IS SOFT LAUNCH THE RIGHT STRATEGY FOR YOUR MOBILE APP? – Part1

So, you have built a mobile app and you are assuming that it will be successful in the app marketplace. But how do you validate that your product will be successful in the marketplace? Before entering into the app marketplace, you need to ensure that your app is a battle-tested product. Why it’s important to have battle-tested product? – It will result in higher acquisition rates as well as high retention rates. By choosing a soft launch approach, you will be able to isolate your app’s success factors and its pain points. Ultimately, it can help you in gathering crucial data on how to enhance your app’s performance and will help you in taking appropriate steps for the same.

In this blog post, we will be discussing the key points that are required to follow for crafting a soft launch strategy so that you can rightly prepare for the official launch of your app.

Here’re a few advantages of Soft launch

By having the soft launch of your mobile app, you will be getting many benefits in addition to reducing costs, resources, and time:

1.   Increasing User Retention Rates

77% of mobile apps get deleted just 3 days after the initial download. And, only 15% of mobile apps last more than a month. To cut-down this 15%, you are required to add a lot of value for your users. By having a soft launch, you will be able to gather quick feedbacks about your app and you’ll be able to understand the key reasons why users are losing interest in your app so that you can adjust your app accordingly.

2.   Insights on User Experience

Your app should be optimized for getting the amazing user experience and this should be the priority for all app developers. If you are overlooking this, your mobile app deletion rates will skyrocket. During the soft launch of your app, you need to leverage the feedback given by the real users. This in turn, will improve the overall user experience of your mobile app. Only users can help you in knowing what they like and what they dislike about your app. By understanding their likes and dislikes, you can easily solve their pain points. It has become important to have open communications with your users to get their genuine feedback.

3.   Product Validation

A soft launch will either validate your app idea or will show that your mobile app is not ready yet for the market. If you are releasing your product just to receive poor reception, you must be having the knowledge of how to improve your product moving forward. By having the product validation, you could better understand the commitment towards your product. It will help in understanding the time and resources required to become successful.

Product validation done through a controlled release will provide you the following benefits so that you can get ready for the hard launch:

•         It will help in identifying bugs and pain points
•         You will get viable User feedback for improvements
•         Your app will be ready for Market acceptance
•         You can have better preparation for the official hard launch

4.   Boost User Acquisition With ASO

Soft launch is an amazing opportunity to see if your app store page is optimized or not. Over the time interval of one month, Google Play alone has the capability to process over 6 million unique search phrases.  And, App store optimization is a key part of your user acquisition strategy. So it has become important to get this done in a right manner before releasing your app to the primary market. By having a soft launch of your app, you can easily accumulate reviews, which in turn, will encourage potential users to download the app.

5.   Approach towards a Soft Launch

Your app towards Soft launch should be right. And, you are required to ensure that you earn as much benefit as you can from the soft launch because it will help you in launching a successful product. To get the most out of a soft launch, you are required to test both – App functionality and App store performance. Both these elements are crucial for the survival of your mobile app.

6.   Testing App Functionality

There are a varied number of methods that you can leverage to soft launch your mobile app including releasing it to the people you know one-to-one or scaling up and releasing it on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit. Soft launch majorly depends on your contacts and follower base. So, testing app functionality in a soft launch is crucial for learning more about the app experience for users apart from your development team.

Part2 of this post will be shared in our next post.