Strategic Guides

How to market your app to increase downloads

In this guide for the Mobile Matters community, James Kember and Kevin Anderson review how app marketing needs to evolve to drive downloads from new users as well as subscribers.

8th January 2025

With apps playing a larger role in publishers' and broadcasters' strategies, app marketing needs to adapt. Photo by James Yarema from Unsplash

Welcome to this Mobile Matters guide on how to market your app effectively so that you deliver the best mobile user experience possible to the largest percentage of your audience.

With changes in user acquisition, publishers and broadcasters have renewed their focus on engaging users with their own properties including websites, newsletters and apps. To maximise the number of subscribers and new users who download your app, you need to optimise and regularly review your app promotion strategy. This short guide will outline the opportunities to maximise your app downloads.

When to promote the app?

There are several key moments across the reader’s lifecycle where you will want to ensure that your app is being highlighted. Traditionally apps have been seen as tools to build habit, loyalty and retention amongst subscribers, but now, we are increasingly seeing publishers leveraging them to build deeper relationships with more loosely engaged cohorts. Therefore, you need to ensure that your app is woven into the overall digital experience from acquisition to retention.

For user acquisition and engagement, consider all your touchpoints with readers and assess where your app fits in with them. We suggest that you:

Review all the emails you send out, both marketing ones and editorial newsletters and ensure that app store CTAs are prominent. In our State of Mobile Publishing Report, publishing leaders told us editorial newsletters are the second most effective way to drive app downloads.
Build a dedicated app hub page on your website as a destination for your app promotion campaigns.
Add links to the app stores throughout your website. The most common approach is to add them to the footer. But there could be instances where you want to make these more prominent by integrating them higher up on a web page. For example, highlight content in the app within the body of an article or link through to a daily digital edition within the header.
Consider using a Smart Banner, which is displayed above a mobile site offering the reader the opportunity to either download the app or open the content they’re reading in the app experience.

Apps are increasingly playing a role in conversion for subscriptions and registrations. To drive subscriptions, they are an essential part of a premium product bundle, and to encourage registrations, apps represent a higher level of mobile user experience than mobile sites. To integrate apps into your subscription and registration marketing, you should:

Leverage app screenshots or images within marketing material, particularly to mobile users.
List the app as a benefit of digital subscription or registration.
Ensure that your app store listing promotes the value of subscriptions offered through the stores.

Apps have traditionally played a strong role in retention, and promoting the app at the point of subscription or registration is an unmissable opportunity to drive downloads. Our State of Mobile Publishing Report has consistently shown the greatest source of paying app users for publishers is existing subscribers, and publishers told us that the number one way of encouraging app downloads was during the subscription onboarding process. Moreover, Edward Roussel, the head of digital at the Times and the Sunday Times, has said app users are 50% more likely to renew their subscriptions than non-app users. To ensure that it has a central role, you should:

Add the app to the onboarding screens a user sees after they subscribe.
Include a QR code that a reader can scan when on a desktop or a link to each of the app stores that they can tap when on mobile.
If you don’t already have one, create an email onboarding series and ensure that the app is highlighted clearly as part of the value proposition of their new subscription.
Include links to the app store in all subscriber communication, especially in high-engagement products such as newsletters.
Consider if there is a role for other marketing channels promoting the benefits of the app, for example through social campaigns, digital advertising or even print/direct mail.

Measure, audit and test your approach

As your approach to digital will be constantly evolving we suggest regularly auditing where your app downloads are coming from and assessing if there are ways to improve. It is vital that you use tracked links when linking through to the app store so you can do this effectively. It will help you measure the effectiveness of various marketing channels. Moreover, after conversion, you should monitor the overall effectiveness of these channels. For example, are users from one channel more likely to churn from the app than another? When users aren’t already subscribers what does the subscription conversion rate look like by acquisition channel?

Moreover, it is important that when you identify a new opportunity you test the different options to ensure that your approach is as efficient as possible. We suggest doing this through a testing framework. If you’ve carried out a full audit of your approach to app downloads this would probably be split into two sections, the first would focus on new opportunities that didn’t exist before whilst the second would address the testing and optimisation of your existing approach.

Conclusion

Finally, effective promotion of the app should support your other business objectives, particularly subscription conversion, newsletter signup and general digital engagement. It is important to understand how changes to your app marketing impact engagement with other CTAs.At Pugpig, we work with publishers to build effective app marketing plans, which deliver long-term benefits beyond the moment of download, and our consulting team has extensive experience in developing testing frameworks.

If you would like further support, email our consulting team who would be more than happy to help.

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