Why most of the Brands with great Apps Fail on a longer run? 7 Reasons of failure and 4 ways to SAVE your App Post Launch

There are millions of brands with mobile apps are available in the market. A good number of those Brands or Apps failed in the market soon or after the release, it may be in the form of attracting new users or by losing a good number of existing users or profit loss. Eventually, it affects the user monetization and leads to the disappearance of the business from the market. So, the question is what are the reasons behind this failure?

The 7 common reasons for post-release app failure,

1. No or less value to the Customer

    In the App ecosystem, most of the apps released are either add no value to customer requirement or do not have a core USP. If the functionalities of a product cannot resolve the pain points or make the user life easier, the result will be very poor.

2. Poor user experience and App Development

   Customers expect a smooth and struggle less performance from any of the product they wished to have. If a user face problems to perform basic actions on the App and can't figure out the core functionalities easily results in poor usability and leads to failure immediately.

3. Competition

    While competition in the app market is high, people expect products with features that take care of their problems. So, the product that offers the best and efficient services with multiple features sustains in the market.

4. Ineffective Marketing Strategy

    Marketing is the base of any product success. Brands with an average product tasted success with the help of proper marketing when great products are failed to succeed in the market. Proper Marketing and promotions attract and retain users. Bad user targets and segmentation leads to higher attrition rate and turns out to low ROI generation.

5. Bad Positioning

    Along with a proper marketing, products should be positioned well to be successful. Locations, Gender, Age, channels and price, everything has a major role in the product positioning. If the product is not positioned well, the chance of failure is inevitable.

6. Poor Market Research

    Understanding the customer needs and requirement through a thorough market research determines the future of any product. If the product is not solving any customer problems or address a user requirement, the result will be terrific.

Similarly, another area the research should be done is about the potential audience size and the growth rate. Also, it is important to understand the user personas, app consumption styles and social presence for the success of any product.

7. Lack of Monetization strategy

    The success of any product is determined by either revenue it generated or the number users the product uses. If the product is failed to achieve any of these, it is not the right product that fit into the targeted audience.

The above reasons are the core factors of any product failure in the market. But even with the help of advanced technologies and techniques, most of the products fails, it is simply because of the lack of customer focus.

The other few modern reasons of failures are

1. Wrong Influencer Marketing

2. Over depend on meaningless metrics

3. Low customer engagement focus post launch

The App can fail due to many reasons, only a continuous improvement and proper analysis can keep it as needful one.

How to reduce the user attrition rate?

There are so many reasons for the failure of great apps. Until the brands or products itself continuously learn and evolve from their existing users, no chance to eliminate the rate of failure.

Data and Analytics are the best solutions for reducing the product failure rate in the market on a longer run. Most of the products able to penetrate into the market and create some momentum at the time of launch or a period of time after release but periodically  they lose a good number of their users because of various reasons. It could be anything may be the availability of other compelling products, poor performance and lack of updates, no engagement and offers,etc.

So understanding the customer and analyzing their usage periodically helps Apps/brands to deliver the best and retain users.

The 4 ways to avoid any App failure after release are,

1. Why Uninstalls

    Analyzing the uninstalls helps to find the most critical reasons for it and also to get an idea of why that user didn't like the app. This result helps to further improve the product and create better user retention plans. To discover the reason of uninstalls, analyse user reviews & rating and examine the user click stream data and also study the complete lifetime activity performed by the user on the app.

 Analyse various uninstall cohorts to find out what amount of users leave the app

     1. Day 1 Uninstalls   

     2. Week Uninstalls

     3. Monthly/3 month uninstalls

2. Understand User interactions/preferences inside the app

    It vital for the success to understand why users are either switch the product or no longer uses it after a good span of lifetime. By analyzing the user interactions on the app, a brand can easily predict the user behavior and plan accordingly to reduce the churn rate.

    1. Type/Category of follows/subscriptions/usage

    2. Rate of Content Consumption

    3. Most performed activities/tasks

3. Analyse User Engagement and Frequency of session

    Analysis of customer usage pattern, the number of sessions,trends and frequency of sessions shows the changes of customer preferences over a period time and bring additional features or changes to the product.

