Business of Apps Podcast

#179: App Subscription A/B Testing best practices with Steve P. Young, Founder at App Masters

Like with many things in business, when it comes to app marketing people either rely on data to make decisions or listen to their gut feeling. We are strongly suggesting to do the former, we encourage you to do your best to keep it rational and follow the data, be a scientist in your field.
In this episode, Steve will make the case for you showing what A/B testing reveals about app engagement, paywalls, and more. This episode is special to celebrate the beginning of 2024 - you can either listen it here or actually watch it on our YouTube channel.
Today’s Topics Include:
Steve P. Young background
What is App Masters
What does A/B testing reveal about app engagement?
Is introducing a paywall on onboarding a great idea?
Do discounts for app subscriptions work?
The significance of customization
Hard and soft paywalls
The right number of plans for app subscriptions
What A/B testing tells us about an efficient Call-To-Action
What Steve would like to change about app industry
Takeaways
Links and Resources:
Steve P. Young on LinkedIn
App Masters website
Video version of the episode on YouTube
Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry
Quotes from Steve P. Young:
"Now I had Yeva from Headway, the product manager. And she said when you have a longer onboarding, we've actually seen our clients from their data that longer onboardings actually lead to higher conversions. Yes, there will be more drop offs, but the people actually make it all the way through will actually subscribe. And the people who drop out, they were never probably going to subscribe it anyways. "
"I mean, frankly, in life, just think like a scientist, like everything is an experiment. We have a hypothesis, which may come from our gut, but we're going to test it out, and then we're going to let data decide."
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#178: Using Generative AI to boost your monetization strategy with Jenny Kay Pollock, Mobile App Expert

Generative Pre-trained Transformer or better known to you as ChatGPT. This Generative AI, based on a large language model, was launched by OpenAI on November 30th last year.
You might have heard about OpenAI’s very recent turmoil with its CEO, Sam Altman’s firing and re-hiring 5 days later. Of course such a twist with a company worth 80$ billion grabbed your attention.
Speaking of money - how Generative AI can help you to boost your app’s monetization strategy?
It’s a good question and we have Jenny to help us to figure it out.
Today’s Topics Include:
Jenny Kay Pollock background
Jenny's take on the current state of Generative AI
How app developers and brand can figure out if Generative AI is a good fit for their app
How Generative AI can help with app monetization
How to create effective prompts for Generative AI
What Jenny would like to change about app marketing
Takeaways
Links and Resources:
Jenny Kay Pollock on LinkedIn
A free AI Prompt Engineering worksheet to help you save time and boost app revenue with AI support.
Women and AI (WAAI) on LinkedIn
www.womenandai.com - join a community focused on advancing the field of artificial intelligence by empowering and amplifying the voices of women in technology.
Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry
Quotes from Jenny Kay Pollock:
"AI’s power to drive business growth is exciting! Organizations and individuals can partner with generative AI to create something better or faster!"
"AI is not going to take your job. You’re just going to have to partner with it. Collaborate with the AI to supercharge your efforts."
"The [AI] technology is moving fast and things like corporate governance and legislation can be slow to catch up. Your board should be talking about AI strategy and AI policies."  
"AI is a new frontier and with that comes a new opportunity for more diversity."
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#177: Preventing App Subscriber Churn with Vahe Baghdasaryan, Sr. Growth Marketing Manager at CoinStats

App user acquisition is so important across mobile platforms, countries and languages - we all understand the challenge and significance of connecting your app with users.
We also are pretty familiar, way more than we would like to, with the notion of a mobile app churn.
This infamous situation when people, users of your app you spent so much energy to find, abandon the app.
In this episode, we will be talking about how to prevent app subscriber churn in particular. When people leave your paid app it’s a problem but not as big as when they pay you a subscription fee and they stop using your app.
Today’s Topics Include:
Vahe Baghdasaryan background
What is CoinStats today
What is App Subscriber churn
Unintentional users churn and how to mitigate it
Intentional users churn and how to mitigate it
App Analytics tools Vahe suggests
Switching the tables: the case when Vahe was an app user who was persuaded to stick to the app
Android or iOS?
Leaving his smartphone at home, what features would Vahe miss most?
What features he would like to see added to his smartphone?
Links and Resources:
Vahe Baghdasaryan on LinkedIn
CoinStats company
Vahe's coaching page
Vahe's course
Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry
Quotes from Vahe Baghdasaryan:
"Subscriber churn is inevitable, but implementing the right interventions  can make it healthy."
"Giving this your customers a grace period is always a good idea. Another very important thing here is incorporating life cycle marketing in terms of transactional communication with the users that you fail to charge. For example, if you fail to charge, send them an email notification that says your payment didn't go through. "
"So the biggest takeaway from here is like if you're gonna ask them to update their billing information, there's something that is that has a lot of friction in it. And your strategy should be also how am I gonna like minimize the friction? "
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#176: A Mobile Consumer Behaviors landscape with Paul Neto, co-founder, Chief Marketing Officer at Measure Protocol

