Thursday, November 10, 2016

Top Tips To Ready Your App This Christmas Season

Well, it’s gonna be Appy Christmas, very soon.

And, be assured, Father Christmas is soon going to load his goody bags with a million Christmassy apps this season.  And, yes, of course, I already see those brand-new, sleek iPhones, precariously dangling at the rims. This isn’t any figment of my wild imagination. Going by last year’s incredible app install rates, which was 2.2 times more on December 25, 2015, than on any average day in December, it’s for anybody guess what Santa’s Christmas offerings would be.

So, wish that your app makes its way into Santa’s goody bag?

Easy. Just wade through these tips and you’d know things aren’t that difficult as they appear to be.

 

1.  Christmassy Title and Description

Ah, yes! Turns out not just the app design part, even the title and description part should exude a perfect Christmassy feel, much less the app icon.

If anything, add jargon like “Great Christmas Sale, Christmas Specials, and so on in good measure in the app descriptions, specifically if you own a retail app. In other words, make sure the title and description are app store optimized with proper regard to keywords.

This would, to say the least, send out festive feelers to the users, prompting them to download the app and encourage them to rush for the deals.

Also, add new screenshots and a video capturing the app experience, which could further nudge the users to download your app.

 

2. Look Beyond Stars And Snowflakes For Your In-App Messages 

For once, you thought your title and description part will do all the work for you. Nope! Even your in-app messages should be up to speed. Embellishing every inch of your in-app message with snowflakes, Santa, stars, presents, bells, angels, etc! etc! won’t help either. You also need to personalize it as per the profile data. In other words, your in-app messages should be in keeping with user attributes such as age, location, gender, customer type and more.

According to Localytics, a personalized in-app message campaign attracts 3X higher conversion than just a generic campaign.

Yes, there’s loads of work at hand! So get going!

 

3. Roll Out Christmas Campaign To Rake In More Positive Reviews

Well, according to the National Retail Federation, almost 20 to 40 percent of yearly sales happen during the last two months, specifically for small and mid-sized retailers. So launching a holiday campaign or a Christmas campaign before Halloween (October 31st) makes more sense than any other time of the year. The idea is to accumulate as many positive reviews as possible, which in turn, could help your app climb up in rankings, in the app stores. You could even corner a particular set of highly engaged users and coerce them (as in, encourage them) to review your app through the campaign.

Why? Are app reviews that significant to app downloads?

Yes. Positive reviews help your app to rank higher in the app stores, thereby increasing the chances of download. According to Appetentive survey, 59% of users check ratings before downloading an app, of which 96% of users are likely to download only an app with 4-star ratings.

 

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4. Rope In Translators For A Dash Of Localization

Game sessions during the holidays are exceptionally high all over the world (source: Chartboost). However, it’s inordinately high in North America, Eastern Europe, and Ireland. So, it pays, to pay some extra attention to these regions when you are developing a holiday campaign.  Consider themes such as snowflakes and other wintry stuff because all these regions witness heavy snowfalls during the Christmas season.

But then again, think of countries like Brazil.  It would be sunny and bright out there. So, you could be making a fool of yourself, by using a wintery theme, rather than focussing on sun, sand and the sea.

The best way out is to rope in a translator for content advice for the regions you aren’t familiar with, specifically for China, Japan, South Korea, India and other popular gaming markets.

 

5.  Optimize For Phablets – It’s Pretty Much In

Gone are the days when phones were particularly used for making calls.  Now, thanks to the proliferation of apps, phones are also used for messaging, navigation, gaming, social networking and more.  So optimizing for a larger screen size helps.

According to Flurrymobile: Pha-La-La: A Real Phabulous Holiday, more and more consumers are moving toward the large screen phablets and it appears consumers are opting for phablets- not instead of a tablet, but instead of a smaller-sized phone.  Users are turning their backs to medium phones and small tablets and opting in for sizes that’s in between the iPhone and iPad Mini – that’s where Phablets come into the picture.

 

6.  Leverage iOS 10 Features  To Lend A New Feel To Your App

Thanks to the recent launch of iOS 10, your app could prove lucky for you this season, if you could just go ahead and load it with some cool new features. This could generate word of mouth for your app because it’s said that users generally love to show off their new apps to friends, specifically if it has got some cool new features embedded. And, in case, you are all fingers and thumbs regarding your app’s adaptability quotient on the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 plus, then that’s something that you need to take care about, asap.

Most important of all, if you own a retail app, get the mobile payment option figured out. With Apple Pay in the news so much, it’s more important now than ever to ensure your app offers Apple Pay and Google Wallet features as well, not to mention one-touch checkouts.

 

7.  Run With Ad Networks To Draw In Quality Users

Your app install rates may climb up and all during holidays. But then, it’s of no use if the users aren’t showing much interest the in-app purchases.

So, try and nail down the networks that you had a good experience working with, previously and run along with them.  For your information, for ecommerce and travel apps, ad networks such as Google Adwords, Twitter, Facebook and AppLovin are good to work with.

So, do any of these ideas sound cool to you? Yes! Then you don’t have a minute to spare. Because the app stores might plan a break between Dec 22 to Dec 29.  So, all your releases and updates have to be submitted, approved and scheduled beforehand.  So, get going. Submit changes ASAP.

 

Over to You

Any other tips that could prove useful to the app developers this Christmas season?  Go on! Share them here!

The post Top Tips To Ready Your App This Christmas Season appeared first on GetResponse Blog - Online Marketing Tips.

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