Ecommerce App For Your Business

What is App User Lifetime Value and How to Increase It?

Developing a mobile app is only the first (indeed crucial) step to boosting your business. But have you strategized what happens after people install your app? Increasing customer lifetime value (LTV) is equally, or perhaps more, important than driving installations. You sure don’t want people to uninstall the app after using it once? Then it’s time to focus on boosting user lifetime value.

Not sure what LTV is? No worry. Today, we will discuss the concept of user lifetime value and explore how to maximize it.

What is User Lifetime Value in a Mobile App?

App user lifetime value denotes the total value of a user for a business. From paid subscription to referring to other users - everything is included in it. LTV offers a holistic view comprising monetization, shareability, and retention rate. Let us take a quick look at these:

•  Sharability - It takes the shareability or virality of the app into account. You can identify how many users are brought by each user over a specific period of time.

•  Retention Rate - It denotes the percentage of people who continue to use your app over a specific period of time. It also considers how much time users spend on your app or user engagement.

•  Monetization - It refers to the amount of money the users spend on an app over their lifetime or Average Revenue per User (ARPU). For an eCommerce app, it takes order values into account. Other monetization methods include PPC campaigns (where the business owner earns money from the ad owner as the users click on it), paid subscriptions, in-app purchases, etc.

How to Calculate User Lifetime Value

Here, you have to multiply the average amount of revenue brought by each user by the time they use your app. Then add the extra value brought in from referrals. Here is a quick formula:

Average LTV = ARPU x 1/Churn rate + Referral rate

(Churn = 1 - retention rate)

Your aim should be to increase user lifetime value. Below, you will find some handpicked tips recommended by a renowned app development agency to boost user lifetime value.

How to Increase User Lifetime Value in a Mobile App

Here, we will elaborate on three components of lifetime value.

1. Sharability

Today, with numerous apps around, people prefer to listen to their peers’ recommendations. Here’re a few ways you can drive more shares.

• Incentivizing the users to share your app is a great trick. They will do something to get something in return. For instance, you may offer in-app bonuses or credits when a user refers a friend through social media.

• Offering something unique on the app will automatically compel people to share your app. Therefore, pay attention to that.

• You can also create an illusion of celebrating the users’ activities on your app. For instance, you may encourage them to share your gaming app when they cross a hurdle or win a puzzle.

• It’s also important to optimize your brand presence on social media. You can engage digital marketing services to spread brand awareness, manage brand reputation on different forums, and so on. All these will lead to evoking a positive impression in people’s minds and drive more installs. And the more installations your app gets the chances of virality through the existing user base increase. 

Before jumping to the next pointer, let’s quickly mention that you must enable people to directly share the app from inside the app. For that, it’s important to integrate popular social media APIs into your app.

2. Retention

The first step to increase retention is to analyze why people delete an app. Precisely for two reasons:

1. They got a better app to meet their purpose
2. They find the app to be confusing or boring

Focus on these two issues and you can significantly reduce the chunk rate. So, how to do that? We will explore below.

• Improve app onboarding experience. Introduce people to the features of your app and encourage them to perform some activities to get started. These may include dragging a feature, swiping through something, and so on.

• Make sure your app is intuitive enough so that people can easily understand which button or feature functions in which manner. The sign-up process should not be long or tedious. Encourage one-tap login with email/social media account or phone number.

• The sign-up process should not be long or tedious. Encourage one-tap login with email/social media account or phone number. 

• Keep data fields to the minimum. Make sure that the users need not fill a lengthy form. If yours is an eCommerce app, ensure that the checkout process is fast. Also, let the users save their card/connect with their UPI app as their preferred payment model for future shopping. It will save time and effort.

• Equip your app with all the essential features required to execute an activity in your specific niche. If required, check your competitors’ apps.

• It’s better to provide some more features in your app than your competitors. That way, it will stand out among the rest. For instance, if yours is a chatting app, consider why people will use it instead of WhatsApp or Telegram? What extra features can you provide?

• A/B testing is a great way to find out which elements are preferred to the users. Optimize your app accordingly.

• Engage maintenance services in a consistent manner so as to keep your app glitch-free and high-functioning at all times.

3. Monetization

Some of the proven ways to monetize your app include:

• Leverage push notification to encourage people to interact with your app and convert. For that, you need to send personalized push notifications to the users. You can track geo-locations of the users, their browsing/purchase history, and wishlist to customize the notification message.

• No matter how alluring it seems, always feature native ads on your mobile app. For instance, if yours is a food delivery app, featuring an ad of a bakery is a smart step. Native ads will not irritate people and these may even encourage them to click. That way, you can earn from the ad owner.

