February 2021

Creating an application is a long journey from establishing a great idea to finally giving it a shape and presenting it to the end-users.
You need to have a basic structure of the entire process to save yourself from getting cheated or deviated by unprofessional experts. Multiple parameters will help you define the idea’s feasibility and specify different ways to bring your dream application into reality.
The following article will work as a basic guideline when you have an app idea, so you can prepare for it before entering the market for further development. ​

​ 1. Shape your idea

Having an idea is great, but you must structure your thoughts into concrete facts. You should be well aware of every aspect of your application.
We know that every idea is directly associated with revenue creation. Therefore, it is necessary to sit down and list your goals and aim attached to your app.
Here are some of the questions that you can ask yourself before going further:

    ● What will my app do?

Your application needs to have a niche that will help the users get an idea about the features they can find in it. These functionalities need to be direct and must not attract ten different application ideas.
For instance, Instagram can be easily categorized as a social media app to post photos and videos that your followers view in their feed.
If it was primarily launched with features like flight booking or inclusive gaming functionality, this might have deviated the users’ focus from the core idea of sharing photos.
People wouldn’t be able to categorize the application and eventually jump to other simple photo posting apps.

    ● What will be the face of my application?  

We understand you are not a developer or might not have any prior knowledge about UX/UI.
However, you must know what your application must look like. This will help you communicate your thoughts to the developers, and the end-result would constitute your dream’s app interface.

 2. Understand your target audience

After formulating a well-structured idea, you must jump on the rigorous research part. Your target audience is people who will use the application or whose problem you are planning to solve through your app idea.
These users can be bifurcated into various categories like locations, ages, gender, or behavioural reaction. You need to be as specific as possible to avoid any extra competition.
Most of the market has top leaders, which captures a vast audience, so you must be up-to-date on their ideologies and USP (Unique Selling points).
While researching, you should be able to determine your application’s goal and narrow down the niche to identify your target audience.
Another major thing to keep in mind is to know the future of your targeted users. You will never want to invest your money into an idea that might become inconsistent or obsolete with new technology advancements.
Try coming up with a unique USP that is different from your competitors and offer much-advanced functionality.

 3. Set a timeline

All these points might look easy, but they aren’t. The steps that we are about to discuss will give you a long list of tasks from meeting the developer to eventually launching the product.
You must acknowledge an estimated time for all these activities; this will help your mind establish time boundaries and stop you from lazing around.
The market research can take up to 10-15 days according to how vast or small your target audience and competitors are. After which, you must determine the exact timeline of your application.
Making a timetable will also give the developers or marketers an idea about how slow or fast you want to build your application.

 4. Connect to your developers to create a prototype

Now comes the exciting part, where you will give your app idea a screen. Creating a prototype means establishing a sample model of your final application.
A prototype can be majorly segmented into three unique categories:

     ● Conceptual: It is the future representation of your app that stimulates user and app interaction.
A conceptual prototype is created to establish the application’s essential infrastructure to ensure that you are happy with its beta interface.

   ● Interactive: After successfully passing the conceptual prototype, your next step would be to create an interactive display constituting designs to make the app look elegant.
It will replace the textual framework with a user-friendly interface that people will thoroughly enjoy.

    ● Animated: This is the most fascinating but challenging part where UI/UX experts add animation to the interactive protocol design. Most successful apps in the market add creative animation to make it more engaging.

 5. Create a market strategy

We cannot emphasize enough what a successful marketing channel can do to your application. Cumulatively, the Android and Apple app stores have over 5 Million apps.
However, there is a majority of applications that have never been installed. This is mainly because people haven’t heard about them and fear if the apps are risk-free.
We have a list of marketing tools that can be adapted to support your idea.

    ● Social media marketing or SMM: It is the trendiest marketing system used to attract traffic using paid ads.
According to stats, 82% of your prospects can be gathered through social media. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter allow businesses to post ads on their targeted audience’s feed.
You can make a list of all the behavioural rules that a user must take on their account that will make them a part of your ad campaign.  

    ● Google paid ads: The search engine allows you to post ads on specific keywords to attract your target audience.
For instance, if you have a food delivery app, the target word would be online food or making (the food item); these visitors are hungry and looking for a way to eat a good meal.
Ranking on these keywords will boost your sales, and eventually bring more loyal customers.

