***Check out our 2017 Mobile Growth Handbook: https://www.slideshare.net/branchmetrics/the-2017-mobile-growth-handbook-79579365.
How industry leaders grow their apps and you can, too! A digest from mobile growth hacker meetups around the world. Complied by Daniel Kob (@dan_kob) and Branch Metrics (@branchmetrics) - the leading solution for mobile deep links. Experts from Flipboard, Zynga, Pinterest, Branch Metrics, Yahoo, Box and other tech companies share their best tips and tools on how to increase downloads, optimize performance in app stores, engage your users and drive viral sharing. More Mobile Growth tips on the Branch blog at blog.branch.io.
2. Who are the mobile growth hackers?
We are 6,000 mobile app developers (iOS
and Android) interested in growing our apps.
We meet in about 30 cities around the
world and cover all things related to growth,
from organic growth hacking, to paid installs,
to how to build referral systems.
Be part of the community, come to one of
our meetups and learn from the leading
mobile developers. Join us now, it’s free!
U.S International
San Francisco Bay Area, CA Vancouver, Canada
San Diego, CA Toronto, Canada
Los Angeles, CA Montreal, Canada
Santa Monica, CA Calgary, Canada
Seattle, WA London, United Kingdom
Boston, MA Berlin, Germany
Austin, TX Stockholm, Sweden
Detroit, MI Helsinki, Finland
New York City, NY Reykjavik, Iceland
Chicago, IL Tel Aviv, Israel
Washington, DC Istanbul, Turkey
Denver, CO Hong Kong, China
Cincinnati, OH Singapore, Singapore
Portland, OR Pune, India
Bangalore, India
Delhi, India
Find our Meetup Groups on meetup.com
3. What’s inside this eBook?
In this eBook we have curated the essential
learnings from our recent mobile growth
hacker meetups in an easy digestible format.
From the generation of your first app
downloads to the activation and retention of
your user base – we have you covered.
If you want to dive in even deeper, you can
watch videos of most of our meetups on
YouTube.com/BranchIODeeplinks.
4. Tyler Coffey
Product Manager
We Heart It
The mobile growth hacking experts
Zaid Al-Husseini
VP of Product
Gogobot
Robi Ganguly
CEO & Cofounder
Apptentive
Josh Lu
Director of Product
Zynga
Casey Winters
Growth Lead
Pinterest
Bayram Annakov
CEO
App in the Air
Deema Tamimi
Head of Product Mktg.
Flipboard
Morgan Brown
COO & Author
Inman News
Deng-Kai Chen
Director of Product Mgmt.
Yahoo
Billy Shipp
CMO
Yoshirt
Andrew Fernandez
EngineeringLead
Rent the Runway
Wally Nguyen
CEO
mNectar
Ethan Smith
VP of Growth
Yummly
Vanessa Larco
Group Product Manager
Box
Mada Seghete
CMO & Cofounder
Branch Metrics
Josh Elman
Partner
Greylock Partners
5. The growth engine of your app –
and the structure of this digest
Share
ActivationDownload
Awareness
Before diving into what the growth hackers
have to say, have a look at this framework for
thinking about growth, which we use as the
structure of this digest. A growth engine is a
cyclical process that results in your existing
users inviting their friends to join them.
Breaking down the different components of
this engine can help create a mental model
for optimizations and improvements. The four
phases of the growth cycle are awareness,
download, activation, and share.
6. The growth engine of your app –
and the structure of this digest
Share
Activation
Download
Awareness
The first step of the process is driving app awareness. How are people going to get to
your app store page in order to press download and install? There are many different
ways to drive awareness and the distribution of channels will vary over time.
The second step is the download. This download will hopefully come naturally with
increased awareness, but there is always a drop-off from awareness to download.
Some channels will drive much higher conversion from awareness to download.
The third and mostly overlooked step is activation. 20% of downloaded apps are
used just once. To avoid this, you want to get your users to take some action to
commit to your product.