• Instead of encouraging people to purchase the app while installing it from the app store, it’s better to rely on in-app purchases. With so many apps available in the market, people may not be interested to purchase an app. On the contrary, as they get addicted to the app, they may want to unlock other features (say, earning virtual coins or lives, or unlocking some tracks) via in-app purchase. This is closely connected with purchasing the premium version of the app that offers more features.

By adopting these strategies you can significantly increase user lifetime value in your mobile app. Try these and share your thoughts with us.

5 Vital Steps to Designing a Great Small Business Website

A well-designed website is important for small businesses, entrepreneurs, or anybody wanting to sell goods or services online. The key to attracting new customers is allowing your prospects to easily find you through a quick search on any of the popular search engines. 

To put it simply, when you are selling products/services online, the website is an extension of your business card. It provides your potential customers all the important details regarding your business, the location of your store (if any) and also lets them know about your latest marketing campaign. However, creating a business website is easier said than done. But, the entire process can seem less challenging if you have availed of professional website design services. 

Now, there are a few steps that are crucial to building an attention-grabbing small business website. Understanding these steps will make it easier for you to work with a professional website design company. Keep reading to know those steps. 

1. Decide the purpose of your business website 

The first and foremost step is to decide what you want the website to do for you. It might be a static website that you are creating for giving potential customers information about your products/services and credentials. Or, you might want a dynamic website where you would be adding new content periodically and want visitors to subscribe for such information. You might want to encourage visitors to buy your products or avail of your services. 

Knowing what you want is important because this will guide website designers to develop your business website and decide on the functionalities, CTAs, content types, user journey, and so on. 

2. Select a content management system (CMS)

A CMS or content management system refers to a web application that helps you with the creation, as well as, editing and management of content on your website. Some of the popular CMS’ are Joomla, Magento, Drupal, Tumblr, WordPress, and Wix. You can talk to a website design company to find out about the features of each of these CMS’ so that you can make an informed decision. 

3. Get the perfect domain and choose stable hosting 

The next step is to decide on a unique domain name (web address). The domain name should be easy to remember, catchy and good for SEO (search engine optimization). It should be relevant to your business. 

Once you’ve decided on the domain name, you need to choose a web host. A web host is a remote location where your business website and all the related software will be held and also made available to your target audience. Your choice of a web host would depend on the number of visitors that you are expecting to receive and the speed of the website. 

4. The design phase 

If you want to drive visitors, you need a website that is engaging and interesting. You would want the design of your website to be relevant and memorable so that visitors keep coming back. Before the actual design starts, a business website design company will provide you with wireframes of your website. These are skeletal pages that will be focusing on offering an intuitive user journey. Once you’ve agreed on the wireframes, they will be passed to the graphic designer who will begin designing your website. 

5. Developing website content and using images 

Content and images can make or break your website. If the images used are blurred or irrelevant, your website is not going to impress your visitors. The same goes for poorly crafted website content. The content must be easy to scan and written in an easily comprehensible language. Jargon must be avoided. 

Besides these, your website needs to have a responsive design so that your potential customers can view your website on their desktop, laptop, or smartphone. 

You can get started on creating your small business website by collaborating with a professional website design company. 

How to Build a Website with Strong SEO Foundation

There was a time when a website and SEO were considered to be distinct. Site owners considered that building a site comprised of design and functionalities. Later, some of them used to invest in SEO services to enhance the site rank on the search engines.

The situation, today, is completely different. In the contemporary competitive landscape, a site owner prioritizes a high rank on the search engine right from the time of building the website. Therefore, having a strong SEO foundation on a website is crucial.

How to Create a Solid SEO Foundation for Your Website

Prioritize Mobile

Google has changed their prioritization from mobile-friendly website indexing to mobile-first indexing. With mobile devices generating almost 60% of website traffic (source: Statista), this only makes sense.

What does it mean from the SEO perspective? This implies that mobile versions of websites will be indexed before the desktop versions. Naturally, responsive website development is the best way to go.

Here are a few principles for building a mobile-first website:

• Use a responsive framework
• Design a thumb-friendly website since 75% of people use their thumb to operate mobile devices (source: UX Matters)
• Place the CTA in easily visible and accessible places and make the button large so that the users can tap
• Navigation must be clean and intuitive
• Constantly test the site

Not sure how to execute all these? Consider engaging a professional website design company and get your job done.

Enhance Loading Speed

Google has rolled out speed update as a crucial part of the ranking algorithm. Take care of this while building your website so as to increase its SEO-friendliness.

