Five trends transforming corporate app publishing

talkingnewmedia.com

Corporate apps are booming business. Companies are fast realizing the power of branded apps. Around 80% of businesses consider mobile app development a priority, with 40% aiming to develop 10 apps over the next three years and 25% expecting to develop 26-50.

In the wake of ad blockers, businesses look to branded apps to put their brand in front of customers in a more creative way. And, according to Manuel Ranchin, Director of Sales at Aquafadas, brand awareness through mobile apps is increasingly successful.

“20XV, the recent Rugby World Cup app from French broadcaster TF1, is a great example of a branded app aimed at advertising and customer engagement,” says Rachin. “It received over 60 thousand downloads and 120 thousand visits in just one month, with an impressive average of 8.21 minutes spent in the app.”

Corporate apps aren’t only about connecting with customers, they’re increasingly aimed at employee engagement too. Internal corporate apps are becoming the workplace norm.

But despite this rise in mobile business, companies are facing app development challenges.

According to studies by moBack, Inc, and Kinvey, the main challenges include difficulties sourcing technical skills, long development periods, ineffective technological infrastructure and inadequate tools.

“Many publishers complain of slow development times,” reveals Ranchin. “They feel frustrated by the inability to build and update apps quickly.”

Aquafadas responded to this with their new Next Gen app, a simple-to-use, cloud-based app development solution.

“With our Next Gen app, we’re giving the power back to marketers. The tool is so simple to use, they no longer need a team of developers to build their apps.”

More app development autonomy among marketing teams is essential. Companies are in critical need of easy-to-use, easy-to-access app development technology to reduce costs and raise productivity.

1. Cloud-based development tools

Approximately 63% of CIOs want to build apps in the cloud and 67% expect to increase their use of cloud technology over the next 12 months.

The benefit of cloud-based app development is huge. Teams can collaborate from any location, it facilitates real-time updates, can significantly reduce costs, and increases speed to market with faster testing and publishing.

2. Tools that don’t require developers

Many companies don’t have development teams at hand to build their marketing apps. What’s more, many in-house development teams are Windows trained with little experience in mobile development. This pushes many companies to outsource, often at high cost.

To give the power back to marketers, app development solution providers increasingly offer tools that require no development skills to use. This allows marketers to manage the whole project from start to end — leaving development teams free to work on more complex projects.

3. Simple-to-use tools for faster development

Many companies report a single app development time of 7 months to a year. This is a serious drain on company resources, especially if outsourced. Simple-to-use, cloud-based tools drastically cuts development time.

But simple shouldn’t mean less powerful. As with Aquafadas’ Next Gen App, online app development solutions must still offer a wide range of enhancements, flexibility and interactivity.

4. Built-in app marketing tools<

You can create the best ever app but if no one knows about it, it will languished unused in the app store.

Too many apps fail due to poor promotion. The best app development solutions on the market offer in-built marketing tools to help publishers promote their app after publication. Tools include in-app purchasing, push notifications and advanced analytics.

5. Instant content updates

With cloud-based app development solutions, companies no longer have to wait. They can update their app in real-time, straight from an online control panel like Aquafadas’ Cloud Connect.

Why Your Customers Are Uninstalling Your App [Infographic]

marketingprofs.com

You've spent time, energy, and money creating an app for your customers. But was all that work worth it? Here's a look at how long users keep apps and why they uninstall them.

The biggest reason (50.6%) consumers cite for uninstalling mobile apps is that the apps "took up too much storage," according to the following ITR infographic.

The second biggest reason is intrusive advertising (41%), followed by "kept freezing" (33.8%).

The biggest reason for uninstalling gaming apps is "didn't enjoy the game" (69.3%). As for uninstalling business apps, consumers' most cited reason was "found a better quality app" (28.4%).

To find out more about why consumers are uninstalling your apps and the biggest errors in app design, click or tap on the infographic.

The Looming Implosion Of Sales/Marketing Automation Apps

customerthink.com

The other day, I was sitting in the airport and had a few idle minutes.  For some reason, I started playing with my IPhone.  I started moving some of the apps around to make them easier to find, based on my utilization.  Business, Social Media, Conferencing,  and Travel on the first page. Mapping, “Yelp-like,” and my fitness apps on the second.  News, Reading, Entertainment, Music apps on the third.  Camera/Photo and miscellaneous apps on the fourth.

