to user acquisition is to increase brand awareness. Scale up your business in new places to acquire more audience.
Let’s move to various strategies that will help you increase the customer base for your business.
7 Important Strategies for Mobile User Acquisition
Follow these 7 popular ways to gain more users for your mobile app.
Focus on App Store Optimization (ASO)
App store optimization refers to increasing the app’s visibility and user appeal to increase the app conversion rate. Increasing the customer base is one of the most important KPIs of any business. To get recognized by high-quality and relevant users, cut user acquisition costs, and increase conversion rates. Follow the below two main ways to get more downloads:
- By optimizing your app to get organic traffic with ASO practices
- By running paid user acquisition campaign that comes with cost-per-install
#Did you know?
Google universal app campaigns allow you to run free and paid ads on platforms such as Google Play, YouTube, and Google Search. These campaigns help design and identify the best-performing ads to optimize and achieve more installs.
An essential part of ASO is to have the right tools like App Radar, AppTweak, MobileActionm Asodesk, AppFollow, and Sensor Tower. Working of ASO is optimizing the app’s description, visuals, and title in order to attract and convert users.
Paid Media Marketing
Every user today has more than one app or they are active on more than 2 social media ads for either personal or professional use. Why not reach them through those channels?
For example, the famous gaming app- Clash of Clans. The company uses social media to show glimpses of the game, address questions, or ask for feedback. Another powerful mobile user acquisition strategy is influencer marketing. This refers to promotional activities of your product through interaction with any influencer.
#Know This:
Choose an influencer whose opinion is taken seriously by your target audience. Mainly these influencers should be interacting with the app users on social networking platforms like YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram.
For example, Taco Bell, partnered with BigDawsTV to advertise their special offer of a 50% discount for Taco Bell users if they use Visa checkout.
Organic Mobile Marketing Tactics
Coming to organic mobile marketing tools, the first thing that comes to our minds is social media. The most popular tool to reach new users for free. Consider going through a mobile app idea validation process before trying organic marketing techniques.
Another overlooked tool to target users and also retain existing users is PR. Expect user installs, app awareness, and drive app promotions through mediums like websites, bloggers, and journalists. Look for media agencies that find interest in your app. Expect potential users with the support of these tools.
Want to Create an App That Increases More Users?
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Content Marketing
Build loyal followers through your content. Direct them to your product page and encourage them to download the app. For example, you can drive traffic by writing blog posts that rank at the top or provide an in-depth guide about your product. Run a paid ad campaign that targets the users.
- Know your target audience- This user acquisition strategy only works if you know your audience. Creating content according to their needs and preferences will increase the number of users.
- Make use of smart banners- Use banner ads that complement organic marketing efforts. This way the users will get directed to the app’s download page.
Referral Program
This is another great strategy to gain users. New users usually trust the opinion of other people who have already used your application. Referral marketing tactics can help you get more users to convert. To keep this strategy going, you need to offer the following incentives for existing users.
- Enable easy invite option through social media apps
- Offer schemes on every referral or discounts on in-app purchases
- Monetary reward or gift encourages the current users to provide valuable leads
Email Marketing
One of the best app marketing efforts is email marketing to gain valuable users. Email provides an environment for users to know more about the new features when they do not scroll through feeds on any social media platforms. As users start showing interest in your product, you can send them a series of emails to convert them into your customer. Tools like MailChimp help to educate and increase users.
Offline User Acquisition Strategy
While many businesses have transformed into innovative digital marketing, offline or traditional marketing should not be overlooked. TV, radio, and podcasts will help reach out to the users when they are not exposed to digital ads. This user acquisition strategy is the golden chance to skyrocket both installs and brand awareness.
While watching TV, viewers may stick to commercial ads if they are appealing and attractive. A TV campaign is an ideal way to capture the attention of the users and persuade them to download your app.
#Pro Tip:
An organic marketing channel takes time to succeed. Do not expect to write a blog post today and get hundreds of app downloads the very next day.
#Know This:
Target the potential users with mobile ads frequently during the two-hour visual to prompt more installs. Be strategic with targeting the audience as they are very selective about the content they watch or read.
Now that you have a list of strategies, let us give you information on how to create the best strategy for user acquisition.
6 Steps to Create User Acquisition Strategy
Follow these 6 steps to gain new customers and increase the revenue of your mobile app business.