Ok, if you work in a brick-and-mortar mall you can see your customers in person daily and you even have a chance to know some of them better than others.
If you own a mobile app, you stare at your laptop’s screen and you better have a good consumer intelligence platform in hand to have a clue about what people use your app, so you can serve them well.
In this episode we have Paul to talk about his company’s “AppLife Report 2023 Vol. 2” report that talks about app users’ behavior.
Today’s Topics Include:
Paul Neto's background
What is Measure Protocol today
Bird-view on the AppLife Report 2023 Vol. 2
Generational differences in app preferences
TikTok users' behavior
Customers' journeys
Priority engagement for mobile apps
Top 5 trends
What Paul would like to change about the ad tech today
Android or iOS?
Leaving his smartphone at home, what features would Paul miss most?
What features he would like to see added to his smartphone?
Links and Resources:
Paul Neto on LinkedIn
Measure Protocol company
AppLife Report 2023 Vol. 2
Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry
Quotes from Paul Neto:
" And I think we're just in the early stages and maybe underappreciate some of the changes that are being driven by  TikTok. So, for example, the volume is immense. If you look at younger audiences, they're browsing about 5,400 videos a month. Older audience, it's around, 1,600 videos. That's a massive amount of content. Secondly, actual engagement with the app is, through the ceiling."
"And so we look at what are some of the top apps that people use when they first pick up the phone. And we see often it's for communication for across for all the generations. So things like messaging, Snapchat or even Discord tend to be ranked relatively high, of the reason why you pick up this device. So it often ends up being communication or some kind of entertainment. And entertainment will be things like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. All those tend to bubble to the top."
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#175: Enterprise app development security with Greg Ellis, General Manager, Application Security at Digital.ai

Unless you’re listening to me from Mars or some other planet, you know that today cybersecurity as important as the physical one, they both are intertwined and security breaches are being reported almost daily.
It’s about personal data security on your phone and computer and security of big corporations and non-profit. In this episode, we invited Greg to talk about security in the app development process.
Today’s Topics Include:
Greg Ellis background
What is Digital.ai today
What is DevSecOps, benefits and challenges
Practices and tools for DevSecOps
How to improve app development teams' security performance
How to handle security incidents
What Greg would like to change about the Big Tech today
Android or iOS?
Leaving his smartphone at home, what features would Greg miss most?
What features he would like to see added to his smartphone?
Links and Resources:
Greg Ellis on LinkedIn
Digital.ai company
Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry
Quotes from Greg Ellis:
"We've actually heard of some customers that inadvertently release a non protected application out in the wild. And so you really want to make sure that you've got those tools in place to catch that. But then once the applications themselves are deployed, it's just as important to ensure that those apps are monitored for active attacks and collecting thread analytics and then responding in real time via runtime application self protected and feeding those insights into the next. Devsecop cycle."
"So that human aspect still needs to be in there. And Ai isn't going to necessarily be the end all and be all, but it's there really to augment the work that we're doing and try to reduce our workload. And that combination of Ai technologies and human intelligence really creates a more robust defense against security incidents and vulnerabilities in these mobile app environments."
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#174: Strategies to master retail on mobile with Lexi Sydow Director, Corporate Marketing & Insights at Data.ai

How was your shopping this year? How long is your Amazon 2023 Orders list by now?
Of course it wasn’t only you and it wasn’t only about Amazon (even though you may justifiably have an impression that it’s always about Amazon :-) ) - well, the whole planet went shopping every second on multiple retail apps.
To comprehend that scale we’ve invited Lexi to talk about one of the latest Data.ai reports “Strategies to master retail on mobile”
Today’s Topics Include:
Lexi Sydow background
What is Data.ai today
Strategies to master retail on mobile report overview
Performance Score benchmark
How much time people spent in retail apps in Q3, 2023
Number of downloads for shopping apps in Q3, 2023
Newcomers and surprises on the Top 10 Shopping Apps list
Takeaways
Links and Resources:
Lexi Sydow on LinkedIn
Data.ai company
Strategies to master retail in mobile
Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry
Quotes from Lexi Sydow:
" It (the Performance Score benchmark) basically gives you this sort of compass to see how you're performing in what sectors you might need to improve.
So it's acquisition, engagement, sentiment and monetization of your app. And so you can dive deeper into each of these buckets and see where you might need to focus more on your strategy. And the beauty of this metric is that it is also driven by applied AI and it is a great sort of almost like a credit score for an app."
"So seeing that many new downloads is really impressive because we do see a lot of e commerce players that are coming in now across the spectrum. "
"Shein did something really interesting. Shein is obviously a fast fashion and its targeting tends to be more Millennial women. And they think their app very Instagramable in its presence. It kind of looks like a social app more than a shopping app at time. Even the images of clothes look like an influencer is curating it, not a corporation that's taking it in a room with models, you know, informal."
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#173: The 2023 Customer Engagement Awards with Josh Hollander, Head of Customer Success at OneSignal