With so many websites for a specific product/service/information available on the web, the users are not going to wait for a long time for a page to load. They will simply bounce and visit a different site. If you don’t want your site to have an increased bounce rate and a low rank on the search engines, pay attention to increasing website speed.

Here are a few strategies to increase your site loading speed:

• Use a browser cache
• Compress images without affecting the quality 
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to reduce latency 
• Leverage lazy loading 
• Minimize HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript
  

Optimized Content

What’s SEO without content! Write SEO-friendly keyword-optimized content for your webpage. Make sure that the keywords match your users’ intent and search terms.

From meta titles and descriptions to on-page content, the website should follow SEO best practices. Also, your site URL must be properly optimized. Google states that the first 3 to 5 words in your URL are the most crucial. You can place your target keyword there. Also, keep it short and remove excess symbols and letters.

Further, make sure to include a blog section on your website and fill it with useful content optimized with relevant keywords. This is a long-term plan and you need to have a content calendar ready at your disposal.

Linking Structure

Linking structure plays a significant role both for website navigation and SEO.

Internal linking will help the site visitors check out multiple web pages on your site. However, make sure not to exhaust them from one page to another without any purpose. Every page must have dedicated CTAs at proper places so that people can easily convert.

Further, internal linking will help search engine bots to crawl the site and comprehend how each page is connected to each other. Finally, it will help to flow link juice and help to uplift the rank of each web page.

Outbound links are also crucial as they help the search engines to recognize your website’s nature and its authority in the niche.

Set Up Google Analytics

From the day you launch your website, make it a practice to monitor its performance. It will help you to improve the site features/functionality and properly direct your SEO strategy.

We recommend you set up Google Analytics. It will help you get insights into who is viewing your page, from which platforms are they coming, how many of the visitors are converting, at which point on your site most visitors are bouncing, and so on.

You will also get to know who is linking to your website and which content is linked the most. You can easily access keyword information like CTR (Click-Through Rate) and total keyword impression. Backed with all the data, your SEO foundation will be stronger.

Wrapping Up

These steps will help you to keep one step ahead of your competitors right from the time of developing a website. If your website is SEO-friendly, you need not give it a complete facelift later when you engage in SEO services. We hope you have found the blog useful. Let us know your thoughts.

How to Make a PWA Search Engine Friendly

We know that a Progressive Web App or PWA is an advanced form of a traditional website. From an interactive experience to push notifications - a PWA offers it all. Now, does it help SEO efforts? One thing is obvious - a PWA offers a superb user experience which is a crucial factor in enhancing site rank on the search engine. No wonder that the experts of SEO services readily approve of PWA right from its initiation. Today, we will explore some more aspects regarding how to improve SEO scores for PWA. Without further ado, let’s get started.

How to Improve SERP Ranking of a PWA

Responsive Design 

Mobile-first indexing is already ‘in’ these days. Search engines prioritize responsive web design as it facilitates superb user experiences on multiple devices irrespective of screen size. Therefore, responsive websites have a competitive edge over other sites when it comes to winning a high rank on the SERP. 

Here’s a suggestion by the top web developers in India. A progressive web app should have a responsive design. Elements like margins, fonts, paddings, buttons, etc. should dynamically scale to different viewports and resolutions. 

Now, when images are scaled-up, they look bad and take a long time to load; thus impact the scroll performance. Further, the margins and paddings may not scale properly. Using the ‘scrset’ attribute can immensely help here. 

This attribute fetches different resolution images leveraging screen display capabilities. Make sure to avoid using fixed-size fonts since it may impact the overall usability of the web app. The thumb rule for a progressive web app is that all the elements should be extremely flexible. 


Loading Speed 

Loading speed is a crucial aspect of search engine optimization. SEMRush states that a site should aim at loading within 2 seconds for enhanced SEO results. As you can understand, PWA aims at reaching it. 

One of the major aspects of a progressive web app is its fast loading. It is known as progressive loading or lazy loading. A PWA defers the loading of some elements while prioritizing other elements to load first. 

For instance, the developers may build a PWA in such a way that it loads HTML elements first and CSS elements later. Similarly, they may also enable the web app to load JavaScript by deferring the loading of CSS and HTML elements. 

Further, a progressive web app can load all the crucial information in a single file instead of multiple small files. It helps the web pages to load faster. A PWA can comprehend what the users want first - for instance, the images and the texts displayed above the fold can be delivered first and the video or other elements present on below-the-fold may load later when the users scroll down.

Link Structure 

External and internal linking plays a significant role in SEO. While external links pointing to your website reflects your site’s authority and credibility, internal links help to flow link juice from high authority webpage to low authority one and enable the search engines to better crawl and index all the pages. Therefore, it is important to focus on link structure. 

