2 Top Tactics for Marketing Your Destination’s App
Earlier this week, we talked ASO for encouraging downloads. Now, in part two of our blog series, we’ll discuss Push Notifications for keeping your app users engaged beyond the download.
Maintaining Relevance and Engagement with your Mobile Travel App
Marketing your travel app doesn’t stop once you launch it. Downloads are naturally the first action you’re looking for from potential visitors, but the big-picture goal is to provide your users with an app that’s there for them throughout their traveler journey and helping them share that experience each step of the way.
This brings us to our second top tactic for marketing your app:
Push Notifications
Push messages are powerful promotional tools for marketing to your customers once they’ve downloaded the app, especially while visitors are in-market, and particularly when they call out redeemable partner promotions. Targeted messages can alert visitors to upcoming local events or business specials, driving foot traffic; or promote exclusive discounts for app users, helping promote visits to local businesses and app retention. You can also encourage social sharing with push messages, during and post-visit. You can even conduct push surveys and polls to generate valuable feedback from your users.
Speaking at Mobile Apps Unlocked in Vegas this past April, John Egan, Head of Growth Traffic Engineering at Pinterest, stressed the value of push notifications, noting that they have twice the impact of email and are effective for increasing engagement with users at all stages (dormant, marginal, casual, core, and daily active users/DAU).
I tell my DMO customers to think of push messages almost like email subject lines: keep them brief but clever enough to catch attention and get the user to open the app.
John’s advice for crafting push messages included:
- Don't start with business goals when crafting a message, start with what you'd personally find interesting.
- Make them hyper-personalized.
- Notifications should be an extension of the app's core value proposition.
In addition to these two top tactics for marketing your tourism app—Push Notifications and ASO—what I hope you’ll take away from my shared experience at these two app-centric conferences is that there are a variety of approaches to marketing your app, from the download to continued engagement phase, that don’t take a big budget. They take creativity with your team, communication with your partners and visitors, and a natural extension of your digital marketing strategies to optimize your mobile apps.
Want more ideas for marketing your app and making it the best it can be? Read our Best Tourism Apps blog.