Now, of course - the reason number one why we all in business is to make money, so we can put food on our table, right? But every once in a while we’re pleasantly surprised when our efforts, our midnight oil burning moments, brainstorms and nail-biting get rewarded. When we either in-person or virtually awarded with a prize for what we’re trying to be the best in.
So, today Josh will tell us about OneSignal’s The 2023 Customer Engagement Awards.
Today’s Topics Include:
Josh Hollander background
What is OneSignal today
What is The Custom Engagement Awards
The evaluation process for the awards
The winners
Reasons nominees didn't win
What Josh would like to change about the mobile industry
Links and Resources:
Josh Hollander on LinkedIn
OneSignal company
2023 Customer Engagement Award Winners
Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry
Quotes from Josh Hollander:
"For me, it was really about how do we identify people that are moving the needle"
"Ninety plus percent of people who download your app are going to disappear in the first thirty days. How do we move that from ninety percent to eighty five percent?"
"So there's three cardinal sins in customer engagement and with our platform specifically that I always try to coach people away from."
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#172: “RIP Fingerprinting in 2024: How should advertisers prepare?” live event with Branch, InMobi, and MobileGroove

This week we have another special episode for you, featuring our recent live event with Brach, InMobi and MobileGroove.
There are only two months left in 2023 and the most dramatic mobile attribution shift is about to happen - when Apple’s Privacy Manifests and Google’s Android Privacy Sandbox will be coming to life in 2024. For many mobile advertisers it is still uncharted territory and so we've summoned up experts from the leading mobile marketing and attribution platforms to share a strategy to tackle this looming challenge.
It was hosted by Peggy Anne Salze of MobileGroove and the guests were: Adam Landis, of Branch, Sergio Serra of InMobi DSP.
Links and Resources:
Adam Landis on LinkedIn
Branch company
Sergio Serra on Linkedin
InMobi DSP company
Peggy Anne Salz on Linkedin
MobileGroove company
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#171: 2023 Mobile UA and Monetization landscape with Renz Gonzales, Head of Biz Dev at PropellerAds

October of 2023 is almost over, Halloween is just a week away, Thanksgiving and Black Friday are coming - in other words we are closing this year. So we decided to take a look at what mobile user acquisition and monetization techniques worked this year.
Head of Biz Dev at PropellerAds, Renz is here to give us a tour.
Listeners can use the promo code BOAPROP to get  a $35 bonus* with $150 (or more) deposit for PropellerAds new clients.
 
*not available for wire transfers
Today’s Topics Include:
Renz Gonzales''s background
What is  PropellerAds today
2023 Best-performing ad formats and channels
UA campaign efficiency improvement
Improving app monetization
The role of Generative AI in UA and app monetization
Takeaways
Android or iOS?
Leaving his smartphone at home, what features would Renz miss most?
What features he would like to see added to his smartphone?
Links and Resources:
Renz Gonzales on LinkedIn
Renz Gonzales email
PropellerAds company
Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry
Quotes from Renz Gonzales:
"Many advertisers utilized the power of social media and that definitely paved the way into different types of marketing, influencer marketing is really-really trending. I would say for 2023 in thus far - it's been TikTok, Instagram, Facebook - all of the social media have been used fully for their advantage."
"With app monetization it really has to do with the balance of user experience. We don't really want to have a lot of ads bombarding the users with different types of  ads units."
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#170: ”User Acquisition for Subscription Apps:” App Promotion Summit San Francisco panel

This week we have a bonus episode for you. During this September’s App Promotion Summit San Francisco we had a great panel we want to share with you.
It was hosted by Carolyn Bao of AppsFlyer and the guests were: Annie Wang, Senior User Acquisition Manager at Picsart, Nick Candler, Consultant and Advisor and Zamir Wassermiller, User Acquisition at TextNow.
Links and Resources:
Carolyn Bao on LinkedIn
AppsFlyer company
Nick Candler on Linkedin
Annie Wang on Linkedin
Picsart company
Zamir Wassermiller on Linkedin
Textnow company
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