At some point I looked at the number of apps on my phone–215.  I was blown away.  I had no idea I had so many apps, I didn’t know how I accumulated them.  I started looking at them, slowly recalling, “This app had this one neat thing.”  “That app had another….”  Each of the apps had something that was attractive for a moment, I supposed I used the app a few times, but then forgot about it.

So I decided to reduce the apps on my phone.  Arbitrarily, I deleted all the apps I hadn’t used in the last 60 days.  I’ve gotten down to about 50.     In reality, I think I can get down to 30.  But there’s that fitness app I’ve been meaning to use when I travel–I’ll keep that a few others.

I’ve done the same thing with my IPad.  It’s interesting, the one’s I’m keeping on the IPad are very different than those I keep on the IPhone.

I think we are experiencing much of the same thing in the sales and marketing automation markets.

The sales and marketing automation markets are booming.  There are literally 1000’s of new apps being introduced every year.  The market is very crowded and confused with many, though useful, very “niched” or “nuanced” applications.

There are apps that enable sales or marketing people to do one specific thing very well and perhaps pass data to a common CRM or other app.  That thing is very important, so the app becomes very important.  After a while we find our organizations have dozens of specialized apps, each helping us do one or two things very well.

But, we sit back and start to take notice, how many are we really using, is everyone using them or just a few people, how do we keep people trained, how do we support the continued integration between these apps.

A new set of terminology has started creeping into the vocabularies of sale and marketing operations execs:  The Sales Stack and the Marketing Stack.  This is the complete set of applications being inflicted on sales and marketing people.  Each one, no doubt has some value to at least one person, otherwise it wouldn’t be in our “stacks.”

It’s not unusual to see a sales stack of $15K per year per person–or larger.  That’s $15K we are paying for apps for each sales person–not including all the services and support around them.  Using Salesforce’ SalesCloud as the “mothership” base application, a fully blown out version of Salesforce, at full retail, costs roughly $3K per year. This leaves another $12K for my prospecting, research, presentation, content, learning, expense, collaboration, messaging, proposal, account planning, call planning, reporting, analysis, and 1000’s of other apps.

As I talk to sales ops/enablement leaders, they struggle with getting people to use all of these apps.  Each is optimized to something different, each has a different user interface.  There are inevitable overlaps, particularly as the vendors try to grow their solutions, so which app do we use, when several enable us to do the same thing?

The business cases for each are becoming increasingly difficult to make on a standalone basis.  Or the justifications overlap, with each app claiming credit of the improvement, but none, on it’s own is justified.  Perhaps, in isolation, we understand the business case for each, but in the reality of how the organization uses the apps, much of the real justification seems to be disappearing.

I look at my own team.  We leverage as many tools as we can.  We’ve invested in a number of apps to support our work, we also have been fortunate to be granted some “free licenses” of a number of other apps.  We use all of them for a while, but over time, the patterns keep coming back to a small number of core–go to apps.

These core apps tend to be the platform or system of record apps.  Think of these as your base CRM or Marketing Automation systems.  A way of thinking about them is, “What are the apps that all the other apps integrate to?”

These core apps and the ones that we use everyday, 365 days a year, critical to the business.

More and more execs we speak with are questioning their tool strategies, focusing on the platforms and systems of record.  Of course there are also those that are struggling to get utilization, compliance, and value from some of these core systems.

On the vendor side, we are seeing interesting things, reflecting what both they and their customers are discovering about the sales and marketing stacks.

There’s a huge amount of consolidation.  The long term winners are those that offer a platform or a system of record.

Those vendors or those that are borderline are acquiring many of the other players to consolidate their platform strength.

Likewise, those applications that will never achieve platform or system of record status are consolidating, trying to become platforms or near platforms–all while still hundreds of other niche apps come to the market.

Private conversations with the exec teams of many of these SaaS based apps, show their concerns.  They are seeing declining retention/renewal rates.  This decline is not due to customer dissatisfaction with the products, but more due to the fact that not everyone needs the app or the app isn’t used everyday.