    ● Influencer marketing: Another way of informing your audience about your application could be through people they follow and seek influence from.
Influencers have unique opinions and ideas that they share with their followers who listen to them.
For instance, a comment published by Elon Musk asking his audience to join signal boosted its download by 12,000%. It is one of the most cost-effective ways to reach your targeted audience.

 6. Fix your budget or find investment

Marketing and finance are the two most important pillars of any business. Building a successful application will require an inclusive combination of both these parameters.
We have already discussed all the significant investments needed while making the app. You are now in a better place to determine a budget for every aspect that has been mentioned above.
Furthermore, there are chances that you lack the required fund but still want to build your dream application.
These are some of the ways you can expand your earning potential:

    ● Ask from family or friends: This is an initial step that you can do to fill in the cash requirement. Your well-wishers might give you cash at a minimum or low-interest rate than the market standards.

   ● Engage with investors: Many organizations and wealthy individuals look for projects to invest their money to get a higher return.
Your first step would be to look for those high-class people and communicate your app idea to them.

   ● Business partnerships: If you cannot find a suitable investor, then the other option could be bringing in some partners.
These people will help you in the building steps of your application through their active participation and sharing relevant knowledge.

 7. Develop a basic version of the application

After you have successfully found your investor, it is vital that you now rigorously work towards building a beta version of the application to test its essential features.
You can choose Android or Apple as your base platform, keeping in mind your targeted audience. This is called constructing an MVP or Minimal Vital Program.
The application is made to closely identify its response from the public and other new features that could be added to ensure a smooth user experience.

 8. Analyze your success through mobile app metrics

Reflecting on your application’s performance is crucial to understand customer feedback and other additional features that you can implement in the future.
The primary parameters include
    ● How many downloaded the app?
    ● If they did, what is their activity status?
    ● And if they enjoyed using the app, have they subscribed to its paid version?
These three parameters are your guideposts that need to be taken care of while depicting your mobile app metrics.
The new users can be studied by estimating their user retention rate, which means how many times they visited the application in a day or week, or month.
If someone is continuously active on your app, they are among the very few percentages of people who can subscribe to your paid programs.
These are the loyal customers you need to nurture and provide them with the utmost value.

Conclusion
We hope this post guides you through the right track to convert your dream app idea into reality. Thus, keep in mind these above-mentioned points that are important to build your application.
Contact the App-Scoop Vancouver Mobile App Developers for further details.

​Digital transformation has the power to change business models and help you adapt to the current market ecosystem.
Traditional ways of running businesses are changing. The world around is developing for good. Global communications have brought us close with real-time applications, collaborations are increased, remote work is on the rise, and whatnot.
Technology is transforming the business world from HR to customer service, and everything in between since the past couple of years.

To add fuel to the fire, the Covid-19 pandemic impacted digital transformation even more. With global lockdown, people were forced to use the internet for business, collaborations, communications, and so on. This skyrocketed the demand for digital transformation.
According to Statista, the worldwide expenditure on digital transformation is likely to reach around US$ 1.3 trillion, with an average growth of 10.4% every year.
In fact, the pandemic taught businesses to increase their operational efficiency, enhance customer experience, and improve communications.
And you know how important these three metrics are for a business to thrive.
Hence, if you have not yet adopted digital transformation, now is the time so you can beat challenges, lower competitions, and move forward for growth.

In this article, we will help you unleash things about digital transformation, how it can help you, and how you can incorporate it into your business.
Stay tuned!

What is digital transformation?

Digital transformation refers to a process of integrating digital technology in every corner of a business. It includes leveraging cloud services, managing remote teams with technology, utilizing more applications to make workflow easier, and so on.
According to a survey by Tech Pro Research, 70% of respondents told that they already have a strategy for digital transformation in their companies or working on it.
It eliminates usage of legacy systems, in-house software, repetitive tasks that consume huge time, and more. This process results in fundamental business changes in terms of their operation and the way they provide value to their customers.
In addition to this, digital transformation brings a culture change as well that needs companies to challenge their status quo, strategies effectively to surpass failure, and experiment often continuously.

Digitization vs Digitalization: They are not the same!

