When you build a website or a mobile app, you would want your product to reach as many people as possible and do business for you.
You would initiate strategies like Search Engine Optimization or App Store Optimization to increase traffic for your app. But, how do you convert that traffic to real goals like making a sale or creating an account or something else in your application?
It’s a bit tricky but can be achieved with Conversion Rate Optimization.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of conversions/sales leads to your app or website.
It typically involves generating ideas for elements on your site or app that can be improved and then validating those hypotheses through A/B testing and multivariate testing.
Take a look at the below image to understand the concept of conversion rate optimization better.
No matter how good your app looks or performs, there is always room for improvement in your app.
Things like driving the most relevant messages, matching user expectations are crucial to master your app store optimization strategy. You can also accomplish it through testing tactics.
Why is Conversion Optimization Important For Your App?
Conversion optimization is essential as it allows businesses to reduce customer acquisition costs by attracting visitors to get more value.
When you optimize the conversion rate, you have a better scope of increasing revenue per visitor, increase your customer base, and grow your business.
For example, if your app has a conversion rate of up to 10% and around 5000 visitors per month, your app must generate 500 conversions per month.
In the case of increasing your conversions, there is always room for improvement. The best companies continuously iterate their processes to improve their apps to create a better experience. It satisfies users that ultimately helps in growing conversions.
There are many ways you can use to make your conversion better. Let’s learn about a few of them that are most effective.
- Increase conversions by using persuasive UX design and copy
- Grow your email list and send more strategic mails
- Measure the right stuff and gather in-depth insights by setting up Google Analytics
- Run A/B tests by conducting quantitative and qualitative research
- Create a repeatable and systematic CRO (conversion rate optimization) process
But before we learn about these strategies, we would like you to identify and establish your conversion metrics.
Conversion optimization begins by identifying what the conversion goals are for any given app screen. Your mobile app’s success metrics depend on the kind of business you’re in and your goals with the application.
For example, if you are selling something online, a conversion for your product may be a purchase, or if your app is a news blog, it’s the number of subscribers. Further, if you are selling products or services to a business, you might be measuring the number of leads your website collects or the number of app downloads.
Let’s take a look at some common mobile app conversion goals of different types of industries.
- Media apps – Page views, ad views, newsletter subscriptions, recommended content engagement
- E-commerce apps – product sales, add–to –cart, shopping cart completion rate, e-mail newsletter sign-ups
- Travel apps – Booking conversions, ancillary purchases, social shares
- B2B – Leads generated, deals closed
Soon after you have established the conversion metrics for your digital interactions with your audience, you can begin with improving your digital customer experiences through conversion optimization.
Steps to begin with app conversion rate optimization:
- Start the process by identifying your conversion metrics. It helps you identify the part of your conversion funnel you want to optimize.
- Typically, you will want to begin optimizing the portion of your conversion funnel that receives the most significant amount of traffic or generates the greatest numbers of conversions.
- By focusing on these pages, you can see the results of your changes faster and have a better impact on your business.
- You can also proceed with the app optimization process by including your highest value and underperforming pages.
- Again, improving these areas can have the best and immediate impact on your conversion goals.
- For example, a company that sells clothes may find that their app for shirts receives much traffic but has a relatively less conversion rate, much lower than the rest of the site. Improving the conversion rate of that page can help the clothing business see a significant improvement in sales for their CRO efforts.
Most Effective Ways of Mobile App Conversion Optimization
#1. Increase conversions with persuasive copy and UX/design
Redesigning your app is one of the most effective and essential steps you can take to increase your conversions.
As technology, fashion, and trends keep changing every day; your app also needs to be rolling with all the new changes.
The colors which you have like a couple of years back may look dull or old now. If your app targets the young generation, your design should intact with modern graphics and animation that attract them in a single stroke.
Your users prefer a modern look and feel; that is why you need to follow the latest design trends while you redesign your app. Remember, the young audience always asks for intuitive, simple, and modern UI and UX.
You can make your app intuitive by adopting the following factors:
- Advanced Usability: By following the latest UI/UX design trends, you will make your app’s appearance more attractive and improve its usability.
- Improved Personalization: Almost all sorts of applications now can use Artificial Intelligence technology to collect more information about your users. You can learn their preferences and needs and offer a customer just that information he or she would most likely appreciate.
- ADD a lot of Call-to-action elements: An application redesign is an excellent way to add as many call-to-action elements as you want. But the modern approaches allow us to make these buttons intrusive and appealing, which leads us to an ideal outcome – we persuade a user to do what we want and boost app sales.
- Better Social Integration: Social media integration is best to integrate as it allows users to share the content from the app with others. It provides an excellent opportunity to acquire new app users by putting minimum efforts. It is great if you already have social media integrations in your app; you can maximize the app reach by adding messengers to your app. Today’s modern users like to share stuff via WhatsApp or Telegram; you can add them too.
But why do you have to redesign?
Remember, there is only you who can decide the right time to redesign your app or not. However, there are some attributes that you can recognize as a sign to take a step forward.
Learn when is the time to app redesign:
Users need changes: One of the main reasons behind successful apps is they keep in touch with the customers through feedbacks and reviews. If you could do that too, you can notice that they complain about all the design changes you could make without even trying to figure out yourself. You don’t have to make changes to what every individual asks; pay attention to similar comments. If several users have the same complaints, you should start from there.
