Congratulations! You’ve built a mobile app. You truly love your apps icon, and design, and it works flawlessly on all the devices which you tested it on. There’s only one problem: your app is not being downloaded.
If this is the case, then you’re encountering the same problem that many companies encounter after their apps have been published.
Don’t be discouraged – if you want the whole world to use your app – you can make this happen.
A quick Google search proves that I’m not the only person talking about how to increase app downloads. There’s a lot of good advice already out there, but none of it is talking about what I’m going to discuss (spoiler-alert: it’s something that Purple does, and something we do really well).
So rather than cover old ground (I’ve added some of this towards the end of the blog for reference), I’ll skip what you already know and tell you something that you probably don’t.
Now call me a traditionalist (“you’re a traditionalist, Dean”), but the people that are most likely to download your app are the people that are visiting your venues (assuming you have venues, if you don’t, you can probably leave).
And the time that they’re most engaged with you and your brand, is when they’re in your venue.
Let’s quickly summarize those last three points about people in your venue:
- Your target market
- Engaged with your brand
- Ideal time to get maximum value from your app
Holy cow! You’ve got three of the Infinity Stones, and you’re close to the ‘Sn-app’.
But how do you currently market to this group of people, at this perfect moment?
Have you got a little logo near your POS?
Have you got it on the receipt, which will soon be doomed to the bottom of a bag or purse?
Are you encouraging your staff to encourage your customers to download?
If you want to accelerate your app downloads at this perfect moment, use your guest WiFi. I’ll go in to the how in a second, but let’s start with the why. And we’ll do it again by looking at those three categories.
- Your target market
I’m going to guess that you’re already doing everything you can to get all of your marketing messages in front of the most relevant people to improve conversion rates and drive down costs. It pays to speak to your target market as much as possible.
It just got easy – they just walked through your door. Hallelujah!
- Engaged with your brand
Second guess of the blog. You’re already working on buyer intent and optimizing around this. Definitely the right thing to be doing. Hit people with your best marketing when they’re thinking about buying.
Someone just walked through your door. They’re thinking about buying.
- Ideal time to get maximum value from your app
If your app is designed to improve the in-venue experience, then the moment of truth for them downloading or using your app is when they’re in the venue.
They’re in the venue. It’s now or never.
Using your WiFi to increase app downloads
When someone enters your venue and logs on to your guest WiFi, they give you three opportunities to be able to market your app to them – encouraging them to download or reminding them to use it.
- Sign in screen
This is prime real estate. As well as the login options, you can have a nice advert for your app and a link to your download page. Imagine: “The cell signal in here is horrendous, need to get on the WiFi. Oooo, I didn’t know they had an app.”
And you can also throw in a cheeky offer to seal the deal.
- Landing page
Ok, they’ve logged on to the WiFi, but they might not have noticed the flashing “Download our app” message. Once they’re on the WiFi, you can make sure that the next page they see is a page about your app and your 10% reduction offer.
- Email details
If your customer doesn’t download your app there and then, don’t worry. You live to fight another day. When they logged on to the WiFi, you captured their contact details, and if they logged in through social you know even more about them. You can now get on the front foot and try and influence them to download the app later.
When I talk to customers about this, I often get asked the same question – what if they don’t log on to the WiFi?
To which there are 2 answers:
- Even if we take a conservative estimate of 15% of visitors logging on (and we see much bigger conversions than this), then you’ll be getting a much higher conversion rate than you’re seeing on your website.
- What if they do log on? Do you want them to have a substandard, off-brand experience? And do you want to waste that opportunity to market to them?
Let’s work through an example from a genuine Purple customer:
Customer A has had Purple for the past 12 months. In that time, they’ve had 3.5 million logins to the WiFi. That means that when these logins occurred, they had 7 million opportunities to drive their app downloads. While the customer was sat in their venue.
How much would you pay to be able to market to your customers at the point they were most engaged?
Of the 3.5 million logins, 2.2 million were unique (some of the people came to the venue multiple times), of which 1.2 million were contacts they did not already have in their CRM.
That’s 1.2 million new people they can market to over email – whether that’s their app, or their loyalty scheme or something else. 1.2 million CRM records that they didn’t have to buy.
How much do you pay for a lead? Now consider if you could turn 15% of the people that enter your door in to a lead; you can start to understand the level of data you could be capturing.
How else can I increase my business app downloads?
As well as using Purple, there are other ways to get your app in to the hands of the masses, particularly through Application Store Optimization (ASO).
ASO has a much bigger impact on your software listing than ASO does for Google’s search results page. The greater its position, the more people will be able to discover your app when doing a search.
After your app has been discovered by a user, ASO can help determine if the individual will download your app. Your ASO is influenced by a number of different factors:
– Favorable reviews: A mobile app with more favorable reviews should have a higher rating. When an app is rated highly by users, it’ll be ranked extremely highly too, which will in turn raise the number of downloads the app gets. And think of all the data you’ve just picked up from your WiFi to prompt people to review via email.
– App downloads: The higher the number of downloads your app gets, the more it’ll receive. To rank tremendously, the objective of a published app should be to acquire steady amounts of downloads. We’ve already covered how Purple can help you on this front.
– Keyword relevance: Applications which get popular keywords in the description and title will get more downloads.
– Revenue: Applications that have a very good revenue generation record will receive more visibility in that the application store. If you’re pushing people to your app at the best possible moment (when they’re in venue), they’re more likely to generate revenue.
– Country: Your rank for a region could be influenced by regional success. Using Purple’s automatic translations, you’ll be giving regional success the best possible chance.
– Backlinks: Your application rankings can be improved if your backlinks point to numerous relevant pages.
– App starts: How often your app is in fact opened by users can affect your ranking significantly. Remember, you can remind people to use your app when they’re logging in to the WiFi.
– Retention: Your rankings can be impacted by how many individuals keep your app for one month vs. how many uninstall it.
What all of this tells me is that improving the number of app downloads you get is not an exact science. However, if you’re able to present your customer with the opportunity to download your app when they’re in venue (when they are most engaged), as well as having the data to consistently reinforce the message via email or SMS, you’ll have a much better chance.