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 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.