Inevitably, there will be huge fall out in the sales and marketing app world.

It’s also an opportunity for clever people to rethink their business models.  Why do we need to base our SaaS models on seat/user based monthly subscriptions?  What if we looked at models based on utilization?

Perhaps it’s not important to have everyone in the organization paying $20/month (or whatever your subscription is), but having those few people who really need the app paying $100/month?

What if we developed business models that look at how people actually use the product or the return they get, rather than flat monthly subscriptions?

Over the next few years, 1000’s of vendors will disappear, not because their products weren’t useful products, but because their business models aren’t aligned with how and who uses the products.  More will pop up in their place, only to disappear a few years later.

We tend to think the big winners will fall into two camps, those that are core platforms/systems of record, and those niche apps that have moved beyond the classical SaaS model and have discovered new business models, more aligned with actual utilization in organizations.

How to convince wary app users to share location data

bizreport.com

More than eight in ten app users say that location is a pivotal part of their app experience, yet a recent study by Skyhook Wireless found that nearly four in ten aren't keen to share their location. Find out how best to encourage app users to turn on location services.

by Helen Leggatt

Eighty-three percent of app users say that location is key to app experience yet 40% are hesitant to share such data and 18% turn off location services for all apps, according to a consumer study commissioned by Skyhook Wireless

The reason, among 50%, is down to concerns about privacy, while 23% don't see the value of location data and 19% worry turning on location services will drain their device's battery.

Surprisingly, even one-third of weather app users do not share their location despite such data allowing accurate information and forecasts. Social networking, photo and video apps (other popular app categories) were also found to have low adoption of location services - 38%, 18% and 16% respectively - revealing the potential to add value to these experiences by getting users to turn location services on, allowing for the automatic tagging of location in photos and videos, among other benefits.

According to Mike Schneider, VP of Marketing at Skyhook Wireless, once an app user turns off location services it's really hard to get them to turn it back on.

"As an example," says Schneider, "the way iOS asks now makes it easy for the user to select "no" because the notification screen is generic and gives no real information. It is more like the query of location data death."

To persuade app users to turn on location services, Schneider suggests that, during the first time user experience, users should be informed of what data is collected and what it is used for.

"Transparency coupled with paying off the use of the data with an insanely awesome experience tells them not only to keep location on, but to let it run in the background," explains Schneider in a blog post.

Furthermore, instead of asking for location permission at the time of download, Schneider suggests waiting until the user clicks on a feature that requires such data as well as segmenting any marketing communications into 'location = on' and 'location = off' so that users that have not turned on location services can be targeted separately with more emphasis on the benefits of doing so.

Skyhook Wireless' CEO Jim Crowley says their data suggests "that there's a huge and largely untapped opportunity to create value from location services that many app publishers and advertisers could be taking full advantage of. Ultimately, it's all about the payoff to consumers. Users need to be informed about the ways in which location services add meaningful value to their app experience, and educated about how their privacy is being managed - so that the critical benefits outweigh any attendant concerns."

How a Food-Ordering App Broke into a Crowded Market

hbr.org

It’s not easy to find companies that genuinely do things differently. But for the founders of the takeout-ordering app Eat24, doing things differently is what allowed them to build up their company into an attractive acquisition target – they recently completed a $134 million deal with Yelp.

The idea for the business came to Nadav Sharon, a former Israeli Navy cook living in San Francisco and managing a small family pizzeria, when he realized how much time he was wasting taking endless phone orders. In 2008, he gathered four other Israelis living in San Francisco to be his cofounders and they hired a coder in Ukraine through Craigslist and paid him to develop an ordering app.

Back then, GrubHub was already the leading online ordering app. When Eat24 tried to raise money, the founders were laughed at by angels and VC funds including Benchmark, Redpoint, Excel, Insight, and Alibaba. The founders were told the service would have no demand, they couldn’t be the ones to meet the demand, they didn’t understand technology, and the management team had no track record (the god of VC’s success philosophy).

It’s true that the founders weren’t technical experts, they had no previous startup experience, and GrubHub already had impressive marketshare. But Eat24 managed to bootstrap their app anyway. Here’s how.

