How successful apps earn their place on a user’s home screen while earning innovators a return on their investment.

If you’re getting ready to launch a new app, you already know that competition is fierce.

With an average of 988 new apps released on the iOS Apple App Store every day, user experience is critical, and differentiation is paramount. Only 9% of people will stay on a mobile app if it provides a poor experience.

The good news is that mobile app downloads have grown 23.3% since the pandemic and there are proven ways to enhance your UX to make a great first impression.

Here are four ways successful apps earn their place on a user’s home screen while earning innovators a return on their investment.

Make A Proper Introduction.

Onboarding is not just a way to help users get familiar with your app interface.  It’s an opportunity to help users develop a clear understanding of your value proposition. When deploying your how-to instructions, focus messaging on the benefits that users get from your product’s unique features and don’t forget to reinforce the solution you are providing. You are also starting to collect data at this point. Think ahead about what you want to measure and what information might be helpful to personalize the user’s experience in the future. It’s important to balance information with simplicity. Don’t ask for more than you need. 

An Onboarding Experience That We Love:

Duolingo provides an example of effective onboarding. The home screen starts with their mission, introduces you to their mascot, and quickly directs you to set your individual goals and align your experience level with the product. They need to collect a fair amount of information to put you on the right education track, so they incorporated graphics, sounds, and icons in place of the standard multiple-choice questionnaire. It feels personal. You get the sense you’ve started your journey before completing your first lesson. Clear copy, bold buttons, status bars, and a little extra motivation from Duo (the owl) keep users moving forward through the process.    

Personalize and Automate.  

Why is mobile app personalization imperative? Your prospects want it. Personalized communications drive users to your app because they are both relevant and helpful. The reasons to automate: necessity and scale.  The key role of any mobile marketing automation platform is to help you optimize your customer lifecycle. Utilize tools that allow you to trigger your emails and push notifications based on specific user behaviors. Notifications can be both powerful and annoying so be sure that your messages are both timely and personal.

Real-World Example:

Nike Run Club uses data to personalize your in-app experience with tailored recommendations, suggestions, and notifications. Bonus: if you drop off from your usual routine, the app doesn’t assume laziness. Instead, it checks in with you to see if stress or an injury might be changing the way you work out. 

Dig Into The Data.

Customer feedback and your app’s analytics are your new best friends. Listen to your customers and remember that the data doesn’t lie. App Analytics can include app marketing analytics, in-app analytics, and app performance analytics. There are thousands of data points available to examine to determine what to change, where maintenance is required, and what works. Be obsessed with understanding individual user behavior and become an expert at identifying trends. Ongoing product optimization always leads to good things.  

Spend time getting to know your users before planning your app’s onboarding flow. There’s no need to build custom marketing and communications tools, there are plenty of options for automation. Explore what’s available for your industry online and learn everything you can from your product analytics. 

Drive Engagement With Music.

Let’s face it, users either love your app or they delete it. We’ve crunched the numbers and found one surprisingly simple solution to boost metrics sustainably across every phase of the acquisition funnel, which is to implement in-app music. We analyzed real engagement data from real apps, including a suite of leading fitness apps hosting more than 400,000 user sessions per week. All in all, the results were eye-opening across all four major categories of app metrics: frequency of use, session times, conversion, and long-term retention.

Are you offering in-app purchases? Music is performance-enhancing when paired with shopping.

Developing a game? Make the most of every moment. Don’t overlook music as a key feature of your introduction, tutorial, and menu screens. Start setting the tone the minute a new user engages.

Launching a fitness or dance app? Music is a powerful motivational tool. Stock music isn’t going to cut it; you’ll need popular music for proof of concept.  

Music Matters:

The team at Artie knew they faced an uphill battle to license music. “Before Adaptr, I was terrified,” says Artie founder and CEO Ryan Horrigan. “I realized there was no good solution. I'd have to license bad public domain songs for our first game.” With Adaptr, Artie is able to use music that boosts engagement and appeals to the game’s target audience.

Putting It All Together.

By putting the user first and aligning your onboarding messaging with your mission, you’re setting everyone up for success. Take the time to align with available tools for personalized automation and tracking. Go beyond downloads as you plan your data points and goals for user behavior and include frequency, session time, and in-app actions. Don’t forget to source quality music (legally) that reflects your brand, connects with your key audience, and encourages users to interact with your app in ways that support your goals. Test, measure, and optimize to keep users coming back for more.

About Adaptr

Licensing music is easier today than ever before. With Adaptr, new apps and startups addressing the US market can integrate rights-cleared music playback via a set of SDKs at an appropriate price point (under $100/month to start). And importantly, Adaptr takes care of all usage, reporting, and royalty administration, one crucial, legal, and complex step that’s often neglected when planning for licensed music use. The impact of music integration has been proven across a variety of apps.

Try Adaptr’s quick-to-market solution for new apps. All the music is pre-cleared, and the native SDKs are ready for you to implement and start testing today.