Digital transformation is not the destination; it’s the journey, the process. In this journey, you will find two stops – digitization and digitalization. And the truth is both are NOT the same.
These words have similar sounds, but different meanings and importance for enabling digital transformation.
Let’s explore each one of them.

• What is Digitization?

Digitization means bringing technology to replace the traditional brick-and-mortar business environment. It enables you to feed information on computers, replace pens with your keyboards, maintain manual documentation with emails and digital formats, and utilize cloud storage.
This way, you can easily manage everything using your computer and from anywhere across the world beyond your 9-5 job. It also decreases the workload on your employees, increases productivity, reduces travel costs, makes communication easier, and cuts off expenditure.
Hence, you will get more time for solving problems, critical thinking, innovation, client engagement, and track performance to better plan and strategize our every move. Thus, you can serve your customers better and open the door to growth.

• What is Digitalization?

Digitalization is automating your business operations with data and insights you already have processed in your database. It is actually the next step forward after you have embraced digitization into your business model.
Digitalization takes place with the help of certain software applications developed to perform specific functions such as accounting, bookkeeping, manufacturing, order management, procurement, customer contact, and more.
Instead of using a separate network of computers for every department, digitalization allows you to merge them into a single network in a standard format.
As a result, it leads to many benefits such as stronger data encryption with cloud computing, machine automation to improve outputs, better quality management and product diagnostics with advanced computers that function accurately, quickly, and reliably.
You can feed customer and sales data into systems and forward it to your marketing departments, so they use it to channelize their marketing efforts for better conversion rates with more personalization
.
The advantages of digital transformation

Digital transformation is not only the next step but also a necessity to survive in the current business scenarios. The pandemic has increased market pressure with changing consumer expectations.
Hence, adapting to these changes with the help of digital transformation is needed to be in the race. These are the advantages digital transformation brings for you:

• Enhanced customer experience

Delivering top-level customer experience must be the top priority for your business.
A report says that 67% of end-customers and 74% of B2B buyers want to pay more if they get a great user experience.
This is proof that you need to enhance customer experience by working on interactions, value proposition, and deliverability. It will help improve your reputation and foster growth. 
Digital transformation is an excellent way of doing it as it increases more convenience for your consumers. You can incorporate mobile applications to increase their experience, and make it as user-friendly as possible.
For example, Uber has increased convenience for its customers with its app that users can use to get a car ride, buy a home or room temporarily. It also expanded its service with UberEats to satisfy hunger.

• Increased growth of mobile applications

Digital transformation has increased the use of mobile applications. And you know the craze for mobile phones in the world. Almost everyone has a smartphone these days.
Therefore, there can never be a better way to reach your customers than through mobile applications. When it comes to the digital transformation approach, smartphone applications are one of the best gifts.
People use it anywhere they want for whatever reasons they may have; whether it is shipping online, ordering foods, getting a cab or booking a healthcare appointment. With cloud storage, you can use your documents anytime you want without downloading and storing them. 

• Encourages progressive web applications

A progressive web app is similar to a web app that works on a browser, without requiring the user to download it from an app store.
These apps such as Google Chat facilitate innovation, including synchronization capabilities, offline features, quick updates, and more.
And digital transformation encourages the development of progressive web apps. In fact, producing these apps is profitable for SMEs as well.
Web apps open the door to new revenue channels, boost customer experience dramatically, provide advanced CRM solutions, and many more.

• Reduces costs

Apart from improving customer engagement and reputation, digital transformation helps you reduce your expenses. You can use digital apps to save a lot of your money as cloud applications allow you to pay for the services you use, unlike traditional software.
Besides, you can use these applications anytime and anywhere across the globe to cut off travel expenses as well.
You can employ marketing automation to prevent repetitive tasks like sending welcome messages and emails, searching for SEO keywords, creating dynamic content, etc. Marketing automation applications and programs can handle such tasks efficiently and accurately.
This way, you don’t need to hire more employees for these tasks and save money.

• Drives innovation and better efficiency

Applications help you increase efficiency and drive innovation. These apps also assist you to manage projects effectively and foster better collaboration. You can use the apps to manage your workflows as well.
Modern businesses use applications such as Slack, Trello, etc. for collaboration and smooth communication instead of physical meetings or emails.
For example, Bank of America uses an app that can take care of taking pictures of checks and manage them, which you deposit while transferring money to others. This way, people don’t need to visit the bank every time to handle finances.

