At the beautiful Rivington Place gallery, the Apps Alliance held its first App Strategy Workshop last week in the heart of London’s tech city. Executive Director Jake Ward welcomed a packed house of 120 app developers, who gathered to hear industry leaders discuss their app business success strategies. With a special focus on monetization and user engagement, this workshop showcased some of the top minds and companies in Europe. Food and drink were provided by Shutterbug, and networking carried on enthusiastically into the evening. We can’t wait until our next London App Strategy Workshop!
Thank you to the sponsors of our London App Strategy Workshop: OpenX, Calldorado, and MobFox!
The entire event was incredibly insightful, and you’ll find our top takeaways below.
Engagement, engagement, engagement.
After greeting the standing-room-only crowd, Jake ushered attendees into the start of the workshop — a fireside chat with Claudia Dreier-Poepperl, CEO of Calldorado, who joined us from Copenhagen. Claudia highlighted the strategy of driving value-added content to engage, and then re-engage, users. Specifically, keeping users engaged is how developers can sustain their revenue flow. Having a smaller, consistent audience is just as valuable as the largest, partially engaged audience. She also discussed the importance of knowing who is using your app and why. App developers should evaluate campaigns and strategies based on who app users are, use metrics and business intelligence, and avoid complacency.
Test, test, test, and test again.
In our next panel, Danny Bluestone of Cyber-Ducks moderated a conversation between Joel Freeborn of Kidslox, Caroline Van Den Bergh of GoldenGecko, and Karim Toubajie of Songkick. Their discussion revolved around the use of user experience to engage and retain app users through splash screens, notifications, and design technique. Although hamburger menus – method of hiding additional functionality off of the main screen – have often been a popular feature of UX, our panelists wondered if the days of the hamburger menu have become limited, as this feature often leaves developers with an out-of-sight, out-of-mind scenario. However, developers must truly embrace the use of testing and analysis to find the best combination of UX variables for their users.
It’s never too early to think of monetisation.
Panos Papageorgiou of Avocarrot, Michael Smith of SwiftKey, Martin MacMillan of Pollen, Kumaran Sambandam of MobFox, and Rob Kramer of OpenX joined us for our last panel of the day to chat about monetisation. In this engaging and interactive session, our audience members were eager to ask the panelists questions (and were rewarded with raspberry pies from OpenX)! Through the answers, the panelists revealed the intertwining nature of engagement and monetisation, saying that although there are many ways to sell to an engaged user, you’ll never be able to sell to a disengaged user. With this in mind, the notion of knowing your users was highlighted once again, in that user knowledge will often dictate monetisation strategies.
Listen to the podcast of this panel below.
Visit the official App Strategy Workshop landing page to register for a workshop near you.
If you have questions or want to get involved in future Apps Alliance events, please contact Keir@AppAlliance.org.