Identify Your Ideal Customers
The first step towards mobile user acquisition is to understand your customer base. This includes studying the competitors and analyzing the industry market. Learning about your industry will give you ideal customers to set market goals. If you are not sure of which audience should you target, ask yourself these questions:
- What are customer issues?
- What would users accomplish with your service or product?
- What benefits do customers look for while buying a product?
- Where will your ideal customers find information?
As you grow, keep track of these questions to analyze customer behavior well and expand. These traits can help you in investing more and less in marketing tactics.
Define Your Goals
Now that you know your ideal customer, define your goals and objectives. Setting an end goal will make you think through a user acquisition plan. To meet the revenue goals, set a mobile user acquisition strategy that is accountable for customer churn and customer growth.
Measure customer acquisition metrics such as customer lifetime value, monthly recurring revenue, churn rate, and customer acquisition costs to create an effective user acquisition strategy that aligns with the business goals.
Choose Your User Acquisition Channels
Identifying your goals and target users is a great way to start with an effective user acquisition plan. But is that enough? Your next step should be to think about what mobile user acquisition channels to use based on your research.
A marketing channel is where customers meet your brand for the first time- whether through video ads, paid advertising, or user acquisition campaigns. Some of the popular effective user acquisition channels include
- Facebook Ad Campaigns
- SEO
- YouTube
- Referrals
Once you choose the best fit, look for app engagement strategies. This will help you gain more users and retain the old ones. If you want to know more about app engagement strategies, read our blog on how to increase app engagement.
Develop a Unique Strategy for Each Channel
You may want to get on with all the above channels to start with, but this can hinder the strategy. For example, you want to target an early 20s audience through Instagram. It wouldn’t be worth using all resources for Facebook and Google ads. Create a strategy for each channel that you want to use and focus on the below three things:
- What context your audience connects with?
- What are your competitors posting on those platforms?
- Collect data and use it to refine your strategy
Fetching these answers, you may realize that you need not have to use Facebook as most of your audience is Instagram. You can also use a video ad on YouTube for brand awareness.
Communicate With Your Customers
It is hard to find the gap during the customer acquisition process without customer feedback. To collect information and feedback, you need to send out emails, customer surveys, social media posts, and customer interviews to increase communication and build an excellent customer base.
Measure and Improve Your Strategy
Building a mobile app to run your business without a strategy is like driving a car with your eyes closed. If you are not aware of your customer preferences, user behavior, and how your paid media marketing is performing, you are driving toward failure.
Different apps that rely on different business models may set different KPIs to measure their app performance. One of the most commonly used KPIs is retention rate. It is an extremely useful KPI in the highly competitive app development market. Customer acquisition analytics will help you figure out:
- Platforms where customers will hear about you.
- Where they usually buy products.
- Customer whereabouts.
Ensure to follow these steps to grow your business more sustainably. Customer acquisition may be daunting and comes with a few challenges. Let’s find out.
3 Common Challenges to Acquiring New Users
Decreased ROI from Paid Traffic
Common challenge is the decrease in the paid traffic effort. If you only rely on PPC campaigns, or Google ads, to keep the customer acquisition process intact, the price of these ads will keep increasing. This means, if the price of ad campaigns is increasing, driving consistent traffic, the ROI will decrease.
Lowering Churn Rate
Customer acquisition and customer retention are opposite sides of the same coin. Great acquisition tactics will be set up to increase the retention rate. Similarly, retention will help you with the increase in user acquisition. You need to ensure that your sales and marketing team is aligned to stop the churn rate by implementing effective strategies.
Diversified Audience
To reach out to diversified users, you need to publish your ads on various platforms and app networks. You can significantly increase the number of users globally. But, it is most likely that your ads will have to be customized according to the user’s location, language, age, etc. This may consume time and money.
How is Mobile App User Acquisition Measured?
Being a business owner, you understand the importance of new users. But do you know how to measure the cost of acquiring new users? App store optimization or mobile ad networks are not the only way you calculate the cost. There are other metrics to consider that deal with the cost. That includes
Customer Acquisition Cost
CAC is the total cost of your sales and marketing activities divided by the number of customers during a specific period. Sales and marketing costs include commission paid to the sales team, and paid user acquisition activities. Compare your CAC with recurring revenue that new users bring to your company.