• Helps you stand out

Consumer preferences are changing as we speak. As a result, market competition has increased to become tougher. Previously, the competition was more on product development, advertising campaigns, marketing channels, etc. 
But now, users need more customized experiences that can help them individually. This is where digital transformation kicks in with AI and ML. Companies are striving to deliver more user-centric, accessible, and convenient experiences. 
For example, Google and Amazon, among other technology giants are leveraging machine learning and IoT to understand user expectations, trends, and predictions that can shape their efforts.

How to navigate digital transformation in your business?

Now that you are aware of digital transformation and how it is beneficial for your business, the next thing is to implement it and be in the race.
For this, keep a few things in mind:

• Strong leadership

If you want to incorporate digital transformation, strong leaders are needed to cut through the challenges. It’s because they are the ones making informed decisions that can help your business in the long run.
They will administer every activity from customer experience, replacing legacy systems, optimizing combinations, and improving marketing efforts to track performance and forecast the future.
For this, they need to have a stronger understanding of emerging technologies combined with management capability. This is why you must evaluate your leaders and make changes in the hierarchy, if that it takes to get the things done.

• Better business planning

Digital transformation is a continuous process. You need to make that first move, and then keep developing and exploring business prospects. Use it to think about how you can accomplish your long-term goals with proper planning and execution.
You can’t settle with the current technology because it will become obsolete in the near future. Plan on introducing new digital technologies that help your business move forward with trends.
Keep on improving consumer engagements, in-house processes, marketing efforts, payment methods, and more with the help of digital transformation.

• Prepare clear strategies

Your digital transformation strategies must be based on providing a better value to your customers. Hence, set priorities based on the planning for each department.
And when you explain these priorities and assign tasks to the team members, clarify each aspect properly, so they understand what they are doing and why.
For example, to help customers have better convenience, you can prioritize digital payments or integrate with tools like PayPal.

• Get more transparent with employees

Everyone in your team expects transparency. Don’t keep them in the dark even if you have to make some decisions that are not appreciated by all.
Due to digital transformation, positions might shift while automation may lead to elimination or merging of employees with other roles.
Whatever be the case, communicate it with your team members honestly, explaining the reasons. Instead of firing employees, you can also look for up-skilling or re-skilling them internally. Find ways you can utilize their talents to bring value in your team.

• Organize your data properly

Data is essential for your business; be it developing a new product, finding customer preferences, or optimizing your marketing strategies. And organizing data properly is also necessary for digital transformation.
Ensure data is accessible easily by centralizing repositories, sharing it with business leaders and product owners, and enhancing data integrity. In addition to this, prepare data catalogues or categorize them efficiently, so your team knows how to find the data and where.

• Empower decision-makers with agility

According to a report, 45% of executives think their company does not have the right set of technologies to deploy digital transformation.
Hence, to enable the digital transformation process in your business smoothly and effectively, you need to empower your decision-makers, leaders, and managers with some agility.
It will help them think quickly and act without having to climb the high ladder of approval from different departments or teams. Let them handle responsibilities such as profit and loss, based on which they can proceed fast, experiment more, and adapt to changes quickly. 
Provide them with the right flexibility and technology to fuel your digital strategies. Let them enable cloud technology to be more dynamic and fast, which helps you test low-risk, cost-effective projects.
Allow them to connect SaaS apps, customer databases, applications, big data analytics, etc., to get a better customer overview to deliver an improved user experience. 

Conclusion
​
Embracing digital transformation has become essential, especially after the global pandemic. It is the key to proving fast, improved, and tailored customer experiences.
Hence, implement digital transformation in your business as early as possible to steer clear of the competition.
​​Contact the App-Scoop Vancouver Mobile App Developers for further details.

​The goal of developing a mobile app is to make it successful.
It took your team months to plan, strategize, develop, design, and market your application so you can deliver best-in-class performance to the users.
Hence, hoping that your customers, subscribers, or users like the app is natural. Or, you expect it to generate at least a decent revenue to walk in the path of making it a success.
But how do you measure success?
How do you know your mobile application is progressing towards your desired goals?
Well, it’s possible if you determine mobile KPIs!

​In this article, we will introduce you to the essential KPIs, and how measuring them can help your business.
Let’s start!

