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Uber rolled out a Snapchat integration for its app in India that could help both companies grow users in the country. When taking an Uber, existing Snapchat users will now see a Snap card in the Uber Feed.
From this Snap card, they'll be able to unlock custom Snapchat filters, such as ETA stickers, and send Snaps to friends without leaving the Uber app. The integration is now available for all Uber riders and Snapchat users on both Android and iOS in India.
It’s worth noting which platform ingests whom in this partnership — Uber eats Snapchat. This likely reflects each company’s position of power, relative to another, not only in the Indian market but perhaps also in the US, where a similar Snapchat integration with Uber already exists. In the future, Snapchat will surely want to add Uber-hailing functionalities to its own app, much like Facebook Messenger is able to do.
India represents a big opportunity because of its growing economy and large population. There are well over a billion people in India, and rising consumerism, an emerging middle class, and rapid mobile adoption are the leading drivers of growth both in India and APAC more broadly. India specifically is expected to be the fastest-growing economy in 2017, with 7.2% growth, according to IMF statistics cited by KMPG. Meanwhile, ad spend — another useful barometer — is expected to rise by 12% in India this year. India to be the fastest-growing economy in 2017.
- Uber is intent on establishing itself in India. As of April 2017, Uber had a little more than 200,000 active drivers on its platform in India — a not insignificant but somewhat trifling number compared to the 400 million people who live in India's cities, and 1.3 billion who populate the country, says the New York Times. Travis Kalanick, Uber's CEO, has also told the Times that India is his company's second-biggest market.
- Snapchat’s presence in India is relatively paltry. It has about 4 million users in India, according to figures cited last month. At the time, Snap was entangled in a public relations crisis due to reports that its CEO, Evan Spiegel, had said that he didn’t want “expand into poor countries like India” — allegations that Snapchat has refuted outright and labeled as “ridiculous,” but which are nonetheless likely hamper its growth in the country.
Mobile-app makers and content creators are vying for consumer attention in a crowded and noisy market.
Even if an app can stand out enough to prompt a consumer to download it from among a list of millions, it then faces the challenge of enticing him or her to use it enough times to recuperate development, maintenance, and marketing costs. To make matters worse, those marketing costs have hit record-high levels over the past year as discoverability has become more challenging.
And while consumers are spending more time in apps, most of that time is spent in a few favorites. Consumers spend almost three-quarters of their total smartphone app time in just their three favorite apps, according to comScore.
But it's not all doom and gloom: There are numerous tools at a publisher's disposal to engage and re-engage consumers, and there are new products and solutions coming to market that can help alleviate some of the issues around this app engagement crisis.
Jessica Smith, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on app engagement that explores the current state of the app market, the issues around engaging consumers, and the tools at a publisher's disposal. It also identifies best practices for the implementation of some app engagement tools, and presents the pitfalls that some publishers fall into in this pursuit.
Here are some key takeaways from the report:
- The app market today is challenging and volatile. It's difficult to stand out, and most apps have to be offered for free in order to entice consumers who have too much supply to choose from. This puts greater emphasis on engaging consumers after they've downloaded an app in order to recoup costs.
- Consumers are more difficult to engage today, as most have dozens of apps installed on their devices yet spend most of their time in just a select handful of favorites.
- There are numerous solutions at hand for mobile app publishers and content creators seeking to engage consumers. Push notifications, in-app messaging, and app message centers with badges are three tools publishers can use to engage consumers.
- While many publishers mistakenly rely solely on push notifications for app engagements, this is a poor practice because many consumers don't allow push notifications and those that do can easily be overwhelmed when they receive too many.
- The best solution often includes leveraging two or three of these tools to engage consumers with the right message at the right time. The technology in this market has grown increasingly sophisticated, and publishers that don't diversify their approach run the risk of annoying their consumers to the point of abandonment.
- There are emerging engagement technologies that will change the current app engagement norms and present new ways for app publishers to communicate with users. The mobile ecosystem is changing quickly as technology improves and consumers become more comfortable conducting more activities on mobile devices.
In full, the report:
- Identifies the major challenges in today's app market and explains why employing good app engagement practices is more important than ever before.
- Presents the major app engagement tools currently available.
- Examines the pros and cons of each app engagement tool while outlining some pitfalls that publishers encounter in implementing them.
- Prescribes best practices for adopting various app engagement tools or strategies.
- Assesses how the market will likely change over the next five years as emerging technologies change both consumer behavior with mobile devices and introduce new tools with which to engage consumers.
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- Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. » Learn More Now
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