The final step of the cycle is to drive users to share. Sharing can come in many
different forms, but the ultimate goal is to leverage your activated users to drive
more awareness and therefore feed back into the cycle.
Awareness
The growth hacks on the following pages follow this four phase structure.
7. Awareness
1.5 m
1.4 m
360 k 340 k
Google
Play
Apple
AppStore
Amazon
Appstore
Windows
Phone Store
Number of apps available
Games
21.8%
Business
10.3%
Education
9.8%
Lifestyle
8.6%
Entertainment
Utilities
Travel
Other
33.4%
6.6%
5.1%
4.4%
Share of apps in Apple App Store
Driving awareness is challenging
> 40,000 new apps are released every month
Source:Statista
8. How do you build
a user base from
zero?
Awareness
9. “Ideas are the currency for growth. Ideate across all
areas of the funnel and create a hypothesis behind each
idea. Then prioritize ideas across three variables: impact
(of the idea), (your) confidence and ease (of
implementation. Test constantly, run experiments and
then analyze and optimize. Optimization of the product
and process is the key to success. This is where internal
testing is so important. Most startups, surprisingly, are
underinvested in metrics – not only about their product
features, but how they are selling, marketing, and
growing. The best thing you can do for your ability to
grow is to capture the right metrics from the start.”
Morgan Brown
COO of Inman News, Author of ‘Growth Engines’
Awareness
10. “If you start from zero you just have to hustle – get
very creative and reach out to everyone you
know. Figure out whether there is some sort of
barter system you can engage in – you promote
someone’s app and in turn they promote yours.
Once you have a first user base, figure out what it
is they love about your app and then take those
experiences and make them even better. That’s the
perfect time to ask your users to share the app
and give you a great rating in the app store. Those
first users who love your app are like gold for you.”
Deema Tamimi
Head of Product Marketing, Flipboard
Awareness
11. “The single most important thing for games
early on is the quality of users and building a
density of quality users. After getting to a
critical mass you can start to focus on the
drivers of virality and the target audiences
and the themes that are working for
performance marketing. But you have to build
a quality user base first. Also, the onboarding
process is incredibly important. Make it
personal and always experiment with it.”
Awareness
Josh Lu
Director of Product, Zynga
12. “First, App Store Optimization. It’s not only
about finding the right keywords, but also
explaining what your app is about. You want to
make sure that the right person downloads
your app otherwise your retention rates will
become fairly high and you might draw a
wrong conclusion about the quality of app.
Second, onboarding. Make sure the user
knows what your app is about and customize
the onboarding experience.”
Awareness
Bayram Annakov
CEO, App in the Air
13. “The people that follow us on Social Media are
our users already. It’s a common mistake to
spend too much time promoting your app to
users you are already reaching. As a content
platform our best channel for growth is search
engine optimization. People discover us by
searching for certain images and if we get them
to our site looking at a handful of images, it is
easy to convert them into app users.”
Awareness
Tyler Coffey
Product Manager, We Heart It
14. “Launch your app in a small market first
that behaves like the large markets you are
targeting before launching it worldwide.
You can get a lot of valuable feedback that
way and it gives you a chance to really
refine your app over successive versions
and get ready for the big markets.”
Awareness
Deng-Kai Chen
Director of Product Management, Yahoo
15. How do you get
featured in the
app store and
what is it worth?
Awareness
16. “Networking – both Apple and
Google organize meetups where you
can talk to representatives who can
put you in touch with the right
people. Going on LinkedIn and cold
emailing people can work as well.”
Zaid Al-Husseini
VP of Product, Gogobot
Awareness
17. “Building a working relationship with your
category manager at the Apple and
Google app stores is incredibly important.
They talk to us about their future plans and
technologies and we try to build features
into our products that map onto those, so
we are more likely to be featured.”
Billy Shipp
CMO, Yoshirt
Awareness
18. “As a small developer it’s likely that if you get
featured you will be overwhelmed by the masses
who download your app and are not ready for
the product or have different expectations. As a
result you will end up with negative reviews and
ratings because you were featured but they didn’t
get what they were looking for. Therefore, don’t
focus on getting featured, focus on getting so
good that if you are getting featured you are
ready to onboard many people and give them
the best experience possible.”