    1. No. of sessions

    2. Frequency of sessions

    3. No. of Activities/Engagement

4. Target Campaign and customer app usage/experience Analysis

     

     Due to the high competition, fast-changing preferences and tastes of  users, the cost of acquisition, retention is very high in the market. The increasing amount of app promotion and marketing expenses make it critical to understand the right users download or use the product. So, cross analysis helps to develop right target users and understand which campaign users drop out.

"Without an actual need, do not try to address it "- Jomin Jose

In short, all of these glitches can be easily find and analysed with the help of Data and Analytics. It helps to find the real reason behind users app uninstalls and drop off. The in-depth analysis helps to create user personas and tailored user experiences. Beyond these factors, poor App experience and execution are the reasons of failures.

How do Mobility Solutions create personalized student experiences with the help of Data and Analytics in the Higher Education Industry?

Technology evolution has influenced all the industries. Amongst them, the education industry is going through vital changes at every point. Evolution of the internet, electronic devices, and mobile phones have accelerated this growth.

Mobility Solutions in Higher Education

The Higher Education(HE) institutions are undergoing massive changes in operations and communication with students, teachers, parents, alumnus, staffs and prospects. Because students demand more tailored learning journey, individualised attention, and services. To serve these demands, institutions must become more efficient and start to implement technological tools which shall make things easier, manageable, and support in decision-making with the help of data and analytics.

In today’s education ecosystem, students are energetic, mobile, and tech-savvy. They are always connected to the internet. Mobility solutions such as CRM, mobile applications, and cloud solutions, etc., helps to automate and manage communications with prospects, customers, staffs and teachers “on the go”. These systems must be implemented to meet the needs of the new generation in an efficient way while cost-effectively addressing the requirements of the college and everyone in their community.

With the help of mobility software’s, institutions can bring together data elements from various sources to create a 360° view of each student and prospects. It activates information access smoother, delivers a personalised experience, creates targeted campaigns and sends messages in a timely manner. Moreover, student management solutions can be used to predict student’s success rate by tracking their activity and performance.

Needs and Benefits

Mobility solutions in HE assist colleges/institutions to manage their students, staffs, teachers and prospects on a single platform efficiently. The various needs and benefits are -

1.    Student Life Cycle Management (Contact Management)

At present, students are neither connected nor engaged through any of the channels or touch points as part of their study life. This infers that there is no particular method to communicate and serve the students based on their progress in the course.

Mobility solutions are designed to impact on every connection in the student life cycle and flawlessly integrate with institution resources and systems. Also, it helps to track every aspect of an individual student life cycle. With the help of data and analytics, institutions can now predict the student’s failure or success rates.

 2.    Service and Communication

Faculties and students are exploring the applicability of mobility services that can enhance the learning experience and assistance with research.

Software tools provide faster communications like online resources access, streaming administrative tasks, notify students about class cancellations, grade allocation and etc.

3.    Automation

Emails, social media messages, student alerts and any other type of communications can now be automated in order to speed up the response time. Mobility solutions shall provide workflow automation that takes care of all the follow-up processes.

4.    Recruitment, Marketing and Operations

Recruitments and marketing features help institutions to create targeted recruitment campaigns and help in lead management. Email marketing tools and templates further optimise the student recruitment process. This allows for smarter marketing, forecasting and budget planning, by maximising the ROI of the marketing process.

5.    Help and Support

Any profile or student that is connected to the system can get a help at any time or even contact respective departments, whether it is related to online tutorials/training, email, live chat, fee and exam management, etc.

HE Mobility Solutions

The competition has gone up in the higher education market as the students started to demand more personalised and faster experiences. There are industry-specific and generic mobility solution providers compete in this segment. They are –

Target X

The system is an open source solution which was built on salesforce platform and It helps to manage the complete student lifecycle from inquiry to alumnus.

