Your app has just 5 fruitful days of life!

Your app has just 5 fruitful days of life!

The above statement is part of my usual experiments over figuring out what drives triggers in human brain to take an action like clicking on my article. Jokes aside, the statement is completely true and reliable. Your app may have just 5 days of life as nearly 50% of applications get uninstalled within 5 days of their installation.

Top 3 reasons for short life -

  • Engagement Funnel
  • Spam (Too many useless notifications)
  • End of use-cases

As a co-founder of an app based company, I always ponder about essential elements to get success in startup world. While reading my old journal entries, I found an interesting note about building a successful startup. The key things to a startup is to develop a killer product, a budding team and loads of determination. Though these factors alone don’t guarantee any sure-shot success — or more importantly, user growth, adoption, loyalty or in context to Indian ecosystem - 'Funding' . But to increase your chances of building a startup that lasts, I realized that the only thing which matters is 'Customers'.

You can’t build an amazing product until you go into the market and experiment. The ability to gather crucial customer insights can give a massive advantage to a startup in this competitive world.

Thinking on the same line, I thought of revamping the whole communication & feedback engagement channel in my application so that I can engage better with all sort of users. I wanted to instrument a technology in my application that will permit me to “split” my consumers, so that I can run tests to small portions of the population without jeopardizing proven functionality. Apart from this, I also wanted to drive actionable insights from my users so that I can see what’s working and what’s not. During this exploration of finding right set of tools for monitoring, segmenting, reaching and gamifying the user engagement – I came to know of Azure Mobile Engagement also known as AzME.

Azure Mobile Engagement is a SAAS based, data-driven service targeted specifically for digital marketers/CMOs but could be used by any mobile app owner or publisher who wants to increase the usage, retention and monetization of their mobile apps. Nearly 75% users uninstall the application within first 30 days. Let's look at an amazing infographic by Deepak Abbot:

How to stop app uninstalls by Deepak Abbot

Azure Mobile Engagement aka AzME takes care of this by opening a highly personalized route to engage with your customers and convert them into happy users and eventually brand ambassadors of your application.

Azure Mobile Engagement provides data-driven insights into app usage, real-time user segmentation, and enables contextually-aware push notifications and in-app messaging.

Breaking these down, we have the following key characteristics which also highlights its unique value proposition:

Contextually-aware push notifications and in-app messaging: AzME can perform targeted and personalized push notifications. And for this to happen, it collects rich behavioral analytics data. Imagine receiving a notification about a special offer on a specific product which you have viewed multiple times on your favorite eCommerce application. You will be prompted to at least open the application and see what’s there for you. These types of contextually aware push notification help you in increasing user-engagement along with effective monetization.

Data-driven insights into app usage: AzME provide cross platform SDKs to collect the behavioral analytics about the app users. Note the term behavioral analytics (as against performance analytics) because AzME focus on how the app users are using the app. It also collects basic performance analytics data about errors, crashes. This data can be used to send event based notification and in-app messages as everything is happening in real-time. Imagine, receiving a message about a crash when using a new application and then later receiving notification about bug resolution. These all things matter as at the end of the day, your users determine whether you application will last in their phone or will get the harsh tap on “Uninstall”.

Real-time user segmentation: Once you have collected app users' behavioral analytics data, we allow you to segment your audience based on various parameters and collected data to enable you to run targeted push campaigns. User segmentation can be done quickly and you can also expose this data to other applications like CRM, CSP etc. via use of Open APIs.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS): AzME or Azure Mobile Engagement also provided an optimized platform to interact and view rich behavioral analytics about the app users and run marketing push campaigns. The product is geared to get you going in no time! Truth be told, it took me less than 20 minutes to instrument this onto my own application.

To recap, the purpose of Mobile Engagement is not just to collect analytics - it is not "yet another Analytics product from Microsoft". It is about sending targeted push notifications and for this targeting, we collect behavioral analytics data but the focus remains on sending push notifications which make the most sense to the app users so that it does not come across as spam.

For more details - take a look at this quick video about Mobile Engagement in a nutshell.

Thanks to Mark D'souza, mentor & colleague for an amazing factoid :-) #MuchThanks

I hope, you unleash the power of AzME in retaining and monetizing your users more effectively. So – Until next time, That’s all from my end. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts on mobile engagement and other similar services available. I am always up for idea jamming or tech chit chat @Twitter.