Robi Ganguly
CEO & Cofounder, Apptentive
Awareness
20. “App store optimization is crucial. But it’s not just a
quick fix – you can’t just change some keywords and
tomorrow you will have more downloads. It’s a lot of
listening and learning. It’s important to notice that the
app title carries a different weight in the Android and
Apple app stores and that the velocity of your ratings
over time really matters. One of the best ways to come
up with good keywords is to read the reviews. People
tell you what features they were looking for, what they
like and what they don’t like. The language they use is
much more indicative of how they discover you than
the language you might think they use.”
Robi Ganguly
CEO & Cofounder, Apptentive
Awareness
21. “App Store Optimization is critical. Where you
appear in the app store is lifeblood. The first
thing to do is to see how visible you really
are. Mobileaction.co is a great tool to get a
rating of how visible you are the way your app
is optimized right now. And on
bit.ly/ASOcheatsheet you find a great cheat
sheet for the iOS store that gives you all the
variables you should optimize for.”
Awareness
Morgan Brown
COO of Inman News, Author of ‘Growth Engines’
22. “You should invest in app store optimization. The
app store is the final hurdle before someone
installs your app and you want to try different
iterations, screenshots and descriptions to
maximize the install rate you get. You can
measure that with tools like Branch Metrics. Using
deep links you can see which sources are sending
how much traffic over and how many have opened
the app coming from that source. Also, A/B test
different versions of your app store landing page.”
Awareness
Zaid Al-Husseini
VP of Product, Gogobot
23. Want to download a high
resolution PDF of this eBook?
You are just a tweet away.
Download>
24. What influences app download decisions
Download
Price
Description
Reviews
Ratings
Free Trial
82%
62%
60%
60%
43%
Source: Think with Google
26. “Be intentional about when you show
people the prompt to rate your app. At
Zynga we make sure that we invite you to
rate the app in a good moment, e.g. when
you just won a game and feel good about it.
When we know that your app crashed
recently, we won’t show you a ratings prompt,
because your recent experience might not
have been as good as we want it to be.”
Josh Lu
Director of Product, Zynga
Download
27. “One challenge is to get great reviews, but the
other one is to get no negative reviews. In the
app stores there is no way to contact the
reviewers, but many users use the same nickname
throughout the web. Try to find these people,
contact them and help them understand the
product better. Often negative reviews come from
users who don’t fully understand your app, so help
them with that. A lot of times they will turn their
negative rating into a positive one – so I encourage
you to fight the negative reviews!”
Download
Bayram Annakov
CEO, App in the Air
29. “We have used traditional interstitials that you
see once you visit our mobile page, prompting you
to download the app. However, if SEO is important
for your growth, interstitials can increase your
bounce rates and drive your SEO results down.
Two other and less risky things you can do are
upselling over email and using a text-me-the-
app feature, which is a little widget integrated in
an iframe on your website. Branch Metrics is one
of the companies that offer this service.”
Download
Zaid Al-Husseini
VP of Product, Gogobot
30. “If you transition people from one channel to the
next, as much as you can, measure it and
understand which community is working early and
why, what they care about and what in the app is
driving them there. Because if you are a website
only and create your first app, you will make
assumptions of why people use your app and
many of them will be wrong. Deep linking or ad
attribution can help to test those assumptions.”
Download
Robi Ganguly
CEO & Cofounder, Apptentive
31. “Smart App Banners are a great way to gradually
onboard mobile web users to the app when they
are ready. This banner only consumes a fraction
of the screen on a mobile website in order to
convince users to click to open the native app if
they have it or install it if they don’t. It’s a smart
link that includes all the routing logic to
automatically open up the app when it’s installed
or fallback to an app store page if not.”