CAC = Sales costs + Marketing costs / Number of new customersCustomer Lifetime Value
This calculation is to understand how much you can expect from new users recurring revenue over the duration. The CLTV is calculated as:
CLTV = Average sale x Number of repeat sales x Average lifespan of the customer relationshipFor example, your company provides a service worth $10,000 per month. Your retention rate for each client is for five years. So the calculation of one client generates $600,000 over the life of the user relationship.
$10,000 x 12 Months x 5 years = $600,000
After calculating the CLTV, compare that with the CAC. Your CLTV should be much higher than CAC, nearly with a 3:1 ratio. If the calculation does not justify this ratio, you need to rethink the business user acquisition strategies and pricing.
Churn Rate
The third calculation you need to gauge the impact of your user acquisition strategies is the churn rate. In business, losing a few customers is beyond your control. Acquiring new users over retaining old customers might become expensive. There are two churn rate metrics that you would want to track.
Customer churn rate, which shows how good or bad the company is doing by retaining customers.
Churn Rate: Number of customers lost that month / Number of customers at the start of the monthRevenue churn rate is to evaluate the impact of customer churn.
Revenue Churn Rate = Amount of recurring revenue lost that month / Original amount of revenue for the monthHaving said this, you should focus on a high CLTV, low CAC, and a low churn rate.
Want to Create an App That Decreases the Churn Rate?
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After knowing all the possible marketing channels for user acquisition, have you decided which one to choose? Without wasting much of your time, below are 5 factors to consider while selecting the best marketing channel for your business.
5 Factors to Consider While Choosing the Right User Acquisition Channel
With thousands of marketing platforms, it becomes difficult to choose the right one for your business. So, how will you decide which marketing channel is the best to reach new users? Consider these factors while choosing app marketing channels.
Select Marketing Personas
Successful marketing starts with marketing personas. These are representatives of everyone in the market. Have one persona for each market segment you want to target. Identify your persona demographics and find out their challenges. Learn what social media platforms they usually use or what groups they participate in.
Sent Out a Survey
Do some research and prepare surveys. Send out to the potential users or mail the list of people who are a representative of your persona. Personal interviews are another way to gather information. Interacting with the users will help you dig deeper and ask more follow-up questions.
Narrow Down Your Options
Once you have targeted all the information from the users, you are ready to narrow down or rank potential channels. Based on your research and information, rank each marketing channel that may leave an impact on your business. For example, if you find maximum users scrolling over Instagram for hours, then marketing or advertising on Instagram is a favorable option.
Check the Scalability of the Channel
The scalable customer acquisition channels are SEO, online advertising, and sales. Customer acquisition channels can really push the business across the growth strategies and yield good returns. All the channels have their own advantages and costs. A startup would invest in one channel and eventually grow to other channels whereas more mature companies with more cash inflow already use all the scalable channels as per the current stage of the business.
Cost of Each Channel
After you have identified the scalable channels, it’s time to find out the costs of using these channels. How much time and resources you can spend behind each channel to optimize performance? For example, you need a substantial budget to invest in campaigns or need time to post content and implement an effective SEO strategy.
Make the final call based on the research and reliable data. With every launch, you will have to experiment to see what works best for your business. Make a call with what you have learned and think is more promising to increase the performance and users of your app.
Frequently Asked Questions About Mobile App User Acquisition
What is a user acquisition campaign?
The goal of a user acquisition campaign is to build potential users through scalable marketing activities. Unlike traditional strategies, most user acquisition approaches focus on using data-driven paid ad campaigns.
How do frequent app updates affect app user acquisition?
Frequent updates of your app on the app stores show that you are constantly making an effort to improve and deliver the best to your users. This helps to retain users and traffic. Frequent app updates affect better monetization and app store optimization.
What is the difference between user acquisition and app engagement?
User acquisition is about finding new users to use your mobile app or product. However, app engagement involves building a relationship with the customers to motivate them to use the product for a long time.
Create a High-Converting Mobile App User Acquisition Strategy
No matter what channel or strategy you use for acquiring new users, you always need to measure the acquisition model. There is no one-size-fit when it comes to creating a user acquisition strategy for mobile apps. You need to keep the experiment going.
Confused about how to hit the highest numbers of the target audience?
Space-O helps you with user-friendly mobile app development. You can also consult with our experts on how to increase the number of users and marketing tactics to reach your business goals.
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