1. Go after “undesirable” customers. Lacking funds but having lots of free time, they targeted customers who were hard to reach. This ensured two things: a) less competition from large firms and b) different activities required to serve customers. For Eat24, that meant small, local, family restaurants — not the big chains and franchises. They literally knocked on doors and offered a free website and ordering system to the clients. To make money, they charged only 10% off orders made via the app.

Eat24 also tailored their approach to these customers. For instance, at first, many small businesses were wary of online orders, so Eat24 got them free fax machines. Eat24 also didn’t send an invoice for their fee if the order was less than $10. If a small restaurant didn’t pay an invoice, Eat24 didn’t make a big deal of it. The startup also assumed the risk of mistakes made making an order or if a customer ordering via the system reneged on paying! To small restaurants with tight cash flow, these gestures meant the world. To a large franchise, they wouldn’t.

2. Go after “undesirable” media. Oddly enough, Eat24’s biggest break came when they left Google and Facebook as marketing platforms after advertising rates rose. Eat24 instead turned to … porn websites. The marketing expense was 90% cheaper than on Google, Facebook, and Twitter – after all, lots of companies don’t want to advertise on porn sites – but the exposure was 200% higher. Moreover, return customers were four times higher. And they were also reaching new customers — nine out of 10 visitors to Eat24 from the sites were new, and conversion rates blew Facebook away. As Nadav told an Israeli newspaper, “we just let the numbers talk.”

Of course, this makes sense: the audience on porn sites is young, male, more inclined to order food online. Eat24 also tailored their ads to the platform, making them humorous and provocative like a woman shown eating sushi provocatively. Mainstream media outlets began to cover the ads, and the company. Orders went up; and eventually, offers to buy them out started rolling in.

The real lesson here is basic. Don’t follow competitors. Grasp the big picture, assess honestly your position in it, and think one-to-two steps ahead. That’s the “secret” of successful strategies and the essence of competitive intelligence.

Three Future-Proof Tactics for Mobile App Marketers

marketingprofs.com

Once your mobile app is out in the wild, you begin to face limitations that make app distribution difficult.

Some of those limitations are rooted in the underlying structure of the world of mobile apps: Unlike the Web, where, inherently, content is linkable and websites are connected, mobile apps are usually gated behind the walls of their download pages in app stores and mobile content is hidden behind the apps' homepages.

Having interacted with the Internet for years, we often take for granted the discoverability of content, websites' interconnectivity, and our ability to update content on the fly. In the reality of mobile apps, those aren't out-of-the-box characteristics.

This article will give you practical advice on how to...

• Increase your app exposure on mobile search
• Make your app content more easily discoverable
• Avoid app resubmission to and approval from app stores for certain marketing-related changes

For some of these tactics you will need help from developers; others are purely marketing tools.

1. Use Mobile App Install Ads to increase app exposure and downloads

(Developer involvement not needed.)

Mobile App Install Ads are served to mobile users on Google Search and Display Networks, YouTube, and Google Play. Users are directed to the download page of the app in the store, and the call to action is to download the app.

These ads are quickly gaining popularity, helping marketers increase app exposure, on the right device, to an actively searching audience. Search volumes on mobile are quickly growing, and making your app visible to this audience of searchers is critical to your success. A recent announcement from Google AdWords is that mobile apps install ads are now also showing on Google Play.

You can set up your Mobile App Install Ad in a few quick steps. The ads are created though the Google AdWords interface, as with a regular ad campaign. You should select Mobile App Installs from Type in Settings, and then follow your Google AdWords strategy for targeting, biding, budget ,and scheduling. By default, the campaign will target tablets as well as smartphones, but you can adjust the bids for mobile devices to make it relevant to your app.

This is how your ad would look:

2. Use deep linking to make in-app content discoverable

(Developer involvement needed.)

To realize how important deep linking is to mobile apps, we must first acknowledge a major flaw in the mobile ecosystem. On the Web, hyperlinks can take users to a website homepage, to a specific page (e.g., About Us page) or a specific piece of content (e.g. ,video or an image). With links, you can immediately discover content on the Web.

That's not the case in a mobile app—not without putting additional effort to achieve linking.

