Welcome back to our ‘In-Review’ series, where we pick apps from the app stores to put under the microscope to see how they can be optimised for organic acquisition, drive further engagement and increase retention.
Each month we will review a different app focusing on onboarding, user journey flow, App Store Optimisation, mCRM, UX, UI and much more- all integral elements of our holistic App Growth Programme.
This month, we will be reviewing Meditopia: Anxiety Motivation in the Google Play Store.
About the App:
In 2018, Apple named “self-care” its app trend of the year. Since then, there is no doubt that meditation and mindfulness apps have proliferated, embedding themselves, and even leading in the app store leaderboards for the health and fitness category. One of the rising contenders in this category is Meditopia, a meditation app aiming to enable users to remain ‘calm, reduce stress, sleep well, love, find peace and start a deep discovery within themselves’. The app contains hundreds of meditation sessions across different topics with specialised programs.
We took a closer look at the Meditopia app on Android to see what we feel it does well and where we feel there are further opportunities to accelerate app growth.
Blueprint for virality
Commendation:
A great way to encourage app virality and organic growth is through the implementation of social sharing features and viral content within the app. With an abundance of self-reflective quotes and highly instagrammable visuals, Meditopia have done a great job in creating a blueprint for their user base to expand.
Meditopia does a good job of driving sharing behaviour through its UX and UI. The ‘daily inspiration’ gallery, hosting the week’s daily quotes, clearly mark the frame with a ‘Share’ headline and display a concise and big share button to encourage sharing to Instagram. The app also gives the user the option to share portrait or square sizes for Instagram stories or feed through a toggle that reflects a preview of the shared image, prior to posting. Meditopia have ensured that the shared thumbnail imagery is clearly watermarked with the Meditopia logo, to increase brand awareness.
Additionally, Meditopia have utilised push messaging to highlight their daily quotes content. They send a single quotes push daily, ensuring they don’t inundate their users through push but communicate enough to drive re-engagement with the app. Their user journey encourages the sharing loop, with a push that deeplinks to the relevant content in the app. Their use of push-messaging will only increase the usage of their sharing feature and, in turn, increase organic traction of their app.
Observation:
Whilst viral content will extend the reach of your app to potential users, there are many other strategies to harness to encourage organic acquisition. An extensive discoverability strategy will ensure that you can alleviate your reliance on paid media for acquisition and in fact, fill your app with organic users that are more often than not the highest quality users in terms of return on investment. There are some things that Meditopia can implement, or optimise, to encourage organic discovery of their app.
Recommendation:
With 27% of users finding applications using a mobile web search, optimising for App Pack search results is a great way to capture high-intent users who are actively looking for your services on mobile web. When searching for ‘meditation app’ on Google via mobile, Meditopia appears low down on the App Pack search results. Executing an App Store Optimisation programme that considers keyword optimisation for App Packs is highly recommended to ensure that Meditopia appears above competitors in the search results.
Feature frenzy: how much is too much?
Commended:
A great way to encourage engagement with their meditation content is the gamified features within the Meditopia app. ‘Challenges’ such as the completion of three sessions to collect a badge, are embedded in the feed and separately tracked in the user’s profile settings. ‘Gamification boosts engagement by one third, with online commenting rising by 13%, social media sharing by 22%, and content discovery by 68%,’ so gamified elements will ensure that usage of the core content of the app is incentivised.
Observation:
Meditopia is rich in content and features – the most prominent screens highlight their programs with categorised topics such as ‘sleep,’ ‘emotions,’ and ‘daily life’ – there is also a toggle to switch the view to ‘Quick Now’ for short meditation snippets when on the go. Outside of this, there are even more features such as their blog, daily quotes, notes, calendar and more, within the user’s profile screen.
Recommendation:
Sometimes less is more. With a range of elements in the app, from content to tracking your meditation journey, the app can appear to be overwhelming and many features will potentially be under-utilised. More features do not necessarily better a product and increasing feature releases don’t necessarily drive growth. An example is the integrated blog content from the app, which serves users a web view of the blog, actually breaks the native feel of the user journey. We recommend taking a deep-dive into the app’s product analytics to gain insight into what features users engage with the most, and then iterate, test and optimise the core elements.
Want us to review an app in the stores? Send us an email with your recommendation! Check out the last In-Review post, where we review the Vero app.
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