Smartphone manufacturers are clearly the earliest proponents of sophisticated digital product adoption techniques like mobile user onboarding flows and product walkthroughs but how are they faring in their global battle for hearts and minds?
A report by Electronics Hub in 2021 showed that out of 142 countries, 74 prefer Android over Apple 65 with Belarus, Fiji and Peru showing a draw. The survey methodology described in the report was based on sentiment analysis of over 347,000 tweets.
What was remarkable about the survey is that North America overwhelmingly prefers Android (yep you read that right) over Apple with Android averaging 32, over Apple 19 in terms of positive sentiment. Curiously Poland emerged as the world’s number 1 Android hater with 34% of tweets averaging negative. Latvia ranked as the world’s number one Apple hater with 35% tweets about Apple averaging negative.
Whatever religious standing consumers hold over either platform the sentiment doesn’t stack up when it comes to B2B and B2B2C mobile apps. A tally of Apple and Android SDKs for three of the most popular analytics firms Segment, Amplitude and Mixpanel tell a very different story. A sample of Business and Finance apps using SDKs for the aforementioned analytics firms reveal Apple as the clear front runner with almost double the number of SDKs over Android.
Love or hate when it comes to the question of how users feel the apps they use, analytics will provide some insight however they don’t provide any tools enabling quick response to change or influence user behaviour. App developers are largely limited to hard coding which extends to any user engagement strategies like mobile app user onboarding tours, product walkthroughs, contextual mobile tooltips, in-app FAQ’s and user surveys. Darryl Goede, CEO and founder of Sparkbox knows first hand how long and painful software development can be, however being able to use a low-code user engagement platform like Contextual allows his team to quickly respond to changes in user behaviour and maintain the love of Spark Pico users
React Native shares the love!. At Contextual we are noticing emerging B2B apps are trending towards Android particularly in Asia and South America however what we are also seeing is a preference for React Native for the development of both Android and IOS business apps. This is great news for Product Teams looking to accelerate their apps across both iOS and Android platforms. The good news is Contextual provides a simple easy to implement solution for creating and targeting mobile and web application user onboarding guides and walkthroughs and in-app contextual tooltips, FAQs and user surveys across each operating system.
Spending on Apps Overtakes Games on Apple’s Platform for the First Time Ever
A strong lead indicator that consumers are depending ever more on mobile phones to conduct their day to day lives is borne out by the latest Sensor Tower Q2 2022 Data Digest: U.S. which reports that spending on Apps Overtakes Games on Apple’s Platform for the First Time Ever.
U.S. consumer spending in non-game mobile apps “pipped” spending in mobile games for the first time ever in the second quarter of the year to $3.4 billion.
Both traditional bricks and mortar businesses and technology led firms are increasingly realizing the potential for greater customer engagement by achieving tenancy on their customers handheld devices.
However despite the massive amount of investment pouring into the development of apps achieving success it’s not as easy as just launching an app! Over 70% of new app installs are used just once and then abandoned and studies have shown that the drop off rate after a free trial period can be as high as 60%. [5 Tips on how to reduce Mobile user churn]
The apps that have survived that initial install and free trial period Gauntlet of Death and become part of the latest success numbers have achieved this by helping their users achieve Activation by shortening the time to “Initial Value” via effective mobile user onboarding strategies and maintained a path of “Realised Value” through effective in-app user engagement via ToolTips, new feature announcements, in-app FAQs and User Surveys.
Sensor Tower also reported that the preferred revenue strategy adopted by B2B and B2B2C mobile apps have also proven to have had a significant impact on these numbers.
The comparative difference between the two sectors (with $3.3 billion spent on mobile games) puts the delta in spending between the two at a mere $100M. However, the difference in comparative growth rates with gaming apps on 20% v non-game mobile apps at 40% compound annual growth rate has non-gaming apps on a trajectory to grow to almost $15B and increase the delta in spending between the two by almost $1B in 2023.
These numbers will place product teams and software developers of B2B and B2B2C mobile apps under even greater pressure as they seek to take advantage of this phenomenal growth. Apps that do not have an effective contextual mobile user onboarding walkthrough strategy will struggle to claim their share. Established mobile and web apps that do not have in-app messaging and tooltips to help guide users find new features and nudge users towards deeper engagement with existing features will lose ground to competitors.
In today’s competitive business landscape, achieving fast-paced growth is a top priority for all businesses and apps. However, sustainable and measurable growth requires more than just expansion. It demands a strategic approach that focuses on user satisfaction, seamless product adoption, and the integration of contextual marketing. This article explores the principles of Product-Led Growth (PLG) and highlights the benefits of incorporating contextual user onboarding, mobile tooltips, and a digital adoption platform into your marketing strategy.
