David K.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David K.

David Kanika | Founder at App Marketing Minds

App stories: Ping Pong Fury

We are starting our new series of App Stories! App Stories is a section within our App Marketing Minds blog where we interview an app developer about their creation.

 

Today’s story is from Uzair, who developed a free game for Andriod users, based on simulating the game of balancing a ping pong ball on a table tennis racket.

 

Can you tell us about your app?

Ping pong fury is an addictive game for android users. Remember the days where you would hold your table tennis racket and would try to balance the ping pong ball for as long as possible? Now you can have that fun right on your Android phone.

Ping Pong fury is a balancing game in which you hold onto your racket with steadiness trying not to drop the ball. The user has to collect gems to earn points. On collection of every 10 gems, boost mode gets activated and then the users will really have to put their skills to test. The boost mode stays active for as long as the user doesn’t collect another gem.

It’s challenging with some cool music in the background, so it’s quite fun to play. A lot of our users are able to play Ping Pong Fury for hours! It’s a game for all age groups, so anyone can test their skills.

What is the story behind Ping Pong Fury?

The idea behind the app came from my childhood memories when me and my friends use to play Ping Pong all the time. We would challenge each other to see who can hold the ping pong ball for longest on the racket. While one person would try to hold the ball steady on the racket, other friends always tried to distract him so that he could drop the ball sooner. So I thought why not relive your memory? But this time instead of using the racket, let’s make use of our smartphones. Hence, I decided to develop this game.

Another motivation behind the game was for me to learn something new, so I decided to go for game development. I choose Unity as a platform on which to develop my game. It was a completely new experience for me. The biggest challenge that I encounter during the development phase was to have good graphics for my game. As I was a developer and had little experience in graphic designing it was the hardest task. I couldn’t hire a designer because of my low budget, so I gave it a shot myself. I design the graphics using Photoshop tool and by doing so I also got to learn some interesting features of the tool. It took me around 3 months to develop the game.

By that time I was a student and hence had very limited finance available to do the marketing for the app. I was however, able to persuade my friends and family to spread the word about the game to their network, and to download it and give it some reviews. Using this strategy I manage to improve my game standing on the search listings. I still need to work on my marketing strategy to further penetrate the market to get more user downloads and generate some revenue out of ads.

Overall, it was a great learning experience for me and I felt proud of doing it.

 

You can download Ping Pong Fury for free here:

DOWNLOAD

 

Want to get your App Story published?

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A complete guide to collecting and marketing your online reviews

A brief reminder why online reviews matter, wellto everyone

 

Imagine this for a second. Your audience is growing day by day without much effort from your side. In fact, your new customers are happily throwing money at you! Why?

 

They did some research and came to a conclusion that your business is the best place for spending their money for what they need. What’s even better, is that other people told them, and not you. Your customers basically did the marketing for you.

 

I know this sounds a little exaggerated and I hear you say ‘impossible!’. It’s not that easy I admit. But the good news is that this can happen and it certainly is happening to many businesses around you. One thing these successful companies have in common is the decision to take control of their online reputation. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is through reviews.

 

The fact is that reviews have never been more important. If you thought that referrals or any other techniques for growing your business reputation and sales is enough, you are wrong And I’ll show you why.

 

online reputation

 

 

As you see, the ecommerce market is not big, it’s huge.

Given the trend, we can expect another massive increase in worldwide ecommerce spending.

 

Considering the sheer amount of businesses falling to the ecommerce market, and also those who don’t sell but advertise their products online, you are up against millions of stores.

So that’s the competition. Now, let’s consider some quick facts and figures about reviews. Depending on your stand on reviews, you can see the following information as an opportunity or as something very troubling.

 

Firstly, 65% of shoppers go to review platforms before purchase, and 90% of people trust online reviews just as much as word-of-mouth recommendations.

 

Therefore a considerable amount of potential customers will trust what they see online. Now the good news.

 

92% of businesses say reviews help them to convince customers to trust them and 94% business owners say reviews helped them to convert more visitors to customers. What the latter data suggests, is that the polled customers actually act on their beliefs. Online reviews do influence customer behaviour in a major way. Hence, it’s important to collect and market good reviews and limit negative reviews…on repeat.

 

Quantifying ‘good reviews’ with purchasing, 80% of consumers would try a business that had a rating of 4 stars or more. Additionally, the well-known Harvard Business School study showed that only one star increase in Yelp rating resulted in 5-9% increase in revenue.

