3 Critical Mistakes Killing Your App Engagement

Coming up, I'm going to share with you three deep linking mistakes that are killing your app [music] engagement and of course how to fix them. Stay tuned. >> [music] >> What is up App Nation? It is Steve P. Young, founder of appmasters.com and I want to share with you before you can even make money in your app, you're going to have to make sure you're not making any of these mistakes. These will brutally kill you and I've got the stats to back it up, all right? So, let's not tease it anymore. Let's get into this video. Here it is, the three critical and even if you're not deep linking, these are going to be critical for you to really watch through. So, I want you to really pay attention to the end of the video and if I failed you, well, leave a comment below and complain to me, okay? Let's get into it. Three critical deep linking mistakes that are killing your app engagement. Before I get to number one, I want to share this

stat with you. The leading causes of churn is poor onboarding, okay? Really, really focus on that. Weak customer relationships, of course. Poor customer service, of course. Difficult user experience. Now, in the age of AI when you can build anything your heart desires, user experience is going to be your main differentiator, all right? And obviously ignoring customer complaints. So, it's a lot about customer stuff and onboarding and user experience, all right? So, really take care of your customers and even before you do that, so make sure they understand how to onboard properly and obviously use your app. All right, let's get into number one and this is app activation. And if you got a finance app or you got a fitness app, you got any app that you need some user information on and you want to confirm that user information, that's social media app, maybe budgeting app, app activation is so important and

deep linking is one of the best ways to activate them. So, I'm going to show you two examples and the stats of why deep linking works a lot better. But let me give you those two examples, all right? Here it is, deep linking. So, here's Seeking Alpha. So, here's the onboarding screens. Welcome, right? Create your free free account. Happy to do that. Check your inbox. I do that. And then they bring me door straight back once I click the link in the inbox into the app to get premium access.

Seamless, right? I put in my email address, they send me an email, I click on that email, I'm right back into the app. Amazing. That's good user experience. Good onboarding, good user experience. Now, I've seen this way, manual code entry where same thing. This is from Monarch. So, Monarch get me to sign up, sign up, give you their email. I have to go to my email, put in the code and do this. Now, probably it's a lot cheaper to do it this way because it's just a code and I can match this up on the back end. I verify the email and then I have the paywall. So, you're probably think, come on Steve, is there that big of a difference between the two?

Obviously, one is pretty seamless. Two, you have to remember a code and you got to input it. You can hit up copy and paste, dude. Come on, boomer, you just hit copy and paste, it's that easy. Let me give you those numbers, all right? Deep linking versus manual code entry. 110% according to our friends at AppsFlyer. 110% improvement. Deep linking delivers 110% improvement in day 30 retention when used for personalized onboarding. Boom.

That's the seamless process. Why? Manual code entry according to email list validation, manual code entry on the other hand increases the likelihood of user errors, very frustrating, like mistyping and lengthy or complex code may discourage users from completing the process. Have you ever checked into an airline? You know that confirmation code? It's like letters and numbers and all that stuff. Super annoying, right? I don't like manual code entry. I like to just click on the link and go straight back into the app. That's cool cuz it makes me feel good as an end user as well. This is seamless, so the app must be good. All right, so if you have to pick a way, I'd pick Seeking Alpha, not Monarch's way. I would get people to sign up, let them go to their email inbox, click on that little link and then take them back straight into the app. The other thing to app engagement cuz I want to help you, right? This is

all about app engagement. So, try to get people to re-engage with an app. And the most critical time in my opinion right now is after they've started a trial. Get them to do something within the app, all right? And if you can do that, they're going to stay within your app, all right? So, let me give you an example. Here's an email campaign that we set up. And we used deep linking to take users straight into the app and into the workout. It was a fitness app and the A was the benefits of hit workouts versus B our most popular workouts. Now, we only sent this email to those who have activated a trial and we wanted them to work out because we knew that if you worked out just once, you're way likely to stay on the app than cancel your subscription. So, you want to guess which one won? I'm going to say A, the benefits of hit workouts versus B, our most popular workouts. You can leave a comment or you can just think it in your

head. You ready? It was B. So, our most popular workouts 2x the workout completion rate. So, use email, use push notifications, the communication channel doesn't matter as much as the messaging. So, it was the same email, I just changed the subject line and I use user psychology because most people want to know what's our most popular. People have FOMO. So, I just said, hey, here's our most popular workouts and then boom, instantly we increase the workout completion. So, an easy way for you to re-engage your users and the most important users in my opinion would be those who actually showed some intent by activating a trial because those who didn't, they're harder, they're a lot harder to get them back into your app.

So, for those who are in the fintech space, well, I want to give you some inspiration from subject lines I know have worked in the past, all right? So, our most popular money saving strategies? Woo. Why wouldn't I want to know that? Copy Warren Buffett's investment philosophy? Now, here's what we're doing here. We're using social proof. This is Warren Buffett, who doesn't know Warren Buffett. So, you can see there's certain elements in subject lines that really re-engage your users. And the last one is do this one thing to eliminate 10 years off your mortgage. I did that one thing, by the way, and that's why I came up with this. But so, if you guys want to know that, that's just paying more than what your mortgage should be. So, whatever your mortgage minimum payment is, if you can afford to pay more, pay a little bit more and I paid enough to short pretty much shave off 10 years off our our mortgage. But people love one

thing and numbers, right? Numbers. I think this video has numbers. All right, the last thing that you can do to activate or engage your users is the offline-online connection, all right? That is it. So, use physical products, use an offline thing and this is especially true for fintech companies who probably have a physical location, right? I have to go to my bank sometimes and you have QR codes. So, or you have a booth and you want QR codes. If you're Venmo, hey, Venmo me QR codes, right?

