Mobile App Strategy is About More Than Marketing

Think your mobile app strategy is solely about effective marketing? Think again. It’s sometimes hard to see, but mobile app engagement generates exceptional results that eclipse traditional marketing channels such as email. Compared to email, in fact, app engagement can demonstrate 50% higher open rates, 10X higher click-through rates and even 1200% greater conversion. Data and mobile analytics play a key role in realizing your mobile app objectives and success.

Broaden and Personalize, All At Once

Mobile is the front door, side door, back door and garage bay to your business. It can deliver benefits across all operations, especially as the “app-eal” spreads to employees, suppliers and partners with growth in B2B and B2E segments. Wherever your stakeholders are, it’s the only screen that offers the immediacy and contextual understanding so you can reach them when it matters most.

But it also requires fundamentally different approaches to meet mobile’s connection and purpose in peoples’ lives. There’s a much higher bar for personal relevancy. It’s less about what you want to say and more about what they want to hear.

The engagement sweet spot is where those two goals meet. The best apps deliver utility- and value-laden experiences that bind people to brands in ways never possible before.

The Mobile Engagement Gap

While there’s a multitude of mobile channels that can be used to engage your app audience — in-app messaging, message center and even things like mobile wallet (which doesn’t even require an app!) — push notifications are perhaps the most popular and utilized channel by brands.

And while they are not a strategy, push notifications are one of the first and best indicators of whether mobile app initiatives will be successful. Time and time again, we’ve found that app users who opt in to notifications are four times more engaged than users who opt out. They are also retained at more than double the rate of opt-out users.

However, new benchmark data shows that there’s a massive and growing mobile engagement gap. And that’s wherein the issue lies. Across all industries, leading mobile innovators are leaving the competition behind when it comes to growing and engaging a directly addressable audience of their own.

So How Do You Stack Up?

Well, we’ve got good news! Our data scientists and strategic consultants partnered to report on key year-over-year mobile engagement trends using the industry’s largest data set of nearly 3,000 apps and 100 billion notifications sent to more than 500 million users.

They zeroed in on notification opt-in rates, followed by analyzing notification engagement rates. High, medium and low values were calculated using the performance of apps in the 90th, 50th and 10th percentiles, resulting in actionable benchmarks for 15 industries.

Mobile innovators realize the value of data as well as benchmarking their success against their peers. And now, you can too — check out our complete set of benchmark reports to see where your brand fits and opportunities for improvement.