 

To sum up, the evidence above clearly shows that there is and will be an increase in online shopping and that people place more and more importance on online reviews. Lastly, not only do customers say they value reviews, businesses also manage to convert more prospects into customers because of them.

 

1. Learn how to collect reviews from different sources

 

Claim your listings first

Before we begin, it’s important that you are set-up on all major and niche-specific platforms. If not, you should do it as soon as possible. Claiming listing is a major aspect of an online reputation strategy and subsequent collection of online reviews. If you are not sure what the niche sites are, have a look at your customer avatar and determine where they look before buying. Do you know where they venture online? Secondly, just perform simple Google search for ‘your industry’ + ‘reviews’. You should soon realize what those sites are. Next, ensure you set-up a listing on all major platforms. There is an abundance of lists online that include majority of them – again, a simple Google search will be enough. Lastly, you can also search for your competitors’ reviews and set-up listings on platforms they are.

 

Collecting reviews

Many businesses struggle with this point. How to encourage customer engagement without boring or annoying them?

 

Deciding on the right medium will be specific to your business, customers, and industry. All 3 aspects should be aligned to maximize conversion rates (for leaving a review), and eventually to serve its purpose, i.e. being marketable, discoverable, attracting more customer and driving conversions (sales).

 

You can engage in ‘active’ gathering, where you include a clear call to action You simply ask or tell  your customers to leave a review. On the other hand, more covert and ‘passive’ way can be achieved through the design of your online and offline assets. Lead your customers to the desired action through their experience with the brand.

Here are the major sources and ways for collecting reviews.

 

  1. Over the phone

Perhaps a less common way of collecting reviews, however, some high touch or price products or services can find this approach useful.

Collecting reviews this way may happen spontaneously, for instance during an update call with a client. You can alternatively ask if their input can be used for marketing purposes (preferably if they have something positive to say).

 

Another way is an invitation for a phone call with this purpose in mind, inviting them for a product or experience interview.

 

  1. Via email

You can do the following and send:

  • Automated emails directly after purchase
  • Automated ‘drip campaigns’ – here you send a sequence of emails asking for feedback
  • One-off email to your list
  • Personal email to your most engaged customers
  • Include badge in emails signatures, such as ‘you can find us on Yelp’, or just use a hyperlinked logo of a review site pointing there
  • Via customer service correspondence

 

  1. On your website
  • Review page displaying all reviews can prompt new customers to leave their feedback
  • Include a badge on your website
  • Include a ‘review us’ type of button

 

  1. On other websites or platforms
  • General or local directories such as Yelp, Booking.com, Angie’s list
  • Sector specific directories, such as bestplumber.com for contractors
  • Through interaction with your audience on social media

 

  1. Video

Various ways will allow you to capture video testimonials or reviews

  • Customers do it: customers can do it themselves using camera, webcam, phone, skype
  • You do it: ideally, if they are in your geographical proximity, you can visit the client at their premises and record them
  • 3rd party providers such as boast.io
  1. Voicemail

Collecting voice mails as testimonials or reviews can be done similarly to how many businesses encourage customer engagement and feedback. For instance, Chris Lema ditched the chat support for voicemail on his homepage.

 

  1. Offline
  • Include CTA on offline products, or branding material
  • QR codes – sure, this is not a fully offline strategy because the actual feedback is received online… But QR codes are a great tool for driving offline traffic to desired online destination
  • Focus groups
  • Offline feedback forms – in many customer-facing industries such as in the culinary or hospitality industries, the majority of the great comments are told in real life in the premises. Many businesses are unfortunately unable to capture these and capitalize on them. One great way to fix this issue are feedback form. A ‘form’ does not need to be a large A4 page, but simply a small card with questions and a room for own comments. Don’t forget to also collect their personal details. These customers are not only happy with your business, but they also spend their time to give you feedback. Utilize this engagement and provide them extra free value.

 

  • Stickers – similarly to badges that you can add to emails or websites, these marketing assets can be displayed on:

 

  • Doors
  • Cars
  • Business cards
  • Stationary for customer
  • Gifts for customers
  • Menus

*

Whether you ask directly or if you generate customer engagement another way, both ways are effective. However, both approaches have different problems associated with their execution.

