If you manage an app or digital product, you'll often be developing and launching new features. The thing is, ”product” is often disconnected from marketing, and releasing new features without promoting them properly hurts your return on investment.
This article covers eleven ways you can promote your feature effectively without breaking the bank, tapping into the skills of both your product and marketing people.
Before we dig into it, let's recap on the benefits we're looking for when promoting a feature.
What are the benefits of promoting a feature?
Modern product teams aren't "feature factories" shipping stuff on a whim; they want to create positive outcomes for the business. So promoting your app properly should align with the outcomes directly. This isn't rocket science, so here are the benefits you'll get from good feature promotion:
- More user satisfaction: Your feature is hopefully doing something useful.
- Higher user retention: If they like it, they come back.
- More organic growth. People tend to talk about things they get value from.
- Better ROI: You invested in building it, so all of the above should mean it generates more revenue.
Right, let's take a look at the steps.
Eleven steps to promoting your app
It's worth saying that our very own Lucy Beldon made me aware of these steps when she was working on launching an AI-enhanced feature for a health app. Credit where credit's due.
This list might seem overwhelming, so keep in mind you don't have to do all of these.
1. Request a nomination for a 'Featured' item on the app store
If you hit the jackpot and get nominated for App of the Day, expect to see a 700% increase in downloads that day. This can slightly lower your customer acquisition costs, and reduce your dependency on paid adverts.
2. Run an in-app event (App Store)
If done well, you'll get more people browsing your app and potentially 2x your explore acquisitions. The content can also be reused on social, email and push campaigns, as mentioned below.
3. Create promotional content (Play Store)
Google Play's promotional content system enables targeted promotion of time-sensitive updates, offers, and major features to specific user segments. If you utilise promotional content, you can experience over twice as many explore acquisitions while featuring windows compared to those that don't.
4. Update app description for ASO (both stores)
Well optimised app store pages see 12% increases in downloads on average. In some cases, this can be as high as 450%. ASO can be a great organic way to gain new users for some apps, therefore reducing your customer acquisition costs.
5. Update app screenshots (both stores) + exploring a video preview
Research shows that users form opinions within 50 milliseconds based on visuals alone, making screenshots critical for first impressions. Good app screenshots on your app store pages can provide 20%-40% increase in conversion rates.
6. Create a blog post for the website (user-facing)
Content marketing is another organic method, enabling you to drive traffic to the app store from your blog. This gives lower customer acquisition costs compared to paid advertising. Blogs also help build long-term brand equity, especially if you write evergreen content.
7. Create social media posts for your channels
Social networks like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok can give you low-cost and high-reach, driving traffic to your app store pages. So it's another route to low-cost customer acquisition.
8. Craft an email to your newsletter database
Bit of an obvious one, but if you have a subscriber base for your app users, notifying them of what's new can help re-engage people, reduce subscriber churn and increase feature adoption.
9. Create a What's New update inside the app
We're big fans of showing a banner to notify people of new features and changes inside the app. It helps existing users see that you're constantly pushing things forward. This can reduce subscriber churn and drive up feature adoption.
10. Post an in-app message
In-app messages are the popups you often see when you return to an app. Using them to promote your feature can be good "belt-and-braces " for those who already use the app daily, but might not have seen the announcement in other places. Check out our article on mobile marketing tech if you want to see platforms that make this easier.
11. Run a small push notification campaign to educate users about it
For those that stopped using your app, this can be a great way to pull them back to check it out. Sometimes a new feature can be enough to sway them into using it again.
12. Run app install campaigns to drive new user acquisition
If you're not opposed to paid advertising, running Meta, Google or App Store ads can help make people aware of your new feature and pull them in to giving your app a try, making it a great user acquisition tool. Paid advertising doesn't work for all apps, we have built a calculator on Appflows to help you understand if yours is a good fit.
Hopefully that's all useful. So, where to start with all this?
Some tips to get started
As I said earlier, you don't have to do it all - there's quite a lot of skills needed across content marketing, paid media, push campaigns etc. So, pick a starting point and do what you can.
Remember, there's ROI in all those things, and once you've done the hard work of crafting the messaging and assets, many can be shared across the different steps.
If you're thinking "We can't afford the time/money to do all this!", then give me a shout and I'll see if we can help; We offer a monthly mobile growth service to our clients, starting at £3,000 a month. If necesary, we're a tech team so can help you get ready, too. That means setting up all the infrastructure you need to make this work; data analytics, acquisition funnels, push messaging systems an in-app messages.
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