The app user journey includes looking for the app on the app store, downloading it on the device, opening it, and then searching for specific content. Mobile apps are hidden behind the walls of the app stores and their homepages.

Let's say you are looking to promote your app to mobile users using the Google Mobile App Install Ads we discussed earlier, but you want to take it one step further and promote your summer sale instead of your app homepage. You can so via deep linking.

Mobile deep links use a document structure similar to that of the Web to create unique links for different app screens or items. Deep links help eliminate friction along your users journey: If you promote a discounted item to users who have your app already installed, the deep link sends them directly to the desired destination, just as if it were a Web page. To do that for non-users of your app, you need to use deferred deep linking, which is similar to deep linking and is offered by various vendors.

Overall, deep linking works best for re-engagement of your existing user base and makes in-app content more easily discoverable. Implementing deep links in your mobile app can be beneficial for your mobile ads, email nurture campaigns, and interconnectivity with other mobile apps or websites.

There is no established standard for deep linking, but in recent months both Apple and Google have emphasized the importance of deep linking:

• This year, at WWDC (Apple Worldwide Developers Conference), Apple launched a search API for iOS 9 based on deep linking which lets developers index and link their apps, making their content discoverable through the native search experience on iOS 9.
• Earlier this year, Google started showing both Android and iOS users relevant content from apps they have installed on their phones and tablets.
• A number of third-party vendors are offering more advanced solutions, such as deep links analytics, deferred deep links, retargeting frameworks, and more.

3. Use Google Tag Manager to avoid republishing your app after every single change

(Developer involvement needed.)

Mobile app content is all but frozen once it is installed on the user's device, unless the user updates to the app's latest version. Every change needs to be synchronized with the app release cycle and then be resubmitted to the store.

The Google Tag Manager (GTM) for mobile apps can save time and effort both for developers and for marketers, making it possible to push certain app updates yet avoiding app store resubmission. GTM helps abstract certain pieces of code from the app codebase, allowing you to edit certain content blocks and tracking codes on the fly through the GTM interface. The changes are applied immediately to the app, without having to resubmit it for approval to the store.

This article, "A Guide to Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps," walks you through the steps needed to implement the GTM in your mobile app; it's a good starting point for your developer colleagues.

Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2015/28929/three-future-proof-tactics-for-mobile-app-marketers#ixzz3tAmbAfO5

How Marketers Can Personalize at Scale

hbr.org

Marketing has entered its “uncanny valley” moment. That term was first used to describe the deep unease people feel when a robot or computer-generated human facsimile nearly succeeds in passing itself off as the real deal. It may walk like a person and talk like a person, but without the nuance, context, and tone that make for real engagement, what’s left rings false. And that’s off-putting.

Some marketing efforts give off the same vibe, like that creepy feeling when a casual online search leads to a glut of ads for the same pair of boots or getaway destination. While this type of engagement represents a step forward in personalizing experiences with customers, clumsy efforts at retargeting often feel intrusive and annoying.

It’s worth trying to get right. We know that personalization can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend, and can lift sales by 10% or more. Although the marketing industry has been promising personalization at scale for the past 20 years, expecting a machine to generate the perfect personalized experience is a fool’s errand. Rather, we’ve found the best way to achieve meaningful personalization is by systematically testing ideas with real customers, then rapidly iterating. Until recently, however, the tools and capabilities to execute this operation—delivering truly relevant personalized offers and content to millions of customers and prospects, across channels, content formats and touchpoints–have not existed.

That’s finally changing. Marketing technology, automation, and advanced analytics techniques have now reached the level where effective personalization at scale is possible. And yet getting this “test and learn” engine to run properly requires a fundamental re-architecting of a company’s marketing analytics processes. The goal is to create a learning ecosystem, one that connects insights to outcomes as part of a continuous, self-improving cycle.

Integrating the Three D’s

This requires the integration of three things: data discovery, automated decision making, and content distribution.

Data discovery is about sourcing and combining traditional and behavioral data to uncover meaningful insights about customers (such as their preferences, interests, and needs.). Not that this is easily done. Given the complexity of coaxing meaning from a wide range of data, companies tend to limit the data they use, generally focusing on the data that’s easiest to get. In addition, traditional CRM systems, built on more rigid, relational databases, often don’t have the flexibility or scalability to manage vast piles of structured and unstructured data. What companies need are systems that can run the advanced analytics to discover useful and practical insights, and then trigger the sending of appropriate messaging, e.g., if customer “A” does action “B,” send item “C.”