It’s preferable to create a culture where customers feel positively about your products, and where they enthusiastic to leave feedback. How to achieve this? Always over-deliver on the value you promised. Always. Once this is established, encouragement with clear call-to-action is optimal.

Human psychology is powerful, and a concept called altruistic reciprocity will entice customers who received more than expected to give you something in return. This can be their contact information, money, or a good review.

 

2. Learn how to market your good reviews

 

As we enter the next major section of this article, it’s important to note that the amount of customer reviews tends to be important. But in some cases, businesses with fewer reviews outperform those with many.

 

Why?

The successful brands know how to let their prospects know about their reputation. So let’s consider how we can market reviews to your relevant audience. These are the ways to do it:

 

Social media

What social media to include? Well, all those on which you have a presence. Your social media followers like your brand, or the content you share. Its important to deliver value, but also to show how valuable you are. You might not be active on all social media, but from the pure Online Reputation standpoint, the majority of well-known social media platforms should be claimed and covered. Social media just like other online channels are also a good way of turning regular feedback into online reviews. The major platforms that should be covered for marketing reviews are:

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin

Instagram

 

In this case, automation is absolutely crucial for efficiency, especially if you experience a high volume of feedback. Prioritize social media channels that drive the best ROI from your marketing.

 

Newsletter

Newsletters are another great way for keeping your current customers engaged. This way, you can demonstrate value and confirm to them that they made a good decision by becoming your customer. Good reviews in newsletters can contribute to higher customer retention and smaller buyer’s remorse.

 

There is no point in sending reviews one-by-one. Preferably, compile them from a certain time frame and include them in a monthly newsletter with your other business updates. Use the positive feedback to support your customer retention strategy and to complement your newsletter content.

 

Press releases

Add data from your review campaign into press releases. In some cases you can use specific reviews, data on volume of reviews or the overall sentiment. However, make sure that it is relevant to the point you are trying to make, and include it only if it’s appropriate in the given context.

 

Sales copy

The majority of businesses use reviews as testimonials to support their sales copy. Be it on the website’s homepage or a specific landing page. This marketing strategy is very effective.

 

Marketers and copywriters understand the power of social proof – a heuristic reasoning where we cometo a conclusion based on a mental shortcut. Reviews in addition to a compelling story tend to consistently improve conversion rates. So make sure to use reviews in your marketing campaigns or product landing pages, or use them to directly compare yourself against the competition in email campaigns.

 

Offline

Offline businesses in industries such as the culinary or hospitality industry have been using this technique for a long time. Naturally, they serve their customers mainly offline and that’s where the eyeballs are. You can include reviews or ratings on:

  • Stationary
  • Business cards
  • Menus
  • Outside advertising boards
  • Banners
  • Walls

 

Let us create buzz around your app with reviews

Learn more…

Review pages

Having a page dedicated to reviews is a great way to market the quality of your business. Doing so will also help your SEO and might attract more traffic looking for reviews on specific products.

 

SEO

Continuing from point 6, there are several ways of making sure that your review page will get discovered by as many people as possible. Here are some basic SEO techniques you can use to accomplish this.

 

Internal linking structure

The way your internal pages are interlinked determines their ‘link juice’ flow, and how discoverable they will be. By both the search engines but also by the visitors. If many links point to a review page, the crawlers will pick up on this, and your visitors are more likely to visit the page.

 

Backlinks

Another way of adding SEO value to your review page is by creating high-quality relevant backlinks pointing to it.

 

Use top navigation

Lastly, if you want to make the review page event more easily discoverable to the visitors, you can include it in the top navigation and guide your customers directly to it from your home page.

 

  1. Techniques for increasing review conversions

The points above showed you why reviews matter, what types of reviews there are, from where and how we can source them, and how to market them. Next, let’s get into some additional tactics for higher conversion.

 

Trials and prototypes

Trials are great for reviews. A certain percentage of your customers will be very enthusiastic about trying a new product, service or a new variation of your existing products. The whole idea behind testing is that you get data at the end. If this feedback is good, use it as a review. People love novelty and the feeling of being important or making a change. Give them this chance by asking them for a prototype feedback.

 

Freebies

Everyone loves a freebie. Giving away products in exchange for reviews is a common tactic especially for start-ups. But it’s important to not confuse a freebie with bribing.

 

Competitors reviewers

Another tactic is ‘borrowing’ reviewers from your competition. Many review platforms and directories list basic contact information of the reviewers. Reach out to them and invite them to try your product. At a regular price or as a freebie or a trial.