Product-Led Growth, Explained:
Product-Led Growth is a strategy that emphasizes delivering value through the product itself to drive user acquisition and retention. Companies like Slack, Calendly, and Dropbox have successfully implemented PLG strategies, transforming their products into the heart of their marketing efforts. This approach not only reduces costs associated with traditional advertising but also fosters a self-serve user experience that encourages organic growth and user referrals.
The Power of Contextual Marketing and User Onboarding:
Contextual marketing plays a pivotal role in the success of product-led companies. By prioritizing user satisfaction and providing in-app guidance and support, companies can lower the adoption barrier and enhance product adoption. Leveraging tools like contextual user onboarding walkthroughs and mobile tooltips, businesses can empower users to discover the product’s value on their own, leading to a faster realization of the “aha moment.”
Why Integrate Context Marketing in Your Strategy?
While content marketing has gained popularity, it’s clear that a single marketing approach isn’t sufficient to deliver the best user experience. This is where the Context Marketing mindset comes into play. Contextual marketing meets users at the right time, filtering information and providing tailored content to enhance engagement, retention, and revenue.
Benefits of Contextual Marketing:
Increased Engagement: Enhanced user experience leads to increased engagement. By focusing on user satisfaction, product-led companies prioritize customer feedback and develop features driven by user needs. This customer-centric approach boosts engagement, happiness, and the likelihood of user recommendations.
Less Intrusive, More Organic: Contextual marketing tailors content to users’ preferences, delivering a personalized experience without compromising user satisfaction. Understanding user behavior allows companies to better target relevant material, increasing user conviction and driving action.
Better Conversion Rates: Targeted marketing meets users’ specific needs, increasing conversion rates and reducing churn. Personalized marketing keeps users engaged, minimizing app abandonment and increasing the probability of recommendations.
Enhanced Analytics: Contextual marketing provides valuable insights into user engagement, retention, and comprehension. Tracking key metrics such as revenue, user growth, and daily and monthly active users (DAU and MAU) helps quantify the impact of guidance initiatives and optimize marketing strategies.
How to Implement Context Marketing:
To harness the power of context marketing, consider integrating tools like Contextu.al into your strategy. In-app announcements, videos, guides, surveys, and tips can transform the user experience, providing contextual guidance and driving user retention. By prioritizing the user journey, you can leverage context marketing to its fullest potential.
Conclusion:
By embracing Product-Led Growth and integrating contextual marketing techniques, businesses can unlock sustainable and measurable growth. Leveraging user onboarding walkthroughs, contextual mobile tooltips, and a digital adoption platform, companies can enhance user experiences, increase engagement, improve conversion rates, and drive organic growth. Prioritize your users, optimize your marketing strategy, and take advantage of tools like Contextu.al to propel your app’s success. Book a demo with Contextual today and start driving product-led growth with a focus on user satisfaction and seamless product adoption.
Naval just tweeted: “You’re doing sales because you failed at marketing.You’re doing marketing because you failed at product.”**
News Flash: Most Product team members don’t actually use their own App. As an App user, we’ve all thought “wtf were these developers thinking” (I’m looking at you Microsoft Teams ????).
These teams are Product-centric but not Customer-centric – it’s a lack of empathy and you need people in your team that are champions for the customer. I’ve written elsewhere about why Customer Support/Care is a key input to Product. But can we develop cultures of Customer Success?
Customer-Centric
Customer centricity is essential for a 21st-century product company and should be a focus for the product team. In this series, “Context Marketing” is the focus/lens that Product Teams can use to view the User’s Journey.
“Marketing” may be a dirty word for Product Managers, Developers and Customer Success – if they wanted a career in Sales or Marketing, they would have chosen it – maybe they see it as “the dark-side”. But, but, but…great Marketing and Sales seeks (with empathy) to speak to the customer’s needs.
Product Teams with customer-centric cultures make products that:
Do the “Job-to-be-done”
Surprise and delight customers.
So “Context Marketing” isn’t a dirty word but making an App infused with the very same “user” curiosity and empathy that Sales and Marketing folks have.
Context marketing is, by nature, user-oriented, individually analysing and displaying content that would be of interest to the client in question – in this moment. Product-led growth and customer success are inevitable.
Credit: superoffice.com
3 Benefits of a Customer-Centric Mindset
Understanding the User Journey
Increasing Customer Satisfaction
Reducing User Churn
The bottom of this post details each of these goals. Context Marketing puts features, offers and help that a customer needs at each point during the User Journey – context matters when it comes to inApp messaging, help, feature releases, and so on.
At Contextual, even a simple tooltip for the right-person at the right time aims to meet these 3 goals.
Can Product Teams afford Customer-centricity?
One (unamed) Company developed a successful B2B app, they have a good customer base and product-market fit. What a dream! Or is it?
