You may be wondering if going through the trouble of creating an app for popular mobile platforms such as Android or iOS is a good idea for a small business. While it may sound obvious to some people, a quick look at how much time and money you’ll need to build a good application, plus the fact that people only use about a fifth of their installed apps regularly may be off-putting to some.
This is where a good marketing campaign and effective advertising techniques come in handy, to make sure your fledgling app takes off and soars over mediocrity, and truly works as a useful took in building long-term relationships with customers and clients. Small business will also have to pay attention to success factors such as level of engagement, app downloads, profitability and overall revenue.
Businesses large and small are keen to spend money in acquisition, and they keep a close eye on how that spend gets ROI over the years. This principle holds the same for building an app- A/B user experiences, in-app messages and push notifications are elements that need to be gauged in order to determine how effective they are in reaching that target audience, and if the money used for marketing automation is well spent.
How to Measure ROI
Investing in a great marketing platform can really boost important mobile metrics such as customer retention and audience engagement, which naturally leads to an increase in revenue. This is the easiest and the best way to determine ROI, as it leads to a metric increase like ARPU, or average revenue per user. The more that small business owners check this statistic with other control variables, the more they can estimate the value and ROI.
ARPU shouldn’t be just the metric we should look at in terms of apps over several mobile platforms. There are some more out there, some of which we can measure to gauge the level of success. Whether or not marketers can put in a tangible value depends on what they think of as important. Finally, the analytics engine should coincide well into the campaign platform to get the best results.
Level of Campaign
If the first method of measuring ROI isn’t enough, then you can focus on smaller, individual campaigns to get a feel of your mobile marketing ROI. In this way, you can easily see how relevant the changes you have implemented is according to the campaigns delivered and apps created.
Hopefully all goes well and the campaign clearly shows how much ROI is grown via comparison between a control and an uplift group. From there, you can use various tools to measure and understand the overall benefit. Keep in mind that sometimes improvements might slip through, such as growth via word of mouth due to an enhanced app experience or other seemingly small factors.
A good advice is to focus on which metric you want to improve upon and the kind of success you wish to see before embarking on a mobile app campaign. After the campaign, measure ROI by comparing the campaign costs with the marketing results. Don’t be so hasty as to run campaigns without thinking about what you need the marketing campaign for- the end result might not be as accurate or as honest as you’d like.