Data Harvesting - Student CRM

Student CRM is a student recruitment tool that specifically built for the UK HE market. The solution allows institutions to purchase necessary modules based on the needs as part of pricing strategy.

Simplicity (Ascend)

Ascend is made for the recruitment part of the SLC with multi-language capability. Pricing is based on the number of applications registered.

  

Admittor

Admittor is a simple system that offers white labelling option, high-level customization and a tagging system. It activates users to better manage and search the applicant pool with advanced execution options.

Jenzabar (SEM CRM)

Jenzaber is a cloud-based CRM system that has integrated with IBM “Cognos” software which helps from reporting to analysis and metrics. “Dotmailer” integration brings email marketing optimization.

Full Fabric

Full Fabric is popular with its appealing and easy to navigate design. The key features are real-time reporting and google maps integration with a great focus on prospect students.

Azorus

Azorus focuses on recruitment and retains “more of the right students”. The platform has the ability to engage students at all the touch points with the institution, and also have the options to manage lead generation and event creation.

Campus Management (Campus Nexus CRM)

Campus Management is a complete student lifecycle CRM comes with both on-premises and cloud based solutions for the maximum functionality.

Mira Network

Mira Network is a multi-lingual mobility solution market leader in the Nordic Countries that comes with an Office 365 and LinkedIn integrations.

Dream Apply

This solution is specifically designed to manage student admissions with a set of features, such as reporting, student exchange, and agent management.

Maximizer CRM (Student Relate)

The system comes with a lot of functional features such as staff performance tracker along with workflow automation, in-depth real-time reporting, Microsoft tools integrations, and online behavioural tracking.

Hobsons (Radius)

Radius is an admission and enrollment CRM that helps to manage processes from enquiry to application and enrollment by tracking all student connections. This system allows identification of at-risk students, student outcomes, academic advising and online payments.

Proretention (Enrollment CRM)

Proretention is a complete student relationship management solution that comes with various features such as multi-channel communication modes, vendor management, dialer integration and with inbuilt dashboards and reports.

Student Recruitment System (SRS)

The system is built for the Nordic education market. It offers offline access that allows offline data collection and automatic data synchronisation along with ROI insights from each marketing channel.

Future Trends

The importance of mobility solutions for the higher education industry is under continuous development to make learning more real-world & student oriented. The opportunities are higher in this market segment because of more enhanced demands and the popularity of “on the go” services. The Internet and digital transformation are the major causes of growth in the education industry and it is on the rise.

Research and surveys reveal that 59% of Institutions do not use any CRM because of the lack of knowledge on Mobility Solutions along with budget limitations. Surveys indicate that most of the colleges are considering to implement mobility solutions in the near future that opens up a whole lot of new opportunities.

How could sponsor brands get benefit from Club's fan base?

Over the past couple of years, the sports and event market has grown to a lucrative and hundreds of billion dollars worth business sector. Sponsorship became one of the main profitable channels of income to teams.

Sponsors pay millions every year to be associated with teams and events to increase the brand awareness and sales to a wide range of audience. Like other marketing activities, sponsorship is not 100% measurable. Now it's time for brands to look beyond reaching millions of clubs fans with brand names by making use of fan intelligence.

How do fan intelligence help brands to increase Revenue?

As part of  Club's data strategy, they started collecting data across ticketing, social, merchandise, retail, hospitality as well as its community and website. Clubs are building intelligence on this data to increase their revenue as well as to provide fans with a tailored experience.

Sponsors can now ask for additional marketing rights from teams to  use their fan data for brands targeted marketing campaigns. At present, sponsorship limited to things like Logo & Name on Team Jersey, Countable Social Media Mentions &  Press Coverages and Rights to Activate Marketing Campaigns with 2 to 3 players.  Apart from a global reach through club fans, the number of benefits is limited.

Sponsors have to sign specific deals to use clubs fan data. They can utilise the Data and Intelligence of Fans like it used by the team or any business. Because the price of media is increasing every year and the insights on fans help brands to optimise and execute channel specific marketing activities. This in-depth knowledge on fans allows brands to work on where they spend out ad budgets and whom to target as well as what markets to focus through club's channels.

