Once, when upgrading phones, Phoena Pang found an app that had sat untouched for 300 days. She didn’t even know it was there. But on the flip side, she doesn’t fail to use Duolingo daily. And the gap between those two consumer journeys is where many brands’ apps fall, says Pang.
Many organizations offer apps because they think they are a must-have, since their competitors also have them. But they don’t give them much thought beyond that and fail to leverage them to their full advantage, says Pang, vice president of sales and operations at Mintegral, a mobile advertising and monetization platform.
“They think once they get the app installed in the user’s phone, and then the user maybe sets up, that is the finish line of the user journey,” says Pang. But there are many more things that brands can do with their apps to engage the customer in repetitive purchases or other important behaviors after a user installs the app.
“The question becomes how you’re going to do the live operations of the app, which a lot of people don’t know how to do. Or they don’t really track the user behavior data in the app. They don’t see the user changing their behavior after they use the app,” says Pang. Brands want more than a one-time transaction on the app; they want users to have more frequent app opens — not go 300 days without it — and stay in the app longer, she explains.
“Having the user install the app is far from the end of the journey,” Pang says.
“You don’t know what you don’t know.”
Data is often the key missing link in this effort, says Pang. App installs are frequently used as a metric of success, but that is far from a complete view of effectiveness. A number of early events can help to predict the longer user value and a series of “turn points” can make the user delete the app and hurt the brand. Some of those pain points include a boring experience, freezing screens or buggy operations, Pang notes.
To understand the effect of those events requires diving into data, but first, the organization has to understand which events and metrics to look for, says Pang. For example, knowing how many days a user goes without opening the app or performing some activity is a good indicator of engagement.
Once behavior is observed, the marketer can decide how to respond – with a notification, an offer or some reward, for example. Pang noted if she forgets to use Duolingo for a few days it will send her a personalized message to come back to the app. “That’s also helpful, not annoying to people at the same time,” she says.
Straddling that line requires understanding how the app is used, what the user pain points are, and how the user experience affects their engagement with the brand itself. It takes knowledge of how apps operate and data to understand the user behaviors that define that app experience.
With the right data, marketers can build a model of how users can use the app and adjust their activities to make the most of the channel. For example, a travel booking app that knows its users are responding to seasonal events can plan to push notifications, such as reminders to book seasonal travel early, or offer discounts on holiday travel. Historical data can be leveraged to predict user behavior and shape activities to recall or activate app users, Pang explains.
Apps have an advantage over browser-based sites, because the data from the browser is more fragmented than data from app traffic. This makes it easier to build a model, says Pang.
But building those models and leveraging them is not always the forte of marketing departments. In many organizations, the owners of the brand know how to do brand marketing, how to build a brand, but they probably don’t know the app business, says Pang. Many organizations treat apps as if they were another storefront or content medium, but they are different, says Pang. The experience is not one-size-fits-all, she says
“The simple answer to that is that you don’t know what you don’t know,” she says. “It’s very, very different, so find someone who understands this domain to help you.”
AI and games and apps
Artificial intelligence is offering an assist in many aspects of this effort, such as “vibe coding” apps without needing extensive software development skills, but at the same time, agentic commerce may affect the usage of apps. That’s still five to 10 years out and “there’s still going to be an adoption curve,” says Pang. Additionally, apps collect more user behavior data than other channels, “something useful that AI won’t be able to replicate,” she says.
The rise of AI agents may be altering the landscape of search, but it won’t supplant apps yet, says Pang. The decision-making journey is dominated by humans. For example, a user may let an AI agent search and price flights, but they will still book tickets on the app
“AI is just adding one more layer for people to do research, ” she says. “The final action, the decision is still going to be done in the app itself.”
Ultimately, commerce apps should borrow some knowledge and tactics from gaming apps, says Pang. While the industry still sees gamers as young males playing in their video game consoles, the rise of mobile gaming has diversified the consumer profile of gamers, who are increasingly older and female.
Gaming apps have figured out how to keep users engaged and coming back, notes Pang. Gaming is suitable for all of the audiences, and games companies know how to reach out to audiences, like an entertainment channel would, says Pang.
“Everyone could be a gamer,” says Pang. “A lot of brands actually are underinvested in the gaming opportunity.”
Other apps could learn from that how to gamify their experience. For example, Pang noted that Duolingo encourages users to earn badges based on reaching certain usage milestones and makes the effort social by encouraging users sharing their stats “so you feel like you have a community, you’re not using this app alone.”
Before launching an app, marketers need to check their mindset – is this app just catching up to rivals, or meant to build the brand? – load on data to understand user behavior and find a partner who understands how to design an app, says Pang. Then, try to gamify the experience, she said.
“A lot of games are designed using the psychology of the human being,” says Pang. “I think the apps should also leverage that, rather than just provide a basic function.”