Mada Seghete
CMO & Cofounder, Branch Metrics
Download
33. “Use incentivized installs to increase your rank and use non
incentivized installs to get quality users that hopefully fit
certain targeting. If you time your incentivized installs
correctly, e.g. while being featured and releasing updates,
these installs can have a good impact on your app store
rank. But you need to have some staying power, otherwise
you will drop again right away. Facebook ads can be really
helpful to seed an audience and get discovered. In general, I
would only recommend paid installs if your cost per engaged
user is still at a good level, rather than looking at your cost
per install. So, model out your Customer Lifetime Value.”
Download
Casey Winters
Growth Lead, Pinterest
34. “The economical way of doing paid installs
is to first launch your app, take what ever
users install your app, see who monetizes
and who is retained. Understand what
your average revenue and value per user is
and then make an install purchase
decision based on that data.”
Download
Wally Nguyen
CEO, mNectar
35. “Don’t aggressively acquire users if you can’t
retain them. You are also potentially burning
some of the most enthusiastic people about your
product. Someone sees your ad who thinks that’s
the product they have been waiting for, downloads
it and it’s not the experience they have been
looking for … and then they just leave. The chance
that they come back is slim to none.”
Download
Vanessa Larco
Group Product Manager, Box
36. Activation
Downloads alone are not enough
23%of all apps on Apple
devices are only
used once
36%of all apps on Apple
devices are used 11
times or more
26apps average
smartphone users
use every month
Source: Localytics
38. Activation
“The onboarding experience early on is really
critical. Don’t think of all your users in the same
way, instead tailor their onboarding experience.
Some users will know your product fairly well
others don’t know what to expect when they
download your app. Maybe don’t ask these people
right at front to give you all their information. Let
them experience your product first. Branch
Metrics for example gives you the possibility to
contextualize the onboarding experience based
on where the users come from.”
Deema Tamimi
Head of Product Marketing, Flipboard
39. Activation
“We think about onboarding not just as intro
screens but as the whole lifecycle. So you might
get a call out two weeks after you installed it to
try the shopping list and later one to try another
feature. Push notifications are another element
of onboarding. We segment users and do
targeted email and push campaigns to turn our
users into engaged ones.”
Ethan Smith
VP of Growth, Yummly
40. Activation
“Most services try to make the signup flow as
painless as possible. That’s a terrible idea. You have
more attention than you ever will have again from
that user. So teach them what your product is
really about – consider the onboard flow a ‘learn
flow’. Slow down, it’s ok to explain your product. But
don’t just tell your users how your product works,
get them to engage with it right away.”
Josh Elman
Partner, Greylock Partners
41. Activation
“Creating the right onboarding flow is
incredibly important. If you don’t create the
right first impression and give the user what
he’s looking for he will close the app right away
and never open it again. With deep links you
can personalize the first app experience and
give new users an individual welcome,
automatically apply any promotional offers
and bring them to the content they came for
without any friction.”
Mada Seghete
CMO & Cofounder, Branch Metrics
43. Activation
“Push Notifications are one of the greatest tool to drive
users back into the app. Part of this is maximizing
your adoption rate – you want as many of your users
as possible to opt into notifications. Best practices
include giving your users reasons why you need their
permission and what content you would push to them
and why this makes their experience better. Give
context of when and how many push messages users
would receive once they agree. Personalize the
notifications and make them highly relevant in order to
maximize opening rates.”
Zaid Al-Husseini
VP of Product, Gogobot
44. Activation
“We make every single notification personal, so
they are either about content you posted or it is
recommended content based on the stuff you
posted on Pinterest. Be careful with general
notifications that you send out to thousands of
users and make sure every notification is personal,
based on the data you have about your users. We
treat every notification as an experiment and
measure whether they increase the retention of
our users or just waste their attention.”
Casey Winters
Growth Lead, Pinterest
45. Activation
“One of our features is a wish list of
products that you might rent and you have
to put a date on it. That is the highest
intent action that you can take in our app.
We just hone in on that – on our website, in
our app and email channels to retarget
those people about that event.”