 

After one review ask for more

Ask to review additional products after leaving one review, or get in touch after certain time period.

 

Enter customers into a competition

This would involve offering an incentive such as the chance to win something for an exchange for their feedback. This is especially appropriate when you sell high ticket items.

Follow these 4 points for an effective review campaign

 

As we covered the basics or collecting, marketing and monitoring; now I will turn to some additional tips that will help you to understand what really works in building a reputation through reviews.

 

Nudging with incentives and bribing is not the same

A simple rule to remember: don’t bribe your customers for positive reviews. Offering an incentive is acceptable, however, directly offering something in return for a positive review is not. If you decide to do it, make sure you don’t overdo it. In this case, try to limit your review collection campaign to a certain percentage of customers or limit it by time.

 

The fact is that a certain group of your customers will do it regardless of the incentive. If the group is small or in fact, you don’t have a group like this at all, it’s an indicator of your business operations. Therefore increasing customer engagement, loyalty and product quality would be the appropriate course of action.

 

Additionally, I would completely limit any incentives geared towards reviews on Yelp. Directly from their website, Yelp puts it bluntly:

 

image00

 

If they suspect you are asking for reviews; all the hard work collecting them will disappear.

 

Employ user-centric design

In this case, UI/UX come into play. The whole review collection process must be easy to follow and not time-consuming or confusing. This is the only way to increase conversion rates. Your customers do it for free (or should, see point 1), therefore any confusion about where to click next will make them leave very quickly.

 

The interaction with your website should be intuitive and every step along the way to leaving a review should be smooth and intuitive. Therefore encouraging feedback, whether overtly or covertly, must be conducted with the user in mind.

 

Find the right level of persistence

This point is quite nuanced. For example in terms of emails, what is healthy persistence and what is pushy persuasion? One can lead to valuable data which will bring your business to the next level, the other will make you seem desperate and you will annoy and alienate your customers. Because of this, you need to understand your industry, and especially your customer base.

 

Is there a frequent interaction between you and your customers? Do you provide them with free content or freebies often? Do they expect it?

 

These are some of the questions you should consider. However, I would stick with a very general rule of creating a three email sequence, where the time distance between each email is progressively increasing. For instance, send the second email after 2 days, and email three after 3-5 days.

 

Reward customers

Your relationship with the customers that gladly leave positive reviews for you should be cherished. You can reward them after leaving a review with discounts or additional content.

These customers are obviously glad about the value you provide, and this needs to be capitalized on. Firstly, you can turn them into brand ambassadors and reach out to them to increase the feedback engagement by asking them for a video review.

Secondly, these customers are likely to engage with your brand in the future. Most importantly, they are likely to exchange their money for your services. Therefore offering more than they expected through a freebie or a discount will only cement their beliefs in your brand.

 

Bonus: 3 ways to use online reviews to upsell existing products and drive more sales

 

So far we looked at the conversion process of customers into reviewers. As a bonus, this section will show you how to turn existing customers into repeat customers by using the power of social proof behind reviews. Why is this crucially important for your business? It’s simple… selling to existing customers is much cheaper!

 

Use reviews for other related products

This tactic is widely used by many eCommerce websites. Including reviews after check-out to upsell and complement purchased product is an effective way to keep customers in the funnel and entice them to a new purchase.

 

Post-review segmentation

Customers that review a certain product do the hard work for you. Not only do they market the product to others, they also segment themselves into clear categories, usually based on their interest and their level of satisfaction. After reviewing a product, enter the customer into a follow-up series that offers an upsell. Create a sales copy focused on benefits and how the new products complements the existing one.

 

Create infographic with reviews

This is a creative strategy which can be implemented if direct upsell or segmentation fails. This is how it works: create an infographic based on a product and attribute a specific review to each component or a feature of the product.

 

Let’s imagine that you are selling a DIY set of decorative candles…

 

Create an infographic where one review points at e.g.

1, how easy it is to make a candle

2, how pleasantly the wax smells

3, how easy it is to clean up after

And so on. You can offer this infographic to existing customers to learn more about your products in a more vivid and creative way if your email campaigns fail to convert.

 

Wrapping up

 

Reviews are extremely important, and with the data showing the current ecommerce trends and customers’ online behaviour, businesses need to account for reviews in their marketing strategy. We looked not only into online reviews, but also touched some interesting way to collect and show reviews offline.

