Decoding App Marketing to Understand User Behavior Better

Understanding user behavior is important for product managers to shape their product. However, it is becoming increasingly important for marketers to also deep dive to understand their users’ behavior better.
And why is that?
To answer this we’ll have to first understand the purpose of marketing. The purpose of marketing is to:

1. Capture attention
2. Facilitate decision making, and
3. Help users with a seamless buying process

Capturing Attention

Capturing users’ attention is so important in today’s world where we are suffering from decreasing attention span. According to a study conducted by Microsoft in 2015, our attention span has decreased from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2015. This makes our attention span shorter than that of a goldfish, which stands at 9 seconds.
More than that, all marketers are fighting for the same amount of free time that a day can offer. In that free time, users can browse their favourite sites, fire up mobile apps, watch TV channels, chat with on messengers, among others.
Once you have the user’s attention, you cannot let them lose interest in your offerings. Within those few seconds that you’ve managed to get their attention, you need to help them with decision making and nudge them towards your business objective.
Hence, it is important to study users’ behavior before actually handholding a user with your business objective. Gone are the days when you could blindly mass blast your marketing campaign. If you’re not sending the right user the right message at the right time, you’re going to lose them to some other app, favourite site, TV series, or something new and fancy. The competition is just too fierce.

When in need, people turn to mobile search. Check out these 3 stats on #mobile user behavior. #mobilemarketing https://t.co/v68lDprUQW

— 50pixels (@50pixels) August 13, 2017

It is important for marketers to study user behavior and then deliver campaigns based on their user behavior.

Get Up Close & Personal with your Users

Use behavioral segmentation to evaluate mobile app success metrics and increase user engagement and retention.

Facilitate Decision Making

In this digital age, the job of a marketer isn’t limited to just attracting new users. You also need to help your users in case they aren’t sure with what they want.
For an ecommerce store, users who abandon their carts are the most valuable users at that moment. These users have shown an intention to purchase an item but have not made the final transaction. Maybe they abandoned the cart as they couldn’t make a decision.
However, if you lose them at this stage it’s a costly loss.
But when do you nudge users who abandon their carts? If you nudge them too soon, you’re nosey. If you nudge them too late, you’ve lost their attention.

Learn how to deal with Abandoned Cart issues from experts. Download this free ebook now – https://t.co/FhgJTOLKQx pic.twitter.com/q51XBAhzp5

— CleverTap (@CleverTap) June 22, 2017

Here’s exactly why you need to study your user behavior and run your marketing campaigns based on available data:
Let’s take the same example of the abandoned cart scenario. An easy funnel can solve the problem of understanding ‘when to nudge your users’. You can track how much time it takes for majority of your users to move from step ‘Add to cart’ to actually making the transaction. Let’s say 90% of your users are moving from ‘Added to cart’ to ‘Purchasing’ within 5 mins, you can run a personalized triggered campaign for such users based on this insight.



Now that’s just one example for an ecommerce store. You can similarly run various such triggered campaigns based on your business objective.
Similarly, if you want to check retention of your users — cohorts is a great way to analyse your user behavior. You can reach out to users if you notice a certain anomaly in their behavior for a certain week or a month.

If your average daily retention of new users by the fourth week is around 40% and you notice an anomaly for a cohort of recently acquired users, you can run a one time campaign to get back the specific set of users to your app.

Help Users With a Seamless Buying Process

Another important aspect of in-app marketers would be to help users when they are stuck.
If a customer is looking for tickets to a theme park on a travel portal, he might add particular tickets to the cart, but on completing the purchase process, he may encounter a problem & not be able to complete the purchase. The chances of this customer coming back and trying to make a successful purchase comes down significantly.
Now imagine, if the prospective customer gets a call from the theme park’s call center within 5 minutes of the failed transaction; a customer service executive can explain the reason for the failed transaction, and guide him to make another payment & also offer a discount! The customer would be more likely to complete the purchase.
A failed transaction for a first time user would leave a bad experience with the user. The cost of re-acquisition for such user would be 100x higher than acquiring a new user.
You could avoid such experiences by using Webhooks to track failed transactions and connect it to your call center. Your customer service department could dial in the user’s number to help them with the transaction. You now have a happy customer, who will share positive feedback with his circle.

The beauty of tools that combine analytics and engagement is that you can monitor and engage with a specific set of users without actually disturbing your other users who do not require an additional nudge.
Studying user behavior is not only important but has become a downright necessity for marketers who deal with in-app or on-site engagement. The new age consumer is impatient and yet smart enough to know what she needs before making a purchase. She doesn’t like it if you’re too nosey and she’ll forget all about you if you ignore her for too long! Sending personalized campaigns based on her past browsing history at the right time is the only way to go about it.