What are Mobile KPIs?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are certain metrics or parameters that help you determine how your mobile application is performing, future predictions, fix issues, and improve its overall functionality to reap better ROI.
Some mobile KPIs are:

• Business metrics
• Performance metrics
• Engagement metrics
• User-centric metrics

A study showcases that about 80-90% of downloaded applications are only used once before users delete them.
Hence, you need to measure the performance of your app and improve every area where you can.
Determining these parameters will help you guide your development, design, and marketing teams in the right direction where they can increase the better value proposition to users. It can also attract the resources and attention of more shareholders, buyers, and investors.
Ultimately, your mobile app will generate more ROI to you, in addition to better brand awareness.
So, let’s breakdown each of these mobile KPIs and understand how they can help you achieve your goal.

• Business metrics

Your app can be considered successful if it can generate decent revenue and ROI. For this, you need to calculate some business metrics such as cost for every acquisition or retention, lifetime value, etc.
Business metrics are necessary to determine the monetization potential of your mobile application. They help you make data-driven decisions in addition to predicting financial problems that might surface.

So, let’s review what business metrics you are required to measure in order to achieve better app success.

    1. Cost per acquisition

Cost per acquisition means how much investment you have made to acquire new subscribers or users.It’s essential to track cost per acquisition because once your app is ready, there are certain costs associated that drive people to install your app, be it marketing efforts or anything else. You need to calculate the average cost you spent on each app download.
Start by calculating costs on app development, design, maintenance, and marketing efforts for each download over a certain time period. This time period can be the same as the time period of your revenue measurement. And it can depend on the nature and type of your business.
Ideally, this cost per acquisition must be as low as possible. And, it must also be lesser than customer lifetime value, which we will discuss next.

    2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)

After you acquire a customer, you need to determine how much financial value those customers can generate for your business.
To be precise, it focuses on measuring the amount of money you can expect to derive from consumers on average.
CLTV is an indicator that helps you gauge whether or not you are spending more money to acquire customers than generating value out of them. Your CLTV must be more than the cost per acquisition if you want to remain in the profit quadrant.

• Performance metrics

The mobile KPIs based on performance focus the way your app operates. It is important to measure these metrics because they help you gain deeper insight into all the functionalities and operations of your mobile app, along with the issues that may arise.   
By determining performance metrics, you can better optimize your application. You can fix issues like frequent crashes, longer loading periods, etc. and make it seamless for the users.
This way, your customers enjoy using your application, and chances of retaining users increase more. For this, you need to track some performance metrics as explained below:

    1. Crash rate

You must keep an eye on your mobile app to determine how many times it crashes in a day, how often, doing what activity, how many users, and more. You can further breakdown this based on the device like what is the number of crashes on Android devices or iOS, and so on.
Frequent crashes disrupt the user experience, frustrates them more, or may even cause data loss. These are enough reasons to drive the users away, hence, affecting your ROI.
But, if you monitor this metric, it will highlight the potential issues, and your team can fix them sooner. You can also measure deeper insights, including crash costs.

    2. Application loading speed

Application loading speed means how fast your mobile app loads along in accordance with its features. It is important as nobody likes a slow app that takes forever to load.
You could revisit the past where we had to roll our heads wondering when this page will load. But gone are those days; we have technologies that ensure it no longer must be the case. Otherwise, people start abandoning slow-loading apps.
Ideally, your app must load within 2 seconds. But if it is higher than that, consider optimizing this subject to reap better profits out of your app.

    3. API latency

API latency refers to the time an application takes to make a user request to an API and receive a response from it. 
Latency must be minimum in order for your app to serve your customers well as no one likes waiting these days. Many app makers are now optimizing their apps for one second of latency, as zero is not yet possible.
If it takes over 3-4 seconds, you need to work seriously on the API latency to provide users with better usability.

• Engagement metrics

The ways users interact with your mobile app is another essential metric you need to track. This is done to ensure they utilize your app and remain your loyal subscribers for you to get better success rates.
For this, you need to understand the usage patterns, in-app behaviour, how much time they use the app, how long they use it, and more.
Monitoring these insights help you improve your app functionality, fix certain areas, optimize it so users can best utilize all the features.
This way, you can have a larger user base and better app monetization strategy for your application. Hence, measure the metrics like:

    1. Retention rate

Retention rate here means how many users revisit your mobile app in a given timeframe. It’s not necessary that they will use it every day, but might use it when in need. So, you need to monitor your retention rates as well per month, year, or quarter.
Another way of measuring your retention rate is to push an update notification and watch your users respond to it. 