The linking structure can be deeply impacted if you don’t use href attribute. The search engine bots will analyze anchor tags that have this attribute in place instead of just JavaScript links. 

We know all these sound quite complex and require extensive tech expertise. You may engage professional dynamic web development services to get your site built by the experts. 

JavaScript Rendering

For a PWA to be search engine friendly, the content available on every web page needs to be properly indexed. That’s because the search engines need to render JavaScript so as to view the content present in the PWA.

Now, the problem is that sometimes resources are randomly utilized due to compilation and execution. Therefore, search engines index JavaScript in two stages. The content rendered on the client-side is deferred until while the server-side content is rendered.

Now, many search engines (not Google) and social media networks like Facebook cannot process JS and fall back on HTML for support. Therefore, the servers need to be configured in a way that these can instantly respond to the requests for deep URLs. This principle applies to various core elements like content, meta tags, links, and images, and navigation. 


Today’s advanced technology makes it possible for the JS framework to be configured in a way that allows uninterrupted server-side rendering or isomorphic rendering. With it, the PWA can run on the server and the browser.

Wrap It Up

As we have earlier stated, PWA offers a superb user experience with its dynamic nature. Following the above-stated strategies will help you to make the PWA more search engine friendly and improve ranking on the SERP.

Found the article useful? Share your thoughts with us.

eCommerce Websites & Mobile Apps

12 Effective Content Marketing Strategies in 2021

Digital marketing experts always hold content in high esteem. According to them, content is the lifeline of promoting a business. It is the driving force that increases the website traffic and even converts the leads.

As a business owner, you should always bear in mind that your content marketing strategy must be up-to-date to grow your business. Whether you are planning to get started with a catchy campaign or your existing strategy is not producing the maximum impact, it’s time to revisit your strategy.

 

Here’s a checklist to guide you in the right direction: 

1. Create Valuable & Varied Content

First thing first, content creation is key to content marketing. No matter how much effort you put into marketing your content, it will not appeal to your audience if it lacks value. Make sure to create original, informative, and user-engaging content.

Also, instead of only creating blog posts, it’s important to include different types of content in your list. For instance, infographic and video content are quite popular these days as they quickly engage people.

Here are different types of content to help you break the monotony:

• Podcast
• Live event 
• Video Infographics
• Blog
• Slide presentation
• Quiz
• News 
• Interview
• Case study 
• Educational article 
• White paper 
• Ebook
• Comparison 
• Checklist 
• Tutorial 
• Templates
  
  

You can also repurpose a content piece after it is published to appeal to a wider audience. For instance:

• Turn an article into a video or infographic
• Combine multiple short content pieces to create an eBook
  

And so on.

2. Brand Positioning

Defining your brand in the market is a crucial element in content marketing. It will help you to establish the right image of your brand through all the marketing efforts.

Find answers to the following questions when it comes to positioning your brand in the market:

• Who are your existing and potential consumers?
• How competitive is the landscape?
• How are your competitors presenting their brand and how can you do something different?
• What type of content your audience is engaging with the most? 
• What’s the USP of your brand? 
• What problems can your product or service solve? 
• What’s the vision and mission of your brand and how you can convey it to your customers?
  
  

3. Diversify Your Content Channels

This is an extension of the first point we mentioned above - diversify your medium to reach more audience. Use your website blog section or guest blogging sites to publish articles. Leverage social media platforms to share your content. Use YouTube to publish video content.

Remember, the more varied content types and channels you use, the higher goes your brand awareness and chances of conversions.

At the same time, you have to pay attention to the platforms where most of your audience is present. If most of the target customers are on Facebook, you need not focus more on Twitter.

If you are not sure which channel is ideal for your business, engaging digital marketing services is a good idea. The experts will analyze which channels are driving the most traffic and promote your site through the right platform.  

4. Pay Attention to Build Authority

Backlinking was one of the primary factors when it came to developing authority in the SEO landscape, but gradually, expertise is becoming even more important. Search engines are becoming smarter about semantics. Therefore, your content should be in-depth and justify the topic so as to satisfy the users’ queries and earn the search engines’ trust.

As you can understand, the sole rule of using keywords is steadily decreasing. Search engines are no more interested in rewarding your ability to create a piece of content with lots of keywords. Rather, it’s important to underline how the content fits in the context of your business and how much useful it is.

Take Google for example. It is putting more emphasis on the E-A-T (Expertise-Authority-Trust) guideline. Even though it is not a direct ranking factor, it includes a secondary signal that Google’s algorithm will determine how a content aligns with E-A-T.  

