5 Tools App Marketers Can Use to Drive Mobile ROI

Consumers are continuing to download more apps onto their smartphones and tablets, and they’re spending more time with the apps they’ve downloaded. The average person is now spending 37 hours and 28 minutes using mobile apps per month, which is an impressive 63% increase in just the past two years. But for app marketers, these statistics don’t tell the complete story. Mobile app monetization is just as challenging now as it’s ever been before.

With more than a million apps in the App Store, the majority of which are free, mobile app marketers are taking a hard look at their own monetization strategies. Whether they’re looking to monetize local news, social channels, or virtual marketplaces, app marketers are finding that the key to generating revenue from mobile freemium apps has to do with personalized messaging and automation with real-time data.

Here are five tools that app marketers can use to drive mobile ROI.

1. Tapjoy: Identify the best moments to monetize each user.
Tapjoy offers a way for app developers to predict which users will be willing to pay for premium features based on their actions and behaviors. What that really boils down to is helping app marketers monetize their freemium apps without wasting ad spend on users who are unlikely to convert. Tapjoy allows marketers to segment users based on more than 20 variables (like referrer ID and user level), and then send automated push notifications and in-app messages meant to target users at the precise moment they’re most likely to convert. Tapjoy also offers “Suggested Marketing Automations” to developers and publishers based on the rate of effectiveness in a given scenario.

2. Localytics: Drive mobile ROI through user engagement.
Localytics is a full suite marketing and analytics platform for mobile apps that boosts conversions with targeted push and in-app messaging. The team behind Localytics believes that the key to app growth and mobile ROI is user engagement, and the platform focuses heavily on facilitating that engagement with personalized messaging, deep links that guide users to specific places within apps, and instant in-app notifications that go out when specific user actions are taken. When marketers understand when and how people use their apps, they’re better able to identify drop-off points and nurture their most loyal users.

3. Urban Airship: Increase mobile revenue with marketing automation tools.
Having a mobile engagement strategy is practically a requirement for app marketers in 2016. Urban Airship provides brands and developers with tools for engaging with their mobile app users. This engagement is designed to increase revenue through the strategic use of targeted push notifications, which can be setup to send app users coupons when they’re inside a store or remind them about products they’ve browsed in the past. These tactics should motivate app users to take actions that lead to purchases, while also streamlining the distribution of mobile campaigns to save app marketers money.

4. InMobi: Engage consumers through mobile advertising.
Developers and publishers in the news, social, gaming, and entertainment verticals can use InMobi to engage mobile app users through targeted advertising. In July, the company launched a discovery feature that turns mobile advertising into personalized, content-rich experiences. That feature, dubbed Miip, acts as a “companion” to consumers across mobile apps. It personalizes the discovery experience over time and provides marketers with a way to monetize their apps by encouraging users to discover complimentary products. Interactive banners, video units, and native experiences are all available as vehicles for promoting contextually relevant content to users.

5. URX: Efficiently distribute and monetize mobile content.
URX takes a unique approach to monetizing mobile apps. Rather than relying on advertising to generate revenue, URX provides a way for developers to place revenue-generating content inside their own mobile apps. The platform dynamically understands user context, and it provides custom results on each page within an app. These custom results might include things like Buy Now buttons that prompt users to purchase tickets or request rides to the events they’re reading about inside the mobile app. URX takes into account keywords, time/date, and location when generating these types of custom results.

Know of other platforms that app marketers can use to drive mobile ROI? Leave a description in the comments.

Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.