You don’t like it: What do you feel when you see the competitors’ apps? Do you like them? Do you accept that their mobile apps are better than yours? If the answers are yes, and you realize that your product is not up to the mark, you need to create a new design for your app.
It just doesn’t convert: It is painful when your app doesn’t convert and doesn’t bring you any money. But don’t think of it as a failure; it is your experience that is needed to improve an app. So, if your product isn’t that profitable as it should be, it’s time to redesign.
The idea of an app changed: You might have seen it many times that if an app is pretty old and gets updated with a few changes, its general idea gets shifted. For example, you added new features or products, or services; it may change the app’s previous look and feel. Your motive here should be to make your app idea convenient and clear to both existing and new users.
#2. Grow your email list, send more strategic emails, and push notifications
Marketing is something you might’ve already considered and practicing, but making those strategies effective is more important.
You need to consider three essential things to make your conversions better.
- Grow your email list
- Send more strategic emails
- Push notifications
Grow your email list:
You could get a list of emails from anywhere, but that isn’t a great strategy; increase your customer base by making them sign up in your app.
How do you do that? By giving them offers or giving them some benefit of signing up on your app.
This is how you gain your customer base and email list. You don’t have to sacrifice your business but create an offer that does not affect your business.
Send more strategic emails:
It is proved that emails are still the most powerful marketing tools, but you need to use this tool to make it better for you.
Make your emails interesting, make them look good, and use creative content so that people can take a look at it before they eventually delete.
Don’t use the same template or content for more than a month; be creative with ideas and content, promote your business or app with emails.
Push notifications:
Push notifications are only useful when your app is in the users’ device, but it is one of the most important and effective tools for conversions.
You can send notifications about the following things
- Reminding them about their tasks on your app
- Products left in the cart
- Offers or discounts or sale
- What’s new in your app
- If the user hasn’t used the app for a while, send a reminder that you love them
Also, don’t just send a pathetic message through your push notifications; make it funny, witty, and creative so that someone would want to check what you have to offer through your app.
#3. Measure the right stuff and gather in-depth insights by setting up Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a tool from Google that tracks your app’s traffic and demographics or your website. It shows:
- The total number of people coming and visiting your app
- Real-time users
- From where, when, and at what time the app is getting traffic
- What age group (along with gender) from which part of the world uses your app
Check the given image to get a clear idea of metrics received by Google Analytics:
So all this information makes it easy for you to target your users. It also makes it easy to decide what strategy you have to plan and what content you could create to increase your conversions.
When you create a new strategy for your conversions, you could keep track of how your users react. It is something that shows the results of your marketing strategies towards your conversions.
You could create conversion goals and check the success rate.
For example, you have created a strategy for abandoned carts in your ecommerce app; you can create a goal to track how many abandoned carts are revisited.
This tool is perfect for measuring the right stuff and gathering insights, which helps you choose the right strategy you have created for conversions.
#4. Run A/B tests by conducting quantitative and qualitative research
A/B testing is a part of the development which primarily focuses on knowing what works for your mobile app and what doesn’t.
A mobile app developer creates two versions of the same app page but implements the one which gets more results; the results are nothing but conversions.
This is how A/B testing looks:
A/B testing focuses on elements that make your app work. Things like content, colors, text and pictures, buttons, navigation of one page to other options, features are all experimented with to provide the best user experience to the user, expecting a better conversion rate at the end.
You cannot create two random pages and choose one out of them.
It will help if you do proper research in-advance on what is working and what is not, what’s trending, and what’s not.
Since the user experience is given the most critical role in conversions, you need to keep your app attractive yet straightforward to make your conversions.
#5. Create a repeatable and systematic CRO (conversion rate optimization) process
After all the hard work you do and get some results finally and gain some momentum in conversions, you should not relax. You need to make a note of what worked and keep the practice going.
You need to repeat the conversion process to keep the CRO working for you.
- Make a note of what worked for you and what did not, and keep the elements that worked in your next strategy or even improvising them is a better idea unless your customers don’t mind.
- Your app needs to be 80% efficient and 20% fun. Since people are not robots, they lose concentration in no time, so you can’t make them concentrate more than they want to.
- Don’t make all elements active, don’t place lots of information on one screen, instead keep it clear with less but informative content.
It is okay to repeat the strategies that gave you success, but you also need to keep an eye on trending. Because there could be something new which people like now and not the old strategy you’ve been using anymore.
Conclusion
The role of conversion optimization indeed plays a significant part in your app’s growth and success. It is the best methodology that works to increase an app’s conversions. There may not be instant results, but the practice, if implemented correctly, brings better and much effective conversion rate optimization for a mobile app.
Most app owners do not realize the importance of conversion optimization, and few of them ignore it. In the end, they get a product that does not bring any business and conversion.
If you have observed the most successful apps like Snapchat, Facebook, or Instagram, they have regular conversion strategies. From redesigning to fixing minor bugs, they do it all to make the app something which people cannot resist, and the results are visible. Similarly, if you such results for your app, optimizing it for defined factors would help you in the long run.
About the Author!
Mohit Maheshwari is Chief Strategist at NMG Technologies, a full service IT Company offering android and IOS mobile app development services. He has been in the industry since 2000 and focuses on long-term strategies, intuitive user experience, and successful customer acquisition. Follow Mohit on Twitter and LinkedIn.