5. Audience Segmentation for Increasing Engagement

Smart marketers always focus on segmenting the audience. Not all of your audience has the same intention. Your content cannot suit everyone as people are at different phases of the conversion cycle. For instance, a content designed to create awareness among the new customers is completely wasted on your existing customers. Repeated awareness campaigns may even irritate the existing customers.

Also, if your business spans across B2B and B2C industry, you need to create distinct strategies for each industry type. While the B2B audience is more familiar with technical jargons, B2C customers are not. Do you see how it will impact your copy?

Segmenting the target audience is a challenging task for a blog or website. Instead, you can use it in your email autoresponder or Facebook ad targeting.
Quick fact: 39% of the email marketers who segment their email lists have reported seeing better open rates (source: Emarketer).

6. Content Auditing

There are millions of content available on the web for your audience to click on. In such a crowded landscape, creating content without any understanding of what will work is a waste of resource and time.

Take note of what kind of content has attracted your audience, which content has led to more queries or conversion, whether any content needs an update, and so on.

However, it’s not enough to analyze the data from your pre-published content. You should also pay attention to what’s trending these days. You can use Google Trends to get an insight into the demand for your topic. Simply type the keyword or topic in the search box to know how many searches it has received within a specific time period.

7. Include CTA in Your Marketing Message

“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.”

We cannot agree more with Tom Fishburne! However, we should also mention the importance of call-to-action in your marketing message. You need not be too pushy but make sure that the users get a clear direction of what to do next. Do you want them to shop a product from you, check out a new service that you have started offering, subscribe to your newsletter, or do something else? Whatever your goal is, it’s better to add a CTA to direct the audience to the right track.

Remember, a marketing message with too many CTAs may irritate the visitors. Your copy should be compelling enough to trigger their attention and the CTA should encourage them to take the step. Bringing a combination of both in each campaign may not be easy if you are not an expert in the field. In such a scenario, let the experts take care of it while you focus on your business. Yes, we are talking about investing in content marketing services. The learned professionals will create and publish quality content that can boost conversions.

8. Increase Your Relevance for Local Audience

For small businesses or businesses with a local audience, it’s important to create some dedicated copies to drive relevance. As you may already know, local SEO is becoming a prominent element in digital marketing and it’s high time to register and optimize your business presence in Google My Business listing. If you are not aware of the benefits of local SEO, take a look at the linked blog.

Depending on the type of your business, create content that appeals to your local audience. These may include writing a blog about a specific issue in your locality and how your business can help, a social media marketing copy about a discount offer running in your physical store, and so on.

9. Personalized Email Marketing Campaign

Much have you heard about automated email marketing campaigns. 2021 brings a revolution with personalized email marketing.

Craft your email by segmenting your audience, include the recipients’ name, mention a product that may appeal to them based on the products they have browsed in your website, and so on. It has the potential to increase the chances of opening the email, checking out your offerings, and even converting.

10. Prepare for Voice Search & Chatbot

Optimizing for voice search is consistently in the marketers’ mind since 2019. Make sure to optimize your content with long-tail keywords for voice search. WPBeginner has witnessed a lot of featured snippets and an almost 37% increase in website traffic by optimizing content for voice searches.

The chatbot is another tool to include in your content marketing strategy. It has the potential to convert visitors into leads by answering common queries.

11. Determine a Budget

Once you get into content marketing, you may get overwhelmed with numerous practices. that’s why it’s important to set a budget beforehand. Find answers to these questions:

• Do you have to purchase a tool? For instance, graphic design software like Adobe Photoshop, keyword research tool like Ahrefs, etc.
• Do you need to pay for an ad space to run paid campaigns?
• Do you need to engage a professional content marketing service?
  

12. Track Your KPIs

Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) and tracking these regularly will help you to understand whether your content marketing efforts are sprouting the results or not.

Here’s a list of some goals and related KPIs. Check these out

Goal	KPI
Brand Awareness	Website traffic, social media followers, sign-ups, subscription, mentions
Brand Loyalty	Returning customers, product reviews, referrals, recommendation, mentions
Conversions	Conversion rate, subscribers, shopping cart abandonment rate, bounce rate
Revenue	Sales
Customer engagement	Likes, shares, backlinks, followers, mentions
Strategic partners	New partnerships, backlinks

Closing Thoughts

An effective content marketing is one that encourages your target audience to interact with you and increase conversions. We hope that our handpicked strategies have made you understand how to get started.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment box below.

An App Suite for Item Order & Delivery Network Business