5 New Year’s Resolutions For Your App To Succeed In 2014
We all make New Year’s resolutions – to lose weight, to read more, to spend more time with friends. Shouldn’t your app be doing the same? Every single mobile app needs tweaks and updates to keep them relevant and on top of the charts. It’s time to pick out your resolution for a successful 2014 in the app stores!
1. Be a better listener. Your consumers are giving you feedback in the app store and on your social media accounts. Are you listening to what they’re saying? Are you actively making changes based on their complaints and praises? Many developers include an email in their app where their users can send comments without leaving negative ratings in the app store.
Find where your users are talking about your app, then carefully read what they’re saying. Are they all having issues in the same place? Is there a pattern to the bugs they’re reporting? Pay attention and make changes to fix the problems they’re reporting, or develop new features based on their requests. Once you’ve done so, don’t hide your work! Thank your users in your update message, and share the update on social media.
2. Make new friends. Before you launch an update, have beta testers spend time with your app and get their opinions on how easy it is to use the update. Invest in tools like TestFlight and test your updates over and over. Consumers will be more positive about your app when it’s the best it can be.
When you look for beta testers, try and find a broad spectrum of consumers to work with. Your tech-savvy friends and co-workers might navigate your app with greater ease than a child, or someone who has never seen your app. Walk through the app with someone with less app experience and see where they get confused or stuck. Consider ways to make the experience more fluid.
You can also use more formal beta testing services like app.io or Mechanical Turk, which provide great feedback for a small price. Wherever you get your testers, it is important to test. Fresh eyes will see things that you, as the developer, have not.
3. Value the precious moments. Every update you put out is an opportunity to speak directly to your consumer. Don’t waste it by writing something as simple as ‘bug fix’; use it as a branding location and speak directly to your consumer about what you’re doing to make their lives easier. Invite the user to return to the app. Update messages and push notifications are a great place to exert your branding – make sure you do it.
4. Make smart business connections. Give yourself the flexibility to do advertising campaigns by adding in SDKs. Integrating with SDKs like Flurry and Appsflyer gives you the option to promote your app at any time – even if you don’t think you’ll need advertising, it’s better to have the ability to advertise whenever you want than to have to wait to update and add the SDK.
Many of the SDKs that ad networks use also allow you to track certain user behavior, or send push notifications to your users. These SDKs can give you better insight into your users – and it might even give you a better idea of how to target ads when you do start a media campaign.
5. Study harder. Install tracking SDKs like Appboy to learn where your users stop using the app. Focus on places where people drop out of the app and make that process easier. See any data you get from this tracking as an on-going beta test and continue to make adjustments to your app for frequent and helpful updates. Even if your consumers aren’t leaving reviews or comments, with tracking SDKs you can find out where your users are having the most issues and where they’re spending most of their time. Now that the app is in the app store, it’s not just your app – it’s your user’s app as well. Adjust the app to meet their use and their needs.
Source : Mobidev