So, very, very important to have deep linking if you're in the fintech, but I want to give you some examples of the right and wrong ways that I've seen it done. All right, here's Nike. I want to show you this really quick. So, I'm on nike.com, right? I hit open. I don't have the app. It's like download, it's not really open, it's get. But all right, it is what it is. But I have to go straight into the app, I have to go to the App Store. So, I'm going from Safari to the App Store. I've downloaded the app and now it's taking me through the onboarding process, right?

Here's Sephora. So, that's one way. Nike.com to the main page, right? All right, here's Sephora. Now, I'm on a product within Sephora right now cuz I can add to the basket and I hit this little get. Sephora's get instead of open. I'm like, okay, I'm going to hit get and I don't have to go anywhere. I'm literally still in Safari. So, I hit get and I'm it will download the app while I'm still in Safari. And then this get changes to open. So, I open the app and boom, I'm right into the app. Now, the thing that I would do is combine both, right? Combine both.

Hey, Nike, allow me to download directly. Now, what Nike does really well is if you're in a product, it takes you directly to the product after you finish the onboarding, takes you directly to the product. But Sephora doesn't. I was in the product and now I'm on the home page. Granted, I was lazy and I picked a product that was on the home page. So it was not that hard to find. But what if I didn't? What if I didn't? Remember our stats.

Poor onboarding. Difficult user experience. Okay? Depending on your demographic, you might have already lost them if you didn't take them to the spot they expected to see. All right? We're very picky with technology now. We expect the very, very best. All right. Now let's see how Nike can do this. So imagine you have a QR code. Imagine you're watching a basketball game on Prime TV or whatever streaming channel, Peacock, all right? It doesn't matter. And you see a QR code and you scan it and you're at nike.com now. Cuz why not? Probably better to be on nike.com. So nike.com takes you to Nike.

It knows right away. Like imagine this. It knows whether you have the app or not. If it does you don't have the app, takes you to the desktop version. So opens up Safari. And then Safari, you have the get button, right? The Sephora version. So I hit get or open. And then I hit open and takes me directly into the shoe selected. So the same shoe. Now I'm in the app. Now app users, especially if you're in the e-commerce space or the fintech space, like app users are way more engaged than web users.

Right? And app users tend to spend more money than web users. So you definitely want an app user versus a web user. But think about how you can use QR codes for that, even in the e-commerce space. I pulled up this great article here for seamless customer experience, banks turned to QR codes, right? You see these Venmo, you see these Cash App QR code codes all the time. So here I saw this on Google, but you can see Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, Square, a bunch of QR codes. So if you've got a physical location, if you're a bank, if you're in e-commerce, have these up there. I've been at a lot of farmer markets where this is all I see as well.

Now, if you haven't been using QR codes, here the benefits, especially if you're in the fintech space. User-friendly, obviously, everybody's got a camera on their phone. Encrypts transactions, very important in the fintech space. Real-time analytics. So for you marketers out there, you get to see how well your QR code users are performing within your app. And are they dropping off from scanning the QR code to actually installing or registering your app.

Contactless mobile banking, that's obvious. Literally I scan a Venmo and I can send payment right away. And then it helps increase customer loyalty. Because as I told you, app users are way more loyal than web users. Now, if you want to learn all about app entry points and app engagement and why broken deep links actually look like low engagement. In other words, if you're seeing low engagement, it might not be the app. It might be how they got in to the app.

Go check out this article from AppsFlyer. It is the five entry moments engagement teams in finance can't afford to break. It is truthfully aimed for own media teams. And that what that means is you own the channel, so you own the media. That is you own social media handle, you own the email, right? You're not doing push. These are people that you can pull into your content. So that means what? You own it, right? It's for those teams in the fintech space, but a lot of great general advice that you can use. And for me and some of the success that I found in the app marketing agency, it's literally cuz I borrowed them from web marketing, right? When I talked about long paywalls, web. When I talked about conversions, I knew when I started talking about 2019, I was like, "Hey, CRO, nobody's talking about in the app space. Let me be the one of the first ones to talk about it." And I was. So I would say go read the article, whether

you're in the fintech space or not, because you're going to learn a whole lot that you can use, whether you're in health and fitness, education, any other category. All right. If you want the link to the full article, it is in the YouTube description. And for those of you who are not watching me and listening to me instead, well, it is in your favorite podcast app as well. It's definitely worth the read, so [music] go check it out. Lastly, if you want to learn more about deep linking and you want to use a deep linking solution from a trusted, [music] one of the biggest names in the app space, well, AppsFlyer has a deep linking suite that you actually don't even need. You're like, "Steve, I just want the deep linking suite and I do not want the MMP." Well, you can do that as well. [music] And that link is in the description below as well. And you'll be able to access >> [music] >> AppsFlyer's deep linking solution. No

need for the MMP. You can just get started with their deep linking solution and really start engaging your >> [music] >> users. Give them a seamless process. All right. Until next time, I will see you on the next video. >> [music]