Do you remember the last time you were searching for a mobile application? And now recognize how many suggestions you saw for the single search, whether it was an Android or iOS platform. As the number of mobile applications is increasing on both iOS and Android platforms, there are now too many options available for the user to choose from. No matter how good your app is, another app might just take their attention away if its listing looks good.
Now the mobile app owners have found that their cost per user acquisition is also increasing, with a decline in their organic reach. At the conditions, when your marketing efforts are going in vain, organic search, and paid ads are losing their effectiveness, then you need to delve for the other strategies to increase the user growth. One such strategy is referral marketing. In this article, we are going to tell you about the referral marketing strategy, their challenges, and tips about them.
What is referral marketing?
Referral marketing is like a mouth-to-mouth marketing, compelling your existing users to promote your app to their kith and kin for some benefits. There are benefits for both the referring person and referred entity. Mouth-to-mouth marketing is considered as the strongest marketing tactic. A person trusts the most known people when looking for any service or product, same goes with a mobile application. In the mobile application, the benefit could be monetary, coupon codes, cashback, etc.
Read more: 7 Pre-Launch and Post-Launch Mobile App Mistakes to Avoid
Benefits of using Referral Program
Provides visible results
You can get easy measurable results in the form of expansion of the user base and garnering a great percentage of users who are active and loyal to the app. A well-designed referral program can bring a great appreciation for your mobile application. The concept is to make each of your users a promoter for your app and offering them incentives for the job. These results can then be analyzed to foretell the number of potential users that lie in your app’s future.
Build Trust
The customers trust your app as it has been referred by their friend or family. This referral policy creates a feeling of community among the users. If your friend uses an app, you can also start using it. As per research, 92 per cent of the respondents trusted referrals from people they knew.
Low costing
Referral programs can initially seem expensive but they cost less in comparison to other marketing strategies. The referral policy works in the long run and builds a chain of users who continuously refer others and they refer to others. The cost per acquisition of each news is also quite lower.
Lower App Churn Rate
No user will spam his friends or family. Hence, you can be sure that the referred person by a user will also use your app. Thus, you are overcoming the most important obstacle i.e. reaching the right audience. Referred users are 18% more loyal than those acquired through other channels of marketing.
Read more: The Importance of Flexibility in Mobile App Development
Better Retention Rate
When you get a lower churn rate, you have time for understanding the exact requirements of the users of your app. You get to analyze their experiences and find solutions to influence their interactions and app sessions. This improves your customer retention rate as well.
Tips for referral programs
Come up with low acquisition costs
With any marketing campaign, the cost is the primary factor whether to adopt it or not. You need to analyze how much it will cost to acquire a new customer. But if the costs are too high, then you are jeopardizing your business. Hence, you need to be sure how much and how many incentives you can provide for referrals. In the past, many companies have faced serious trouble for providing too many incentives.
Timing is everything
You have launched your application. Now you should release your referral program? No. Not now! You should not immediately begin the referral program immediately after launching the app but you shouldn’t wait too long either. Launching the referral program too soon implies that your initial customers are not loyal to your app and have not engaged yet. They will not have a reason yet to refer anyone as they don’t even know if they want to continue using your app.
On the other side, if you wait too long, then probably the users will stop using it, will forget about it, and probably one day will uninstall your app. Hence, the right timing matters most. For this, you need to keep an eye on the app analytics. Find the time when the number of the download is good and there are plenty of daily engaged users. This is the best time to launch your referral program. This will maximize the growth of your program as well as the success of your app and brand.
Read more: Automation Testing Process – Ways To Calculate The Cost & Expected ROI
Leverage Push Notifications
After setting up the referral program, you need to tell your audience about the referral app benefits. Currently, the best way for this is push notifications. You can use push notification once or twice a day and tell users about the incentives they can get for every app referral. Remember, sending too many notifications is quite annoying.
Take benefit of all possible channels
You can’t limit yourself on push notifications for advertising your referral program. Instead, you must take leverage of every possible channel you can think of. Make a banner on your website, prepare social media posts to highlight your referral policy.
You can also get in contact with every social influencer for promoting your referral program and can make videos on Youtube to promote it. Don’t forget about email marketing either. When people download your app, you probably had them create a profile before they could get started.
Make Changes
In the referral policy you can begin with high lucrative incentives for up to a period of time, and can decrease them gradually thereafter. It will lessen your referral marketing costs and will create a sense among the users to refer immediately else they will get a lower incentive.
Read more: Agile Testing: How QA Works When Your Team Goes Agile
Wrapping Up
Referral policy has been an important marketing tool for apps like Swiggy, Uber, Ola, Phonepe, Paytm, and many others. At Amplework Software, the best mobile app development company in India, we are having the mobile app developers who can implement whatever marketing strategy you prefer, and amazing app development.
