See the video transcript below:
Mobile Tools: What Are They and What Are the Benefits of Implementing Them?
The basic explanation of in-app Mobile Tech Stack tools is that they help you to do something much more easily than if you built the same solution from scratch yourself. Mobile tools give you a solid view into how your users are behaving across all of the key touch points. They also help you track which updates you make are successful and which aren’t and whether these changes are driving the types of behaviour in your users and your customers that you really want to promote. There are several different types of in-app tools you might want to implement, the staples are attribution, analytics and marketing automation tools.
1. Attribution
Attribution tools help you to see where your users are coming from. They give you a breakdown of your organic acquisition versus paid and enable you to track custom links that can be placed in emails, social channels, or anywhere else. Attribution tools provide you with a single source of truth when it comes to how many users came from each of your channel and how valuable these sets of users are.
2. Analytics
Analytics tools like Mixpanel handle the user journey from the point of install onwards, and they should be set up to track users in-app journeys much more comprehensively. Product analytics tools let you dive really deep into the data to analyse user demographics, funnel conversion rates, or even cohort analysis for example. You can also include the source and campaign data from your attribution tool for an even more in-depth analysis.
3. Automation
Marketing automation or customer engagement tools allow you to set up and execute in-app push, email and SMS campaigns without any development work. A good tool will allow you to automatically import live cohorts from your analytics tool, and the best ones give you the ability to build journeys and A/B test within the platform as well. These tools give you the power to set up custom re-engagement campaigns to improve user retention and drive users towards an end goal.
Mobile tools are also going to give you a great view and understanding of what is actually going on within your app. They help you truly understand how your users are behaving. From attribution tools helping you understand how you acquired users to then go on to engage with those users through a number of different channels, whether that be push, SMS or email.
Diving Deeper into Product Analytics Mobile Tools
Product analytics tools are focused on tracking how users are engaging with your platform. Product analytics tools track key touch points that users make through your application. such as making a purchase or clicking specific areas of your application. Looking at the actions users are taking in-ap on an individual user level is great, but when you aggregate that information across the hundreds 1000s or millions of users that are engaging with your platform, you’re very easily and quickly able to identify key trends, monitor core KPIs, and understand how specific features are being adopted.
You can use the insight gained to make data driven decisions around what features you should update or what features you should be releasing next. Product analytics tools also help you group users effectively and engage with users in a more meaningful way. By understanding at which key points users have dropped off at in-app, you can make sure that you engage with users at the right and most valuable time to drive the type of behaviour that you want and increase engagement. Product analytics tools allow you to do all of that with a data-driven decision backing all of it.
The Things you Really Need to Consider Before Implementing a Mobile Tech Stack
The most important thing to consider is the value you’re actually going to get from it all, versus the cost of the tool. There are plenty of premium solutions out there, but there is no point building a tech stack of the best of everything if you’re not going to get proportional value out of it. For example, you might spend 1000s getting a premium marketing automation tool into your app, then discover that you actually didn’t have a retention problem to begin with and your investment would have been much better spent getting a tool that would let you A/B test different areas, such as the onboarding flow if you have a massive drop off there instead.
You should start by understanding what the priorities are for your app, then assess what each tool is able to provide versus its costs to meet your decision. Remember many tools provide scalable Pay As You Go solutions which are often referred to as growth plans, and are more suitable for start-ups. You can always upgrade in the future if you need to.
It is also important to look at the maturity of the organisation. This includes understanding your own KPIs, the questions you need to ask of your data and what answers you really need to get out of the actions of your user base to make sure that you can track those KPIs and that you can really monitor the performance of both your platforms and your users.
A final tip is to check that the tool is actually compatible with your apps coding language, to make sure it is actually going to work when you implement it.
Why is it Important For you to Implement and Integrate your Mobile Tools Properly?
You’re going to be relying on your mobile tools for really important data and functions. You need to trust that the tools are going to perform the tasks reliably, whatever they are, otherwise you might be in a position where you’re prioritising things based on incorrect assumptions. It could also result in your marketing automation campaigns not sending or, even worse, they might be going mad and sending push notifications to everyone all the time.
Once tools have been implemented, it’s a good idea to test them before a specific app build goes live too. Most tools have a simple testing process which can be done by either the development or the marketing teams. It’s also vital to have a really well thought through plan for any custom events and properties that are going to be tracked, especially within your analytics tool. As good as most of these tools are they’ll actually only work if you’re feeding the right data in, in the right way. The best approach is usually to have a line sheet to keep track of everything, which you can update as the product changes over time.
Before you implement your mobile tools, it is important to define an analytics strategy. This means really understanding what those key KPIs are or that focus metric within your organisation that really makes your business tick. This initial work, before any implementation, is going to give you a great understanding of what you need to get the most out of those tools that you’re currently working with.
It is also worth understanding what skill sets and resource you currently have internally, it’s something that’s really going to help you understand how you should implement and how you should get the most out of those tools.
In terms of integrating your mobile tools together, understanding what type of information your attribution tool has, and how you’re going to pass that through to a product analytics tool, and how that can then help you group users and send the data over to an engagement or a messaging tool will be key.
How Does the Mixpanel Tool Support Product Lead Growth?
The number one driver of product lead growth for Mixpanel is the democratisation of data. Data can often be hidden behind this wall of data scientists that know SQL, that have experience with these big BI tools – and this is great for a certain type of analysis – but Mixpanel ensures everyone within an organisation can really have access to data at their fingertips. This encourages every decision that is made to be backed by data. It also allows anybody in the organisation, to be able to get access to those insights, and then take action of those insights.
Mixpanel’s partnership network also ensures that all of the other tools within your tech stack integrate into a single place, so you get a full, holistic view of your users throughout that whole journey. That is key to truly understanding how to impact product lead growth.
The insights drawn from Mixpanel allow you to prioritise where to focus next in terms of the product, whether it’s optimising a particular conversion rate, looking to increase retention or anything in between. A lot of what you do when it comes to product analytics will also affect your acquisition efforts as well through areas like social sharing and rating and review prompts. Product lead growth will be key to many of your most effective and impactful growth strategies.
Make sure to sign up to our newsletter to get notified when we release a new blog post. Want to find out more about optimising your app and incorporating advanced growth metrics? Make sure to subscribe to our Mastering Mobile Marketing video series. You can also get in touch by visiting the Contact Us page. Follow us on LinkedIn, chat with us on Twitter @yodelmobile, and join our #AppMarketingUK LinkedIn group.