The advanced level insights on fans help sponsors to plan and execute targeted and tailored marketing campaigns around the year that is even after the tournament gets over. Its helps brands to associated with team long term to achieve the scale.

The long-term association and relationship by brand increase the engagement, conversion and loyalty among fans and also helps to understand the behavioural evolution of people. This helps to build more detailed profiles of potential customers and gives an improved ability to monetization of fans in the local and global market.

Targeted messages to teams supporter database can lead to higher opt-ins and sales. This new system assists in utilising marketing budget properly and brings a greater valuation to the sponsorship deal.

"Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web like deer on a freeway." – Geoffrey Moore

In short, sponsors with intelligence on club fan base would be able to drive additional revenue through various touch points. It could be either through clubs or sponsor brands channels. Data and Analytics activates series of customized marketing and loyalty activities year around.

How does Fan Relationship Management(Fan Insights) helped Sports club's to drive better revenue?

Fan analytics are used in all phase of business to take better data-driven results as well as to meet specific business objectives. Fan Data and Analytics is widely implemented in sports business to improve the revenue and engagement.

The main reason sports brands and organisations started looking at the data is because of the reducing number of attendance for in-stadia games, merchandise and ticket sales, engagement and etc..

Till recent years, the data has been captured for the on-field game performance improvement. For example, Player performance analysis, on-field injury analysis,fitness analysis, game statistics,competitor players and game analysis etc. But the trend has changed now because it became important to generate higher revenue as important to win matches .

Most of the English Premier League, French League and MLB teams started looking at the fan data to increase their revenue by saving marketing and other operational budgets through proper analytics based decisions and finding out the various pattern to increase the sales. Also, teams use the help of analytics to improve the fan engagement and real-time game experience.

Let's start with English Premier League,

Manchester City

Manchester city has tied up with SAP to increase fan engagement and better matchday experiences. As part of driving engagement, analytics helped them to provide fans with behind the scenes player statistics, and real-time game insights,etc.,Analytics used to produce more powerful reports to evaluate how the club is connecting with its fans and partners.

Fan Relationship Management - Manchester City FC

Fan Analytics helped them to optimise teams operations while providing new opportunities to enhance fan experiences wherever they are- in-stadium, online, via mobile devices.

Fan relationship management helped MCFC to increase the average attendance to 47,000 fans per match and able to sell 85,000 "Clever Cards" (loyalty cards) during the launching year.

How big data gives premier league football clubs an edge?

Chelsea

Chelsea club heavily depended on Fan Analytics and relationship management to present fans better experiences along with building brand awareness. Chelsea one of the premier league clubs who use Big Data efficiently for the success of sports business.

Team collect the data and analyses to bring more sponsorship deals, new market penetration and much engagement apart from monetization context.

Chelsea uses Customer Relationship management system to interact

In-depth analysis on fans, helped them to launch new revenue services and open up partnerships with various brands.

Arsenal

Fan intelligence is a vital element that determines the success of sports business and helps to activate many deals. Arsenal bought statDNA, a US-based football data analytics company to do on-field sports performance analysis, in game preparation, in post-match analysis, and in gaining tactical insights.

Arsenal FC Case Study

Along with the on-field analysis, Arsenal also partnered with a CRM company to understand their fans and their preferences in-depth. Arsenal uses their fan intelligence for their sponsor brand marketing activations, creating a top notch on and off game fan experience and manage their marketing budgets effectively.

Arsenal used Fan Insights to sell more upper-class tickets and increased the ticket sales of their away games.

Emirates: 'CRM data key to £150m Arsenal deal'

French League - Paris Saint-Germain

Similar to EPL clubs, Paris Saint-Germain also used Fan insights to predict the club revenues through various streams and fan behaviour. They nailed down their fan data to know more about their fans behaviours and consumptions.

Case Study: Paris Saint-Germain Football Club Scores With CRM Strategy 

Like all other teams, club revenue came from ticket sales, merchandise, prize money and sponsorships etc., The last time PSG won a championship was on 1996, later their fans had nothing to feel great.