Andrew Fernandez
Engineering Lead – Mobile, Rent the Runway
47. Activation
“Look at your user data and find out what features
make your users stay longer and come back. Once
you identified those, start educating your users and
help them understand the main value you are creating.
This can increase retention a lot. In addition, emails
and notifications can be effective to increase retention.
One thing that we found is when we emailed users that
hadn’t been in the app for 28 days it’s because they had
forgotten about it since there’s so many things on their
phone. This reminder can be a very powerful tool.”
Deema Tamimi
Head of Product Marketing, Flipboard
48. Activation
“We realized that users who have a promo
code are three times more likely to convert
into paying users. As a consequence, we
were giving out a promo code to every
user who installed the app, so they could
try out all the premium features and
understand the value we were creating
before we even asked them to pay.”
Bayram Annakov
CEO, App in the Air
49. Activation
“It’s easy to assume your customers
are using your product the way you
intended. Data can inform you of
the value your product brings to
each demographic which is gold when
optimizing user acquisition channels.”
Vanessa Larco
Group Product Manager, Box
50. Want to download a high
resolution PDF of this eBook?
You are just a tweet away.
Download>
51. Share
How viral is your app?
activated
downloaded
shared
activated
new downloads
shared
_____________
__________
__________
x
k-factor of an app =
x
53. Share
“It’s not only about sharing your app but more
about letting users share what content they
like or have created inside the app. At Flipboard
this could be an interesting article they read or a
magazine they have created. Think about their
motivations and tie it back to what makes your
product unique. This is where Branch Metrics can
be really powerful by letting users share
contextual links to one specific piece of content
they like inside your app.”
Deema Tamimi
Head of Product Marketing, Flipboard
54. Share
“Text messages have the highest
conversion rate. While the volume of
shares on Facebook is higher, the
eventual conversion of a text invitation
to install the app is much higher.”
Bayram Annakov
CEO, App in the Air
55. Share
“Remove friction. Make it really
easy for a user to use the method of
sharing they want to use. And make
sure that the content they share is
really compelling.”
Tyler Coffey
Product Manager, We Heart It
57. Share
“Know what segments of users really love what
you are building. When you find these groups then
you can analyze what kind of blogs these users
read, whom they follow on Twitter, what they read
on Facebook and you can put together a whole
messaging plan. Also, try to find out who the
contact at the app store is for the product you are
making, because if you make it into even a minor
feature you will have this recurring install stream
that drives organic growth.”
Deng-Kai Chen
Director of Product Management, Yahoo
58. Share
“At a certain scale contests and
promotions can drive virality. For us
having customers share their custom
designs or selfies with their t-shirts is
extremely valuable. When a friend sees
a friend’s creation they are very likely to
want to participate as well.”
Billy Shipp
CMO, Yoshirt
59. Share
“Most companies get caught up in what I call ‘infectious
virality’ – the kind of virality where you encourage your
users to bring their friends so the experience is better for
both. But there’s two other types of virality that let your core
users be your evangelists: 1. ‘Word-of-mouth Virality’ –
having your users describe their great experience to their
friends. Be careful which words you use in the product or
when talking to the press because these words will impact
how your users will describe it. 2. ‘Demonstration Virality’ –
having your core users share content from your product.
These shares only happen if they are authentic and naturally
happen in your product.”
Josh Elman
Partner, Greylock Partners
60. Share
“Users have to get addicted to your app – not to
the entire experience but to something in your
app. Some feature, something to hook on to that
they do over and over again. When you don’t
take away every single barrier that lets them
exactly do that, you will end up chasing the next
feature that is going to create growth – and that
never works. Having tons of features usually
doesn’t create growth.”
Andrew Fernandez
Engineering Lead – Mobile, Rent the Runway
61. Share
“Use your influencers that are already loving your
app – they are your megaphone. All you need to
do is to empower them. We started to develop a
set of tools that helps us identify our most
engaged power users and help them make us
more successful and spread the word. We found
that a lot of these users are very receptive if the
app they love reaches out to them.”
Tyler Coffey
Product Manager, We Heart It
62. Ready to grow your app?
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