While things look perfect on paper, what can’t be seen from the outside is that they are overloaded. Their engineering led culture codes everything in-house – the founders were super-coders so all engineering copy-cats that hairy chested style. The App is loaded with features (developers build whatever customers ask). So the App has grown to be complex….customers need to be onboarded, features need to be explained and guides need to be released.
The Customer Success and Customer Care teams are overwhelmed with a backlog of customer tasks/followups that need to be done and consider giving extra responsibilities to the developers. While hard coding was once the main option in these situations, now it feels outdated, and it only adds to the problem. Designers could fix these issues, but it would be costly, and it would only add to the development backlog.
This scenario is a vicious circle: by letting the developers handle it, the company loses money and time.
Customer related costs
Poor App customer-centricity results in these top-line problem:
Increased load on Customer Care
Lags in resolving Customer problems
User Churn
Poor revenue
Poor reviews and referrals (the engine of low cost marketing and acquisition)
Opportunity cost
By hard-coding every aspect of a product, there is less time to develop new features, more effort goes into contextual customisations, if each user (cohort) is manually analyzed, and there is no analytics that proves the success of any of these aspects.
Another lost opportunity is the lack of performance/usability data flowing back into Customer Success systems. Lack of this data means the organisation can’t adapt and learn from lessons.
Engineering Costs
Keeping super-coders employed is expensive, there are many job opportunities for coders and it’s unlikely that coding tips, guides, marketing will lead to employee retention.
In addition, recruiters now demand fees of 18-20% of salary. Every dissatisfied departing engineer has a devastating impact on corporate memory.
Customer Care and Customer Success Costs
With Increased load on Customer Care, this results in unhappiness and churn in your staffing.
Recruitment and retraining may not be as expensive as engineering churn but every green, newbie, clueless customer support rep will be a bad experience for the customer.
This is a huge risk!
Solution
Few product teams have enough development resources to write features AND have a framework of inApp messaging and help. Hard coding is costly, slow and precious.
The solution is to:
1. Have developers focus on improving the product itself – the “feature layer”.
2. Use “engagement layer” tools like Contextual to help the User Journey.
No-Code inApp tips, guides, walkthroughs, announcements and feedback can be delivered on the Engagement Layer without consuming developer resources – much more affordable.
By choosing to let go of the “NIH”*** mindset, any product-led company would do themselves a favour. Precious time is saved, and less effort goes into satisfying your customers.
No-code engagement layer tools like Contextual are not a silver bullet but can help significantly to reduce costs and risk discussed above.
Why Context Marketing ⇒ Customer Success
The JTBD(jobs-to-be-done) framework helps product companies achieve product-market fit, as well as the level of satisfaction their users have while using the product.
Context Marketing is a similar framework By recognizing the need for context marketing (and platforms that deliver contextual help), the workload could be lighter and stress more manageable in Customer Care and Customer Success teams. Also, by using this method, Product Management can be more empathetic towards the customers as well.
Context Marketing can be even just a simple tooltip. Users can self-serve help, and they will feel closer to the product if right-place-right-time content is shown throughout their user journey.
We now have mutually beneficial ROI (return on investment) between the company/product and its clients.
The key is the customer – not the product.
The product is in service to the customer. The drip emails are in service to the customer. The chat widget or support button are in service to the customer. The help desk is in service to the customer. No touch point should lack customer-centric empathy.
More importantly: product management, developers, designers, scrum-masters are thinking customer-centric.
By using this framework, customer success is increased.
We take care of your announcements, guides, and feedback, so you won’t have to think about ‘Build or Buy?’ ever again. By choosing us, you can have access to the above-mentioned analytics to see if we help your users in their workflow, as well as lighten the workload of the design and development team. This way, you can focus only on coming up with new and exciting features for your product!
** Lots of Tweeps got grumpy and argued with Naval. Of course. Its rare to find a product today that doesn’t have competitors, so S&M play a function even for the most loved products.
*** “NIH” is Not invented here – it is very common in large silicon valley companies like google because of the massive profitability and the huge scale. But nowadays we find even larger companies consider using SaaS platforms to solve problems that arn’t their core competency. E.g Analytics or Product Adoption.
Appendix – 3 Goals in Detail
Understanding the User Journey
Product-led companies can be tempted to focus more on their product rather than their users. As they put a lot of effort into the creation of an app, they tend to forget about their audience’s happiness – “growth” gets bolted-on as a tactic without customer empathy.
By allowing the users to be the centre of attention, instead of the product itself, product companies are more likely to understand the user journey and the exact steps a customer might go through in a session.
This is important for future user journey mapping too, as it reveals possible weak points, parts of the product that need to be improved, as well as its strengths. By taking time to understand the before, during, and after parts of the user journey, context marketing can also be better targeted, uncovering the exact needs a user has while using an app.
Increasing Customer Satisfaction
Users make or break a product and the developing company as well. Their opinions are essential for product-led growth, and so is their happiness.