Using big data to create smart venues = happy fans

With the help of Fan Data, PSG managed to increase their fans in-stadia experiences, cross-selling, create new targeted campaigns, customer segments, measure fan satisfactions and etc.  Fan relationship management had given fans a whole lot of promotional discounts and benefits, at the same time club generated more marketing opportunities.


Major Baseball League - San Francisco Giants

Fan Relationship helped SFG also like other clubs in its operations. They were able to sell complete tickets in 140 games straightly. Though teams do a commendable work to deliver best experiences to fans, there is a decided difference with the help of Data and Insights.

In baseball, the small things and details which increase the fan experiences that brings fans back. It also supported the team's revenue production and efficient fan  monetization.

Data  and analytics become a valuable part of the sports business as it helps to run the business more efficiently, prove the value of their brands to potential partners, and to improve the monetization of fans in the global market.

All most all the top leagues and club's like Liverpool, Queens Park Rangers and etc started investing on various analytics and CRM tools to grab their fan data to increase the ROI through better fan experiences.

How does fan Analytics help business to generate better results?

Data and Analytics became the vital part of all business. We saw How Big Data and Analytics used for Data Driven Decision making. In this post, we look at “How does fan Analytics help business to generate better results? Before we get into details, it is important to understand a Fan and Fan Ecosystem?

Who is a Fan?

(Fan Definition: Wikipedia) A fan, or fanatic, sometimes also called an ardent follower or supporter, is a person who is enthusiastically devoted to something or somebody, such as a band, a sports team, a genre, a book, a movie or an entertainer. 

Fans express their passion or interest through certain behaviours like social interactions, wish to acquire objects, posting online, etc. So, understanding a fan in detail helps to communicate and engage with him well. 

Fan Ecosystem

Fan ecosystem is an environment that interconnects fans, their interactions, and any activities performed which related to the devotee.

What does really matters in a Fan ecosystem? 

For the success of any business, it is essential to understand their customers or fans voice, feelings and needs. Until brands are able to communicate with their fans by understanding them in detail, the sustainability is very low in the market even if there is a convincing value proposition.

So, how do we understand Fans better? The best practice is to listen to them, engage them and analyse. A Fan ecosystem basically includes three things, they are 

• Fan engagement
• Fan Relationship Management- Analytics
• Fan Activation (Monetization)

Business decision making depends on the results of the important strategy of social media called Engage, Analyze and Activate.

Fan Engagement

Engagement is nothing but Interacting (meaningful communication) with fans. At Present, engagement shrunk to social media updates or posts. Fans are needed to engage through all the mediums or channels they connect with a brand like social, ticketing, email, websites, shopping, direct and etc. 

Mass level engagement became meaningless and won't work anymore; Individualization is the new face of engagement which provides a unique experience to fans. Fan insight helps the customization of experiences by an understanding of likes, dislikes and behaviours.

Fan Relationship Management(FRM)

Fan relationship management is handling fans in individual level with the help of data analytics. As everything connected with digitalism, user leaves a footprint of whatever action they perform like shopping, transactions, search, visits, social media interactions (comment, share, posting.).

There is a clear saying now, "Facebook knows a person better than his/her best friend"

How does it possible? It is by analysing all the activities a person performs on Facebook which makes it easy to predict his behaviours. But Facebook does this analysis only with online data. What about offline activities? Fan relationship management is a solution that built over Fan Analytics, which collect and aggregate fan data from various online and offline and create a 360-degree view of fans with actionable insights to manage him better than ever. 

Fan Activation(Monetization)

        Fan activation is getting fans to do what you want them to do through a series of activation services with the objective of monetization. It is a multi-level process of converting a fan from unknown to an advocate fan. Activation enables brands to monetize fans through insights and predictive analytics.

How does Fan Analytics help in Decision Making Process?

At present, fans are in a disengaged state where most of the brands are depended on social media channels to stay in connected with them and it is done on the page level. Due to limited fan intelligence, brands and teams face hindrance in generating better results.