The information I shared with you today should equip you with solid foundations for collecting reviews. Now you can start using them to turn visitors into customers, and customers into repeated customers.

 

What do you think about this guide? Did I leave anything out, or do you have something to add? Share and comment below!

 

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How to create viral apps (part II): User interface (UI) and the right pricing model

By now, you know how to conduct research strategy and how to design a viral loop. In this article, we will look at the best practices of user interface (UI) and how to pick the best pricing model for your viral app.

 

Both elements are important, and we will focus on executing them with virality in mind.

User interface

Simply put, UI covers everything that falls in the human-machine interaction. Therefore everything that a user will interact with. UI involves all the menus and junctions that user goes through while interacting with the application.

 

Good UI will ensure that your users don’t abandon your app, and will be happy to use it. However, to proactively ensure that people will share your app intuitively and with ease, your UI needs to be really well thought through and executed.

 

So, why exactly is UI so extremely important?

 

Even from anecdotal evidence, it’s quite clear that the human attention span is decreasing. Do you also find it hard to focus only on one task? Given the amount of stimuli competing for our attention, no wonder we are easily distracted.

 

If you are a mobile user, this can range from music, in-app ads to incoming emails. But also messages from communication applications, music notification, and the list goes on…

 

viral app pricing model

 

In fact, research shows that our attention span decreased from 12 seconds to 8 seconds because of technology. Given this statistic, bad UI can impact your users in a number of ways:

 

[bctt tweet=”Research actually showed that our attention span decreased from 12 seconds to 8 seconds, because of technology. https://appmarketingminds.com/marketing/how-create-viral-apps-user-interface-pricing-models” username=”amm_news”]

 

  • they will become quickly disinterested
  • bad UI causes confusion and frustration
  • sub-optimal UI will increase attention to other stimuli and distractions

 

Nobody can say with certainty what will happen in the future, but the trend of diminishing attention span is likely to continue. Hence, it’s even more important to design applications that will be truly captivating. Through both, its features and design.

 

Designing UI with virality in mind

 

A great UI with its primary focus on virality will have a number of common underlying characteristics:

 

  1. Optimized for sharing. Ensure that your users can easily share the app to their network. This will involve large salient sharing buttons, and clear call to action buttons.
  2. Keep your app intuitive. The user flow or journey that will lead them to share your app needs to be intuitive, and the action of sharing must come ”naturally”.
  3. All possible decisions must be kept to a minimum. Asking your users to make too many decisions is a proven conversions killer. Ensure that if you want your users to share the app, that they won’t need to do anything else at that given time.
  4. High quality. The overall design and feel of your application needs to be of high quality, and congruent with the feel and nature of your brands.

 

Pick the right pricing model for your application

 

Whether people pay for your app, at what stage in their interaction and how much, will greatly impact its viral potential. The pricing model you choose can proactively influence the relative amount and the type of users your app will acquire.

If you want, however, to create a viral app, it’s worth paying emphasis on minimizing any barriers to using it. 

 

What pricing models can you choose from?

 

1.Paid: Making your users pay for your app is a safe way to launch. This is especially the case if your idea is validated and you are confident that your app can deliver. Paid apps allow clear financial forecasting for minimising risk. This straightforward method of launching an app is however difficult to execute without a well established brand name. Secondly, your brand name and positioning need to be aligned with the selling price and marketing strategy to pull this off. However, putting up a financial barrier is really likely to decrease the speed of acquisition of new users.

 

2.Free: Not having to pay to use the application generally means significantly lower barriers of entry, and more users. Free applications generate their revenue from in-app advertising. So before deciding on this pricing model, determine what demographic will you be reaching and how lucrative is it to sell advertising space. Many developers who don’t execute their launch and marketing of a free app well enough can fail to meet their ROI benchmark.

The initial success can be perhaps deceiving. New research shows that in general after 30 days there is 90% drop in daily average users. Secondly, there is 95% drop in the next 90 days. The whole user base tends to diminish after few months. Given this data, low barriers for acquiring the app can possibly lead to even faster reduction of users if there wasn’t any financial investment. 

 

3. Freemium. With this pricing model, the initial use of the app is free. However, the use of advanced or proprietary features is paid. In some ways, this pricing model has the benefits of a free app, and paid. The user acquisition tends to be faster due to the low initial commitment. If the features prove to be good enough, this pricing model allows monetization options via upgrades. One example of a viral app with this pricing structure is Candy Crush. 