Customer satisfaction is not a new term in the marketing world. Context marketing especially focuses on this concept, as it plays a great role in what type of content users are shown while working with a product. The right place and the right time are crucial elements of customer success.
Customer centricity helps product-led companies to recognize and adjust their practices that increase user satisfaction and offer a positive user experience.
Reducing User Churn
By placing the user in the centre of the product development, product-led companies can observe the patterns and behaviours of their clients. This not only helps in the user journey mapping task, but it can be a great starting point in reducing user churn.
Analysing the possible reasons why users may or may not like different features, conducting A/B testing on them, displaying different tips to guide them in their user journey are all beneficial in determining reasons why churn might occur. With these and a problem-solving attitude, solutions can be found to reduce user churn.
The key is the customer. Their satisfaction matters in the success of a product. By looking at their journey and adopting a customer-centric mindset, it’s obvious how much context matters when it comes to marketing, feature releases, and so on. Here, at Contextual, we understand the need for context the best!
“Impactful” product features are the backbone of every product-led company. “Impact” is one of the axes of the RICE prioritisation method – we revisit this valuable approach to getting the right tasks into your sprints.
Like most product companies, we struggle to triage and prioritize the mountain of tickets into sprints. Luckily at Contextual we can use our own product to add contextual help instead of making even more tickets for engineering.
Your Mobile and Web Apps are competing with other apps to get your users attention. You need each of your product features help the user get their Job Done (JTBD) – this means the right features at the right time and with minimum user confusion.
In the routine of a product-led company, user journey mapping is a crucial task in order to ensure the greatest possible user experience. As there are a lot of things to consider in user journey mapping, prioritisation helps you be more organised with your product features, and it enables your App to become more impactful.
But, (you may ask ????,) based on what criteria should you prioritize product features? A great place to start is the RICE scoring model, a prioritization framework that shines light on the value of your ideas. It helps your user journey mapping through four factors: Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort. Together, they form the acronym: RICE.
RICE – Grain by Grain
A good prioritization framework can help you see your product features in a new light, so that you can make sure you’re making a good decision for your company. So, when you make time for user journey mapping, having a system that allows you to see your product clearly and objectively comes to your advantage. RICE helps you evaluate the four main areas of any project idea.
Reach
How many people can you reach with a new product feature in a given timeframe? Will they benefit from it? The score in this case is the number of people you estimate to be reached by the new feature.
Impact
The Impact score represents, as its name suggests, the estimated impact the new product feature can have on the people you reach. For instance, you could ask: ‘How much will this feature affect product adoption/conversion rates?’ Or, ‘How will the user experience benefit from this?’
As Impact is hard to measure, a multiple-choice scale is usually used for estimation purposes:
3 – massive impact
2 – high impact
1 – medium impact
.5 – low impact
.25 – minimal impact
Confidence
A product-led company is always enthusiastic about great ideas and implementing them when it comes to product features. However, to be more realistic, the RICE scoring model advises that you factor in the level of confidence you might have with product features and their releases. In the long run, this estimation will help with product adoption among your users.
Percentages score Confidence, as follows: 100% – high confidence
80% – medium confidence
50 % – low confidence
So, how confident are you about the reach and impact of a new product feature?
In order to achieve your product feature’s RICE score, you have to follow the following formula:
Effort is the denominator in the RICE equation. This factor represents the cost a product-led company pays when implementing a new product feature.
To quantify Effort in this score model, you estimate it in the same manner you do with Reach, Impact, and Confidence. In this case, Effort is estimated by analyzing the work one team member can do in a month.
The highest possible Impact with the least possible Effort is desirable when it comes to product features and their releases. By minimizing the time and human resources you put into a feature release, you gain them back for other areas of your product.
Effort is the most important out of the four RICE factors, as it can make or break a good idea. If you have great Reach and Impact, but the feature you envisioned requires most of your team and a significant amount of time, it might be better to rethink the idea or to use a different approach for it.
How to Minimize Effort?
That’s an easy question to answer: use Contextu.al!
Of course we jest – there is so many features you have to implement and those require solid development work. But Feature Announcements and Guidance – in fact all elements such as videos that deepen user engagement can be helped by using Contextual.
We strive to deliver product-led growth through announcements, guides, tips regarding product features, the onboarding process, and even feedback!
With Contextu.al, you wouldn’t have to worry about hard-coding, because the Effort on your part would be minimal. Your top priorities are even higher priorities for us! Putting more effort into implementing new releases is the thing of the past with us.
As an added bonus, with Contextu.al, the Impact and Confidence are also increasing. How, you ask? With us, you can get rapid feedback and measure results in no time. This will give you and your team the confidence to implement the desired changes later by hard-coding.
If you want to make your app fly, don’t hesitate to book a demo with us today! You won’t regret it.
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