With the Help of Fan Analytics, brands would able to overcome their pain points and increase ROI.

Fan Analytics provides brands, an in-depth knowledge and 360-degree view of fans at an individual level. It drives better business decisions by effectively leveraging fan data and the resulting insights. 

Let’s now look at how does Fan intelligence helps in BDM,

1.   Higher Engagement Rate across all touch points

       Fan analytics helps brands/teams to understand fans likes, dislikes and behaviours based on their online and offline activities. Engagement is not something which has to be restricted with social media updates like I mentioned earlier. It is really important to engage fans through all the touch points because it increases the fan affinity and loyalty. Analytics helps to engage fans based on their preferences which basically increases the Response and conversion rates.

For example, sending a 10% movie discount coupon code after his purchase which induces him to book another or sending a thank you note directly to the fan by mentioning his name from the hero of that movie, etc.

2.     Loyalty management and rewards

Identification and managing of loyal fans help to increase the brand value and revenue. How do we find our loyal fans? Loyal fans are the not only group of people who continuously interact with your social media pages but also people who support your team endlessly purchasing tickets, watching the match on TV or stadiums, attending offline events, interacting through Fan contests, subscribing to email campaigns, etc.

Fan intelligence helps to find loyal fans by analyzing millions of data from various places and identify various patterns to convert them as advocate fans and increase the brand value. It also helps to activate these fans through cross selling and up selling.

3.      Fan Relationship Management

We know Fans are the biggest asset of any team or brand. Maintaining the relationship with fans are very much important for the success of any business as they are the largest group of revenue drivers and income deciders. FRM identifies the places where a fan is more active irrespective of channels, mediums- online or offline and enable teams/brands to connect with them based on their past and present activities and preferences.

FRM brings online and offline fans to one place and manage relationship. Individual fan insights help to cluster the fans, create and target the campaigns and review the results and increase the ROI.

4.      Independent predictable value and value generation

It is now possible to calculate the individual monetary value a fan generates and predict how much he is valuable he is for the business with help of Fan intelligence. The value is calculated based on past transactions, spending nature, household income level, interest and behaviour. This intelligence helps brands to plan and execute their marketing and advertising campaigns in an optimised way.

With the help of Fan analytics, brands can now create more personalised offers to monetize them better with the higher response and conversion rates.

5. Measurable and Optimized Marketing Management

Technology and digitalism help brands to measure anything that is executed. Most of the times,the measurement and optimisation on

the campaign level. Now it is passed the campaign level and analytics is performed on an individual level with the help of Fan Insights. 

Most of the brands fail to make profit because they fail to gather the advance insights that separate success from the fail.  Marketers and Brands are doing marketing activities based on brand level based on objectives and goals rather than understanding the fans. The goal is to understand the fans by walking into their shoes and generating creative ideas from those learnings and insights to take decisions that eventually take business to profit margin.

6.      Alignment of sponsor brands with fan persona's and demographics

Selling sponsorships or getting a sponsor for an event or team became very hard as there are no specific metrics for proper measurement and sponsorship value can calculate the % of sales gone up during that particular period. However, there are no mechanisms yet to find out whether the sponsor brand aligns with fans affinity. 

For example, let us say 70% of fans of a team “X” are using low-end hand phones and shows interest in mobiles and technology. So, team X can easily sell sponsorship to a mobile brand. Because the market opportunity to sell more mobiles are higher by associating with team “X” rather than sponsoring any other Team.

Fan intelligence enables sponsorship sales based on insights and drives better results. So, it is important to look at the advanced level fan insights from the team fan base like fan affinity, likes/dislikes, age group and gender with household income level, etc.

 

In short, Fan Analytics is a Fan based analytic driven approach that helps teams and brands to take better decisions with the help of advance level of Fan insights. Individual level insights make business people to make more result oriented decisions by not only generating money but also saving the extra cash that spent for marketing, sales or anything as well.

PS: My next blog showcases Real world Analytic implementations that helped sports business to achieve the Goals.