 

continuity app strategy

 

4.Paymium. People don’t discuss this pricing model very often. You purchase a paymium app upfront, with further paid features inside. 

 

How to pick the best pricing model for your app

 

This article is outlining how to maximize the chances of your app going viral. Because of this, all other factors that would in other circumstances need to be addressed must be aligned to this sole purpose. 

 

In case you missed our diagram of a viral loop which outlines the process of how apps go viral, here it is again:

 

viral loop

 

The cycle of viral sharing naturally starts with the access to the app and its features, which then allow sharing.

 

Therefore your primary objective is clear. Allow access to your app and its features to as many people as possible (that are likely to share). Based on this line of logic, we need to minimize the barriers of entry so users see and interact with the app.

 

Considering the pricing models above, you can increase the chances of your app going viral with free or freemium pricing models. However, when applying the freemium pricing model, ensure that all the features and encouragement to share will be accessed before the first paywall.

 

Conclusion

Viral applications gain popularity because many relevant people gained access to it, and were willing to share it.

 

Therefore, ensure minimal barriers to entry by lowering the initial acquisition commitment. For many people, the main concern is money and value they will gain. And money is perhaps one of the biggest barriers of entry to.. almost anything.

 

Because of this, the best approach would be to select the free or fremium pricing model. You will ensure that enough people will see and interact with your app to share it, and start the viral loop cycle.

 

In terms of practicality, clear and intuitive UI is the solid foundation that will support and optimize sharing.

 

Did we leave anything out? Let us now in the comments section below!

 

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How to create viral apps (part I): Strategy and viral loop

What distinguishes good apps from great ones? And what makes the seemingly simple ideas go viral?

 

A lot of people seem to think that apps which experienced amazing success and gone viral are flukes. Outliers that happened due to the combination of a good idea and luck.

 

This notion is responsible for millions of hopeful entrepreneurs and developers chasing the next Twitter, Tinder or Pokemon Go… right now as we speak.

 

No wonder that nine out of ten start-ups fail.

 

In this article, we’ll shed some light on the sharing element in virality. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be one right, proven and tested method that guarantees success.

 

However, all viral apps have common strategies and processes which underlie their success (don’t like reading? Check out our infographic on how to create viral apps)

 

1. Plan ahead

Before you get into creating a strategy and user flows for creating your app, consider whether your app has the potential to go viral in the first place.

 

Gauging the viral potential by considering your audience can mean the difference between succeeding and failing.

 

To understand its viral potential, ask yourself these questions:

 

  • What is your market size?
  • What is the demography of your audience?
  • To what age category does your audience belong?
  • Are they avid ‘app junkies’ or do they prefer to access information via desktop?

app store optimization tool

 

Secondly, you need to consider whether the topic itself is suitable for mobile applications. [bctt tweet=”A viral app needs to be great enough to capture people’s attention to the extent that they will want to share it with their friends” username=”@amm_news”].

 

Last but not least, what about the features? You need to solve a problem specific to your audience.

 

You might consider apps that have one or more of these aspects:

 

  1. Let users experience personal connections by using the app  – think about how Snapchat started

viral app

  1. Create an emotional connection – users of all ages use Facebook because they can connect instantly connect with friends and family from all over the world

viral app fb

 

  1. Very easy to use and understand – DropBox for example very easy and useful concept to grasp

app strategy

 

  1. Continuity element (e.g. game, next levels) – Candy Crush and other viral games (e.g. Angry Birds) did excellent job with the element of continuity

continuity app strategy

Understanding what your audience wants, and tying it with these aspects will allow you to create a great application. Yet, almost all developers still fail because they fail to create an emotional connection with their audience in addition to designing great features.

 

You might decide to go for a unique idea that nobody ever thought of before. This will, however, involve substantial idea validation, research, testing and iteration.

 

Alternatively, get a good understanding of the current market and the competitive landscape to design a better solution. One way to do so is through analyzing the app stores and looking at what people complain about.

 

app stores

 

To visualize the data, you can create a rating scale which will show the competitors, features their apps offer, and how well is each feature executed.

 

Depending on the nature of the application you want to develop, the rating can have multiple levels of quality execution, or it can be simply binary: YES feature and NO feature.

 

Let’s use an example with multiple rating levels.

