Research from Gartner shows that more than 60% of apps on the Google Play Store see an 80% decline in downloads one week after they launch. While the odds may seem stacked against you, a successful mobile app launch can yield significant rewards, from rapid user growth to substantial revenue streams.
However, successfully launching a mobile app requires a well-defined strategy, meticulous planning, and a deep understanding of rules and regulations. In this blog post, we will cover all necessary steps you need to take in your pre-launch stage and give your app the best chances to succeed from day 1.
And if you’re looking for more information on what to do in your launch and post-launch stage check out our Complete Guide to Launchng a Successful App with some great advice from industry experts.
Let’s dive in.
1. Research your industry and competitors
In the pre-launch phase, it’s vital to understand what other apps are out there and how they position themselves. What style of creative are they using in their advertising? Have they run any A/B tests, creative optimisation or in-app events on the App Store? Are they using Custom Product Pages for paid acquisition campaigns?
If your app is an eCommerce app, tracking seasonal activities is important – are the competition running special promotions for Black Friday or Christmas? What does their monetisation model look like? Could you do things more efficiently, perhaps put some features behind a paywall?
Tools like App Store Spy, AppTweak and AppFollow will give you great insights into how your competitor’s apps perform in the app stores. You can also use resources such as Data.ai, which has a wealth of information on the mobile app market. Data.ai can give you data on your competitors’ Day 1, Day 7 and Day 30 retention rates, which is a good indicator of a good or not-so-good activation strategy.
2. Use keyword research and analysis to ensure your app is discoverable
Keyword research and analysis are essential in order to ensure that your app is returned in searches for apps like yours in the app stores and should be the basis of your App Store Optimisation strategy. You should maximise the power of keywords for app names, back-end keywords, subtitles, and descriptions. The starting point for keyword research is to make a list of words and phrases that accurately describe your app and what it does.
There are also dedicated keyword research tools for App Store Optimisation, like AppTweak, Mobile Action and Sensor Tower. These are closely aligned to keyword trends in the app store you are interested in.
Remember to carry out research into the keywords your competitors are using, as this can guide your strategy. Don’t limit yourself to ASO intelligence tools – leverage all the search insight you can to inform your keyword strategy. You can even leverage tools like Google Trends or SEMRush’s Keyword Magic tool to see the level of search volume around each keyword or phrase.
Try to find keywords with enough volume to drive installs, but not so much that there is too much competition to rank for them
3. Prioritise app compliance
When you get ready to submit your app to the app stores, there are several factors to consider when it comes to app compliance. The first is to ensure that you follow the rules laid down by Apple and Google to list an app in their app store.
These rules cover a variety of issues, from how stable the app is and how well it performs, to the use of Google or Apple’s payment system for in-app payments.
Suppose your app targets children or relates to a highly regulated industry, such as financial services. In that case, it must comply with relevant legislation, such as the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), or for finance apps in the UK, Financial Conduct Authority guidelines.
From a data collection standpoint, your app will need to be compliant with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe, and with similar rules elsewhere.
If your app fails to meet any of these requirements, you risk your app submission being rejected by Apple and Google, delaying your mobile app launch efforts.
4. Ensure your app meets privacy regulations
Both Apple and Google have made data privacy a priority in recent times. Apple’s big privacy move came with the launch of iOS 14.5 in April 2021. With it came Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) Framework, which required app publishers to give consumers the explicit right to opt out of allowing apps to access the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) on their device, which app publishers used to track users across other apps and websites and target them with advertising.
So, any app that wants to track a user across other apps and websites now needs to show the user a prompt, ideally when they first open the app, giving the user the option of allowing, or not allowing the app to do that.
The introduction of ATT has made it more difficult for app owners to track users of their app and to attribute actions taken in the app, such as completing a registration form, or signing up for a subscription, with the same degree of accuracy they once had. The Privacy Sandbox is Google’s attempt to bring in a similar level of privacy on Android devices.
More recently, with the release of iOS 17 in September 2023, Apple has also cracked down on “fingerprinting” – the process of collecting data on users’ devices to track them. The key point for app owners is to ensure that you follow Apple and Google’s submission guidelines in the app stores and that your data collection and privacy processes meet all regulatory requirements.
5. Define your mobile app launch KPIs
To define your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), start by looking at the metrics that matter most to the business. Ask yourself: what is the app’s core purpose, and what are the metrics that link to that? Are you looking for a certain number of daily or monthly active users, or to convert 10% of users to paying subscribers? Understanding how the app will monetise will help you to set your KPI framework.
At Yodel, we start with a focus metric, or a ‘North Star’. This is the most important metric to the business and is usually related to business growth. Once this has been agreed, you can look at a number of building blocks that span across the user lifecycle to hit this KPI. It’s a hierarchy of KPIs and metrics that all link to the focus metric.
One of these metrics could be to look at achieving a given number of app installs within a certain timeframe. Then, you can look at what levers you can pull to hit this number. Remember, your KPIs upon mobile app launch will evolve and change as you start to gather data and grow your app, so it’s important to remain agile when it comes to measuring success.
6. Set up your app store listing
Your app store listing is the most vital element in ensuring your app is downloaded. No matter how well you perform in terms of driving people to your listing, if it doesn’t tell the story of why your app exists clearly and succinctly, users will click away.
Every aspect of your listing should be tested and optimised, including the app icon, name, subtitle, description and screenshots – but that will come later in your mobile app launch process. For now, define your creative assets based on competitor research and best practice.
The keyword research referenced earlier is vital to feed into all the text elements of your listing. Look at your competitors’ metadata and screenshots to see what
they prioritise. For the screenshots, focus on the first three. Make sure they explain how the app looks and functions, and what its purpose is. These three images are the single biggest converter of installs.
Finally, make sure everything about your listing sticks to the app store’s guidelines. You don’t want to risk a rejected app submission.
7. Prepare for soft launch phase
The mobile app launch phase is where you let your app loose on the world, but again, there’s a process to follow in order to make it successful.
Every app needs to go through a soft launch phase to iron out any issues before its full launch. A soft launch enables you to allow access to the app for a limited number of users, to see how it performs in the real world.
You can see how the app performs in terms of user experience, onboarding, in-app events like registration or subscription, and check the volume of usage it sees, so that you can scale up capacity for the full mobile app launch.
The soft launch phase will help you stress test the app and identify user pain points that you can fix before the full launch. Apple and Google both have tools – TestFlight and Google Play Console respectively – that you can use to help you with testing in the soft launch phase.
The key point is to measure everything and use the insights you gain to fix anything broken.
Set your app for success
By this point, it should be clear that there’s a lot to think about when launching an app. Even if you have the best-designed, most user-friendly app ever released, there’s still a huge amount of work to do to get it discovered and downloaded; iron out any issues or bugs; keep those people who have downloaded it coming back to it frequently; and find new users to grow your app at scale.
If you’re launching an app and looking for technical or consultancy support, our team has launched and scaled hundreds of apps, just like yours. Contact us to learn how we can help you navigate the mobile app launch process successfully.
