Dear Diary,
This week i've been thinking a lot. I like tossing around thoughts in my head. So i've been watching over some numbers and every time i look at them, they drive me bonkers.
There's this app i'm working on. Whenever i check its stats i see, people download it everyday 7-10 times.But the uninstall rate is also similar. So the net effect is 1-2 download per day. Imagine how many people uninstall per month. Imagine if, for some magical reason, we found out why they were uninstalling and suddenly the uninstall rate is 0. Gawd, i already have heart emoji shining in my eyes.
So I dug down to check why people behave the way they behave. Why do people uninstall apps..For that matter, why do people install apps in the first place?
To answer the 1st q, it Seems like in 2019 its very hard to keep up people's attention. you literally have to fight with the other apps to gain the user's love. In 2015 alone there were 1000 apps being released in the app store. Imagine 4 years later. Sometimes, I feel this whole app industry is a bubble waiting to burst.
The main reason people uninstalled them was because of too many push notifications and begging them for rating in-app. But no notification was also a problem, as without notifications people forget about the existence of the app in their phone and hence deleted it after a while.
Then the usual targets, like bad ui and ux came, slow load time, too much memory requirement and so on. I dont think we fare poor in any of these sections, even though we do have some inconsistency issues between web and mobile. Does Google punish people for that?
I recently came across the google material design website. It has a treasure trove of info regarding UI design. I want to learn some stuff from it. I still have an intuition we can make the app prettier without making it trashy, but right now, I have no knowledge to provide evidence for my intuition. So let me give it a try.
We dont give intrusive ads, we're not creeps when it comes to handling users' privacy, we dont have bad grammar or spelling the last time i checked.
Do people have a bad time signing up, is the onboarding difficult,..are they aware of all the features in the app..or are we doing a bad job with the icons. Do people go,..'oh i didnt know i could do this'..a lot? I dont think so, but again I dont have any data to back up.(I did observe one incident of that happening though)
And coming to installing, people don't mostly install after reading the whole description, carefully evaluating the store listing elements and all. According to market researchers, they Glance through the icon, and the headline, go over the screenshots and make a quick decision. So those screenshots are really important. It's beginning to show the difference on our side too.
The evaluation is happening after the app download, mostly. Again research says, after a week, only 10-20 per cent of the original downloaders remain. It may be hard to grasp, but people install apps just for the curiosity of checking it out. it's not a carefully thought out decision. And if they dont see the hype in the app store listing being real in the app, they uninstall. Means they didnt get the value they expected. Year by year, people's app expectations are going up. So it's getting harder and harder to make them excited by app features.
This is the hardest thing to accept. That people may choose something else over this baby. But its the reality of the world. People don't want to settle, given a choice they always go for whatever they think as best. Unique value proposition comes into play here ( if it's done right)
I know, the marketing effort has been lazy. but I'm experimenting with different channels. FB seems to be the unexpected surprising winner in this case. idk why. I was puzzled. I also ran a store listing experiment last week, and even though it's not complete, the results so far have been the exact opposite of what I predicted. it just goes to show why in any situation, it's always safe to validate a hypothesis by real-life testing than going straight with intuition. You can never fully predict human psychology. Its the 8th wonder of the world.
Today, Swapnil went over the app listing and said, 'it's nice'. That's great if someone who works over these details on a daily basis think it's nice.
I came across this guy called Ankit Srivastava who built a music app and gained 4 mil downloads in 2 years. He's a hyped digital marketer now. He 's also a self-proclaimed zero dollar marketer. It means he does all his marketing efforts spending 0 dollars on paid advertising. Every download comes from organic methods. He says he sent 4000 emails to youtubers and influencers to review his app every day. And some other seo and social marketing stuff. I get his tactics. I got some good ideas from them. But did he really send 4000 emails every day?
And a few other things too, aggressively messaging people in FB groups,..like 100s every day.
dude, please.
Unless he automated the process. Everyone knows that's a bad idea.Idk mayb its not such a bad idea. Its hard to believe he didn't do atleast advertising for 10 rs. Its very much possible on the net. Anyways, Who am I to judge the 4 mils download guy?
I know as a marketer, we're supposed to inflate numbers but this is just crazy. But the techniques he mentioned are good anyway. So I wanna go over them. I think now I've have an ok idea of how all these things are tied up. I'm still learning, but I feel the pieces are slowly coming together.
The needle isn't moving fast enough, but its ok,..lets see how things unfold.