 

Basic app features analysis

You can approach a very basic features analysis by performing content analysis, and convert qualitative data into quantitative data, since you will quantify people’s opinions.

 

In 3 steps:

 

  • X-axis: here you will plot the features
  • Y-axis: this axis will represent your rating scale (e.g. 0-8, 0-1)
  • You will plot the feature’s score for each competitor to get an idea of how is everyone performing.

 

In this example, we will use 0-8 rating, where 8 is a score for the best-executed feature, and 0 will be awarded if the feature is missing completely.

 

Let’s imagine that you want to analyze the competition in the Instagram photo editing niche. You’d start with reading the comments and conducting a content analysis. This will involve simply looking at different features and themes that emerge. The more research you do, the more reliable your data will be. Doing deep research will mean trust in your analysis, so take the time to really do this properly.

 

rotation

It seems that users complain mostly about rotation. You could, therefore, start plotting the data and come up with something like this:

graph

 

Want to get a detailed competitive analysis done for you?

Read more about app marketing services here

2. Design viral loop

To break down and simplify ‘Viral loop’ as a concept, we can understand it as the continuous process of sharing and inviting people in your network, who will continue to share and invite people in their network.

 

As you can imagine, being able to design viral loop and establish this cycle can create powerful results.

 

If we visually depict a viral loop, it looks something like this:

 

viral loop

 

Understand your metrics

Before setting out to create a viral loop, it’s vital that you understand all the necessary metrics.

 

We’ll need to calculate the viral coefficient. This number will reflect how many new customers is each current customer able to convert. The calculation for K (viral coefficient) is fairly simple, and will enable us to build a model of future growth. The formula is simply:

 

Number of invitations X conversion rate (%)

 

So let’s use an example to model how many customers we will have after the first cycle.

 

Remember, all we need is:

1) the number of customers who send out invitation

2) conversion rate

 

Example:

 

10 customers will send out 10 invitations each (100 in total). 20% of these invitations end up customers.

 

This will give us 2 new customers per each existing customer. Therefore 20 in total. If we add the new 20 customers to 10 existing, we’d have 30 customers at the end of the first cycle.

 

To continue building this model and having robust results, it’s important to consider sharing performed by the new customers in each new cycle, rather than calculating sharing of customers who shared in the previous cycle.

 

By building a simple model like this and testing with different conversion rates, you will quickly see the impact on your app’s growth.

 

However, remember that to achieve viral growth, the coefficient must be greater than 1.

 

In case you don’t feel like doing all the calculations yourself, you can use online calculators which calculate K for you.

 

viral app coefficient calculator

 

Once you understand your numbers, you want to make sure your app’s features are optimized for sharing.

 

There is a number of ways to achieve this. Firstly, reduce the barriers to entry for using and sharing your app. Unnecessary opt-ins, too much commitment and sharing of information or bad UI is bound to reduce your sharing rates.

 

Secondly, accelerate your viral loop by designing your app with shorter sharing cycles. This will result in a greater amount of viral cycles in shorter period of time, and will therefore lead to more users acquired in the given timeframe.

 

 

Incentive to share

Lastly, let’s turn to the most important aspect in optimizing sharing – the incentives to share. As with anything, also in apps the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) rule applies.

 

Here is a list of techniques you can employ to encourage sharing.

 

Make your app go viral encouraging users to share….

  1. Because of altruism – entice people to share it as a thank you for the features you offer
  2. To receive extra features

dropbox-viral-loop3. And get a discount on the paid version

4. Because of altruistic referrals – you will perform a good deed if they share (such as donating to charity)

5. To receive discounts for other services/products in the industry (for example restaurants in you have an app listing restaurants)

6. To receive a badge, points, virtual currency (gamify sharing and offer perceived value) or other in-game value : Candy crush

7. To make a social statement 

8. To receive pre-launch perks

9. For a chance to win something

10. To show support to a cause

 

Wrapping it up

In conclusion, creating a viral app is certainly not easy. 

 

First of all, the fact is that many successful entrepreneurs fail with apps. Scoring with an app that really takes off and goes viral involves more than planning and designing a viral loop.

 

In part II we will look at other aspects of your app that will make people more than likely to share it with their network.

 

You can now watch our video about building a viral loop!

 

Or download the powerpoint presentation here!

 

Did we leave anything out? Share it with us in the comments below.

 

app store optimization tool

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