BY
Article originally published on Forbes Argentina
Making a successful application requires a lot of work and effort that demands a lot of experience, and a delicate process of trial and error to understand what the market needs and values must ere now.
This work is framed in maintaining the life cycle of an application, to allow it to develop and achieve an explosion, keep the productive life cycle by as much time as possible and, ideally, that the success of an application allows distributed the next application that generates the next hit.
Whatever the application or the market you want to reach, there are four essential functions to be measured and solve like a mathematical equation. As with the legs of a table, it takes all. In this case all must reach a certain level of development.
These four legs of the table are:
1.USABILITY
When a user uses an application first has a few second of attention to determine what it is, how it works. How to play, if it is a game
In those first moments are being played all the previous effort made for the user to download the app and activate it.
If the application does not respond intuitively and easy usability, all the previous effort is wasted.
There is not manually possible help. That’s the moment of truth, in wh eel user has little patience.
As in business – as in almost all aspects of life-just a chance to create a good first impression.
2. DISTRIBUTION
Distribution is the necessary work that the company has to do to get to the apparatus aterir time. It is the stage of promotion and marketing plan.
The 3 ways are complementary manhood and published press.
2.1 Virality -. Is The ability to convince users to generate a recommendation using the product to their friends, known to us entrojo. It is, by far, the most effective advertising and wash, more difficult to achieve.
The first logical step in this case is to remove all obstacles and brakes that the user has to recommend it to your friends and look for the wagging make it easier, giving the list of friends, connecting them via Facebook, posting on Twitter, sending e-mails , SMS and calls to tele phonic … Reduce friction is a necessary but not sufficient, something difficult to achieve this is to generate stimulus and incentive for the user to generate motivation. A good secret is to appeal to the ego, vanity or sense of competence.
If we achieve this and we achieved a high rate of virility, in which each new user recommends another who choose to download the application, not yet solved the problem as a whole, because if we have few users, cans of growth will be also very low .
2.2 Advertising -. Is More controllable because it depends mainly on direct investment. Through the purchase of advertising in digital media we can secure the first generation of users, that if we have a good usability and expose them to the virility of the application could spread her feel the use of the application.
The efficiency of the advertising is not measured by the cost per contact op or the pattern, but the cost of acquiring a customer (CPA) to install and use the application. This e calculated by dividing the cost of each advertising campaign by the number of users who brings the action. The lower the CPA, the more efficient action.
2.3 Press. – It’s the third method of distributing an application. This means defining the attractiveness you can have for your audience the app developer and all you can do is to work with journalists to find facilitares “compressible” excuses that are appealing. The attractiveness of the press is the low direct cost, but its deficiency are sore from control over the actions and little guarantee of success.
3. Monetization
The economic success of an application and its ability to reinvest in advertising campaign and press actions is measured by the degree of monetization of an application and the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) it generates.
These are the most common ways of monetization:
3.1 Advertising Revenue
It is the most common method of monetization, in which the user is exposed to see published within the application. When the user is interested in a product we lose as a user goes to another service application. If you are not interested, we irritate him.
Usually advertising applications distracted, irritated and undermines the usability and user loyalty. It is usually a good practice, not always respected, ask the lizard if you want to stop seeing the Publish for a change to purchase a premium version free ads.
The metric measurement is the inverse of the advertising revenue per 1,000 impressions that the user sees. Usually, the money paid by the owner, 60% goes to the middle, in this case the application, but if there are many intermediaries this value could be reduced to half.
3.2 Income from shock or premium versions
Income from discharge is generated when the lizard has to pay a one-time price pair downloading the application many times as desired. This method may be an additional strategy or advertising revenues could be the only strategy you have. The application i Billionaire, for instance, charges $ 3 per download to track the portfolio of billionaires. From this revenue the appstores (Apple, Google and others) are left with 30% of collection management.
3.3 Purchases within the app (in app purchase)
The method of procurement within the application is generated when the user, after testing the application, you realize that could significantly enhance your experience with a minimum outlay of money, a figure that usually is almost negligible. These improvements may be of benefit above their opponents blocked or new functionalities in the basic free versions.
This income also taxed 30% commission to the App Store, who are faced with collection management, expense payments and credit card billing customer.
3.4 Subscription
The alternative method to the above is the monetization of subscription. Is that often use the content generating applications where the saurian pay a monthly fee, usually charged by outside appstores and not suffer withholding thereof.
In this case, the owner of the application must deal cela collection management. It is a method used by some digital versions of media as The New York Times or The Economist, for example.
4. ENGAGEMENT, STICKINESS, LOYALTY AND ADDICTION
The last factor to develop is to mediate the recurrent use of apliaciñon number of sessions in use and the duration of each session.
All actions that developers test and measure are intended to stimulate tiempoque is dedicated to the use of the application, since it generates more advertising exposure, increasing ARPU and rising tennis manhood.
The other aspect refers to the frequency of use between one session and the next is stimulated through alert messages, or sounds that remind the user can reuse the application and increase the ARPU of the user base.
Any improvement in the degree of relationship with the user (engagement), or that the user stays “stuck” more time in each session (stickiness), increase product loyalty or get to develop some kind of “addiction”, they will make all other product metrics significantly improve and increase business.
CONCLUSION
Developing a good application requires an interdisciplinary team that is capable of handling these four aspects of business. The attraction is that whoever can do will have the ability to access global direct customers without relying on anyone but his team and the desire and needs of users. This seems simple, is not as common in most businesses.
Here the only barrier to entry is implementation capacity and talent of the teams, no matter who they are or where in the world are.