More purchases. Bigger upsells. Larger returns.

These are the goals of any team. But as we all know, the path to monetization and recurring revenue isn’t the same for every app. And no matter what your industry, it’s nearly impossible to increase revenue without a clear understanding of individual customer interests, needs, and goals, and the greater app market.

The facts are clear:

  • The global app store reached $101B in sales in 2018, up 75% from 2016 (App Annie)
  • Projections show the app store growing 5x as fast as the overall global economy, with revenues reaching $120B in revenue in 2019 (App Annie)
  • Games accounted for 74% of global app store spend in 2018 (App Annie)
  • Play Market, App Store, Microsoft Store, Amazon Appstore, and BlackBerry World offer users instant access to over 7 million apps (Statista)

This research shows continued promise in the app market. But with the majority of spend coming from mobile games, the stakes can feel high for brands across verticals. And with millions of apps to choose from, most users will leave after just one lackluster experience with an app. But the key to success is all in your strategy. Years of experience have shown us there are four tactics proven to help global brands win the fight for market share:
 

Use First and Third Party Data to Your Advantage

Remember a time when mom and pop shops knew customers as individuals, inspiring a loyalty that would last decades? Since greater loyalty means more revenue, shares, and word-of-mouth recommendations, it’s within your best interest to use contextual, first party data, like individual interests and actions, and third party data, like age and location, to create and deliver a digital equivalent to these mom and pop experiences.

Pairing third party data with first party data makes your messaging deeply personal and profitable. Evidence shows that a deeply personalized and hyper relevant campaign will almost always outperform one that is nonspecific and not tailored to individual customer interests, needs, and goals. And if you’re looking to cross-sell items, more and more of today’s additional purchases are selected based on data-driven recommendations made in the app.

Our platform streams billions of these data points in real time for this reason. We use behavior histories and profile data from virtually any service or system to maximize the potential of your customer data, and combine it with your mobile, web, and/or TV app SDK app data in Swrve. And unlike other solutions who see only the outer shell of a new event (like “searched for tickets”), Swrve targets and triggers on granular details inside the event (like “searched for first-class flights from JFK to LHR 3x last week”). Because the more data you have to make messaging more relevant, the better your off your bottom line will be.
 

A/B Test Purchase Experiences & Optimize with High-Performing Content

There’s something to be said about experimentation. Watching how new copy, design, and UX frameworks perform in real time can be its own thrill. Not to mention the surprise one feels at uncovering the hidden profit in long-shot variants, all while discovering that tried-and-true methods may not be so true after all.

Testing reveals value. The more you uncover about what will actually get your audience to click, convert, and make repeat purchases, the more you can influence future campaigns. And remember that context is important: what performed well for a paid subscription campaign may not work for an upsell campaign. The trick is to continuously test, collect insights, and iterate on your checkout, paywall, and repeat-purchase experiences. After uncovering what works across campaigns, use your highest-performing variables to optimize new experiences, and watch your revenue rise.

Global brands use Swrve to test as many as 99 UX resource variants at a time to reveal number of users who engage, behaviors that follow, and revenue generated by variant. One major global publisher used A/B testing in Swrve to iterate on their highest-performing paywall campaign, a move that increased total subscription revenues by 20% in a single business quarter.

Gain Return on Relevance (ROR) with a Real-time Approach

The moment to monetize is always fleeting. With customers moving at the speed of now across channels, their expectations for immediacy and expediency are higher than ever. Miss the boat (or show up just a second too late), and you’ve missed your chance at a purchase or an upsell. That’s why it’s so important for your brand to be relevant in real time.

Real-time relevance for global brands means being omnipresent wherever a customer is across the digital ecosystem (scrolling on mobile, exploring the web, etc.) with a message that’s meaningful and valuable to them at the exact moment they’re most likely to engage and make a purchase, at scale. It may sound like a fictional dream world, but global brands across industries are already doing this, and collecting major market share because of it.

The secret is having the ability to identify, interpret, and anticipate customer needs as they occur live and in the moment. Brands who’ve embraced this shift have seen revenue growth 3x faster and profit growth over 200x faster than the S&P 500. We refer to this as return on relevance, or ROR. Swrve is the only customer engagement solution that allows brands to send better, not more, customer touches in real time, at exact moments of live engagement—linking that relevance to measurable business outcomes and ROR for our customers.

Master the Art of Gamification

That stat about mobile games accounting for 74% of global app spend was true, but this isn’t a dealbreaker for other verticals. If nothing else, it’s a learning opportunity.

Today’s most popular brands have mastered the art of gamification, the technique that uses typical elements of mobile app gameplay (like points, competition with others, rules of play, etc.) in non-games related activity to encourage ROI-driven engagement. This technique can hook new users in from the start, and keep them engaged and making more purchases over time. How could you effectively gamify experiences in any app? Glad you asked:

  • Create a point system that rewards users for relevant behaviors, repeated actions, milestones, etc.
  • Inform users of experiences/exclusives/content they’ve earned based on their real-time behaviors, individual interests, and past actions
  • Surprise and delight users with loyalty rewards at optimal times of engagement
  • Bring lapsed users back to the app with limited-time, premium user experiences
  • Give users the opportunity to earn discounts or user exclusives through competition with other app users

There’s no doubt that you’ll see significant results using the tactics listed, and I encourage you to give them a try to see the power of real-time relevance in action.

Stay tuned for more insights like these in our ongoing Swrve Customer Journey blog series. In our next post we’ll be exploring:

  • Acquisition-driven customer advocacy

And if you want to skip ahead to see real-time relevance happening across journeys in action, sign up to demo Swrve today.