An emerging answer to this issue is the customer data platform (CDP), which is the modern version of a customer data warehouse—though one that is far more flexible and interconnected. CDPs integrate first-party data, including customer-supplied data and purchase history, website or app behavior, and marketing response and engagement information, with third-party data on customer interests and shopping behavior, to improve individual targeting.

The brains that drive automated decision making are the advanced analytics models that produce propensity scores for each customer or prospect. These scores define the probability of an individual responding to a specific offer, or engaging with specific content. Whereas standard data models can only pump out messages or offers, modern automated decision-making processes allow two-way communication—collecting and tracking customer reactions and using that information to guide future messaging and offers. More complex decision-making rules, exceptions, or unacceptable variances can be programmed to be escalated to managers (although these exceptions should be less than five percent of all decisions).

The last mile of personalization is content distribution. A good system will use customer and prospect scores to trigger personalized ads and landing pages, and to distribute specific content, offers, or experiences across channels. For example, a telco could personalize the bundle offered to anonymous website visitors based on the type of car they drive, their city, and the stores they frequent. Similarly, an airline can set rules to help automate decisions on the lowest cost offer for a ticket and predict which types of customers will respond to the offer over email, a display ad, or within the mobile app.

For these three “Ds” to operate successfully, companies need to integrate their technology systems, often through APIs, to allow data to flow where it’s needed and decisions to happen in real-time. Doing so allows much of this cycle to learn and adapt in real time, automatically. A series of virtual “pipes” feed response data from customer interactions into the CDP to develop better statistical and event-based models (e.g., response rates based on an event and context). Predictive marketing analytics then make recommendations on which actions drive the highest conversion rates.

Companies that succeed in integrating and automating their customer and marketing data platforms can test, track, refine and optimize themselves in real-time—ensuring that the right offer goes to the right customer or the best leads get routed to the best salespeople. This allows brands to shape their customers’ decision journeys, deepen their relationships, and gain a distinct competitive advantage.

Providing the Right Functional Support

Of course, it’s not enough to gather insights, even at a massive scale.  The organization has to be able to act smartly on those insights. Addressing that problem requires changing how things are done, particularly in the following four areas:

1. A coordinated strategy. Marketers need to determine where they’re going to play and how they’re going to apply technology to engage consumers. That means defining specific use cases, coming up with schemas, taxonomies, and then orchestrating the right internal and external resources (e.g., agency and technology partners) to manage the process. In many organizations, these responsibilities exist loosely through disparate activities, but they need to be coordinated and managed as a cohesive function to put insight into action at scale.
2. Experienced campaign management teams. While automation implies that you can sit back and let the system run itself, there is no autopilot. It takes experienced marketers to set up, deploy, and manage always-on campaigns. Organizations can run systems internally with a dedicated team or enlist their agency to support them—provided they still appoint an experienced individual to liaise with those agencies.
3.  A sustained commitment to analytics. Data and analytics are the backbone of personalization at scale, but an IT-only project won’t work. Senior leadership commitment and cross-functional involvement are required to support the infrastructure and continuously update the data and advanced analytics models that fuel the decision-making engine. Leaders need to continually test business use cases and adjust the data and tech infrastructure, managing these integrated elements in the way one would a “live entity,” one that is dynamic, fluid and ever-evolving. Because the marketing technology ecosystem evolves quickly, systems need to be flexible so that technologies can be swapped out when necessary.
4. A lot of very good content. Content fuels personalization — and someone needs to develop and organize it. You don’t want your “robots” to guide people to stale, irrelevant, or low-quality content. This puts a significant onus on developing a strong content “supply chain” fed by designers, copywriters, animators, and videographers. All content attributes can and should be tested regularly—to refine the look and feel and tone, calls to action, and the value proposition.

Getting to the other side of the “uncanny valley” takes commitment and discipline. But it may be the best option for companies that want to personalize at scale and accelerate their growth in the digital world