In an increasingly mobile world, the one thing that never leaves your sight is your smartphone. Mobile phone apps are being used now more than ever before, as our world shifts nearer to a virtual world and less of the physical.

Traditionally, apps were built to serve a purpose such as allowing interactions on social media, or helping you keep track of your to-do lists. Now, mobile apps have turned into a medium of advertising, as more and more people switch towards online interactions. People no longer want to call up a restaurant to place an order – they want an app for it. And this is where in-app marketing and advertising can give brands an edge.

Why In-app Marketing?

In-app marketing uses consumer specific data for a tailor-made mobile app experience. In-app marketing uses Data Management Platforms that collect information such as the location, phone usage, preferences and more, to target the consumer right where they click.

This means a more targeted advertising plan with regard to the consumer and the product or service. In turn, this means a better ROI, because In-app marketing directly communicates with the consumer. Bombarding your customers with content that is irrelevant to them will be taken as spam.

New features and opportunities are personalized to the consumer’s specific tastes and preferences. This, in turn, means marketing effort is placed on the avenue that will provide the most returns.

Here’s how you can make in-app marketing work for your brand.

1. Focus on Specific KPIs

Focusing on KPIs specific to app marketing, including app store rankings, organic and loyal user acquisition, cost-per-download, cost-per-action, and app store optimization, will allow you to pay for what really matters – active and paying consumers.

For example, Food apps such as Foodpanda want you to do more than just look through a few restaurants and exit the app. They want you to place orders and deliveries from their favorite restaurants through the app.

This eliminates the need to pay for many users who are not active as well as the need to constantly monitor and analyze campaigns. You will only pay to advertise to consumers who are already buying from your brand.

2. Segmentation

Segmentation, or breaking down the audience into targeted groups based on a commonality can help brands reach a higher ROI and increase profitability. Segments can be divided based on location, demographics and behavior.

• This segment can be based on geographic location (offers for a specific geographic location), proximity (to brand stores) or local offers (available only in a certain area)
• This segment can be based on logging patterns, usage session, most visited sites and pages. This allows marketers to employ more specific ads and find out what the consumer really wants.
• This segment is based on the male and female genders and specific products for each gender. Thus, it allows a more tailor-made app experience.

3. A/B testing

Testing to make sure that your in-app campaigns provide the best user experience is an integral part of in-app marketing. According to a recent study by Localytics, 23 percent of users stopped using an app after one use, due to a slow onboarding process, difficulty in usage and too many irrelevant pop-ups

Therefore, every aspect of the in-app campaign should be tested to make sure what works for your brand. Several tools such as Swrve, MoEngage, SplitMetrics and appboy are available to facilitate the marketer in the process of analyzing what works best, which campaigns are successful and what needs to be tweaked, in order to deliver the best user experience.

“A/B split testing is no longer an option for digital marketing professionals. It’s a necessary stage that each of your campaigns must pass through in order to boost your conversion rate and maintain your customers,” says Neil Patel.

4. Addition of Deep Links

Deep linking means using a uniform resource identifier (URI) which links the user to a specific location inside the mobile app, instead of simply initiating the mobile application.

This means that consumers are guaranteed to be redirected to pages about the products they prefer. Adding deeps links can help marketers confirm the success of their in-app marketing tactics.

When consumers access specific locations on the Internet that have more information on the product they prefer, they are more likely to end up investing in the product or the service.

5. Auto-Event Collection

Consumer usage sessions and page view data allows marketers to figure out exactly what their audience wants. With this information, marketers rank the users who show preference to specific kind of events, which can lead to custom event tagging of users. By keeping the users updated on their event preferences, marketers will be able to increase their conversions as a result.

Conclusion

The biggest challenge in the smartphone age is that consumers uninstall some apps after a single use. How can a marketer use in-app mobile marketing to increase engagement and decrease uninstalls? Here’s how:

• Interactive onboarding process can retain user engagement. If, for instance, you create a mobile fashion app, how do you lure users to buy your products? By getting your users hooked on the very first tap. For example, Tumblr employs a walkthrough onboarding process. Popular fashion games such as Kim Kardashian’s Hollywood and Taylor Swift’s The Swift Life also use the tutorial style onboarding process. Ideally, you want your user to be familiarized with the app as soon as possible. Defining important objectives will help you develop successful user engagement.
• Terminate poor performing sources of app installation. Measure your sources so as to deliver high-quality installs. When the onboarding process is all set, the next step is retention. Make app user’s retention your major worry.
• Finally, master the patterns in user’s uninstallation behavior. Study your user app uninstallation behavior and identify viable ways to stop this from repeating itself.

If you can successfully identify and address the issues that make consumers uninstall mobile In-apps, then your retention rates should be high.

Check out some more ideas on how to use in-app marketing to your brand’s benefit here.

Author Bio:

Ashley Rosa is a freelance writer and blogger. As writing is her passion that why she loves to write articles related to the latest trends in technology and sometimes on health-tech as well.  She is crazy about chocolates. You can find her at twitter: @Ashrosa2