    2. Session length

In the world of mobile applications, session length means how much time your subscribers or users spend using your application in a single session. You can calculate it by marking the time when a user launches it, to the time they close it.
When you track app session length, you can discover potential revenue streams via app flows. The goal here is to find a way through which the users spend more time on your app if you serve certain services that require this user behaviour like social media.
But the case can be totally opposite for other industries like Uber. Here, the goal would be to help users find a ride quickly to serve them better.
Hence, session length is not universal and can vary from one industry to another. This is why you need to keep calculating it on average to understand whether your users like your app or not and present more relevant content for them.

    3. Session interval

Similar to the session length, there is one more metric called session interval. It is the time lapse between two app sessions. It will give you an idea of how often users open your mobile application and use it.
This metric is great for industries where users do not need to open the app every day or at least not like social media. They use your app when they need it. Use this metric to optimize your user experience while encouraging them for more openings with useful more materials.
For example, you may gain insight like tablet users tend to have long session intervals. It’s the sign that you need to optimize your app design for tablets.

    4. Time-in app

Track time-in app metrics to understand how long users spend in your mobile application over a certain period of time. This metric helps you measure user engagement and usage trends.
Use this data to learn what a user does with your mobile app, what sections they love exploring, and more. This way, you can guide your developers to develop and design upcoming app versions based on these trends and user expectations.
For example, if users from a specific location use your mobile app for longer durations, you can check screen flow patterns of those users, how many purchases they make or just explore the app.
This data helps you add more value to users and drives better user experience for that location. You can follow the same procedure to determine the in-app time for other user segments and improve your app engagement.

• User-centric metrics

To get a better understanding of your app user base, you need to monitor user-centric metrics. Measure how large your user base is, how frequently they use your mobile app, and where they are located on the global map.
These insights help you understand user behaviour, which your app development team can utilize to create more personalized elements in the app. As a result of this, retention rates and engagement rates increase.
Therefore, consider measuring user-centric metrics such as:

    1. Active Users

One of the most crucial metrics you need to measure is how many active users engage with your mobile app.
According to a report, about 28% of applications are uninstalled within 30 days of their installation.
It implies that not only attracting users to your app is necessary but maintaining their trust with powerful usability works in the long run.
For this, there are two things to measure Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU). These things help you understand the importance of user engagement for your mobile app by reflecting the total number of users who engage with your mobile app daily and monthly. 
Use the data to work in the areas requiring improvement. However, DAU and MAU may depend on the industry. Mobile applications for social media like Facebook will have higher DAU and MAU, but for healthcare, food delivery, etc., things might change.

    2. Acquisition and Retention

The number of new users who installed your mobile application on their devices is what we are referring by ‘acquisition’. It may happen through paid campaigns, organic search, or word-of-mouth campaigns.
Track how many users you acquired per day or month, through which marketing channel, and from which location. It will help you guide your marketing efforts on the right path.

​    3. Churn rate

Tracking churn rates are as important as your acquisition and retention rates. It is actually just the opposite of retention rate. It is the rate with which users uninstall your mobile application or cancel its subscription.
You need to keep an eye on this metric because it directly affects your revenue and business. The reasons can be many like poor usability, app crashes, lack of fresh content, better app in the market, and more.
However, sometimes it becomes difficult to understand the exact reasons. But if you keep a sharp eye on all the metrics, it will be easier to spot issues and fix them. Thus, you can work on getting better retention rates with the help of this insight.

Conclusion

Tracking metrics associated with your mobile app’s performance, user experience, engagement, and cost expenditure is important.
If you only focus on development, design, maintenance, and marketing without measuring how your users and subscribers are responding to your app, you will never know where you are lacking and why you are not achieving the desired profit out of it.
Thus, keep an eye on these 12 mobile application KPIs to improve your application in 360 degrees and fix issues to provide a better user experience. And when all these things are met, you can expect to witness better ROI and profit margins.
Contact the App-Scoop Vancouver Mobile App Developers for further details.