Mobile ROI

What is mobile ROI?

Mobile ROI is the return on investment after a mobile marketing campaign. For example, this can be reflected in profit realized after a push notification or an increase in five-star ratings from a successful A/B test.

How can marketers improve their mobile ROI?

Marketers must be constantly measuring their activity to track how effective an investment it is — for example, if a push notification converts X amount of users but leads Y amount of users to uninstall the app, is the campaign actually financially viable?

The easiest way to improve mobile ROI is through A/B testing. This involves taking variables in an app, for example the color of a button or the wording of a push notification, and serving different versions of these variables to different users at the same time. After a sufficient amount of time has passed, marketers will be able to see which variant performs better and make an informed decision on a campaign, which should lead to higher conversion rates.

Before setting up a mobile A/B test, it’s important for marketers to establish a goal, e.g., increasing conversions but also ROI. As noted above, an app change that temporarily causes a surge in sales but also leads to a huge loss of customers could actually have a negative ROI.

The three biggest considerations when trying to increase mobile ROI are:

• What to test: Messages, channels, and even the mobile interface itself can all be A/B tested, while multivariate testing allows multiple variables to be tested simultaneously. These approaches are ideal for testing new app features. For example, marketers can swap out variables while alerting certain users to the changes, thereby testing the effectiveness of the new features and messaging, as well as determining overall ROI.
• Who to test: While A/B tests can be applied to all users by default, marketers can also analyze customer behavior more deeply by testing user segments based on historical data, e.g. women aged 20-35.
• Determining the final goal: What counts as a conversion? Will higher open rates increase app revenues? To accurately measure ROI, marketers need to set out goals before launching A/B tests.

How can marketers analyze the results of their A/B testing?

Using Leanplum’s integrated analytics platform, marketers can get a 360-view of their A/B testing, displaying not only the positive, but the negative results of their marketing efforts. The platform automatically creates control groups, allowing marketers to clearly see results in terms of downstream conversions, purchases, session time, and retention.

There is no limit to the data that can be analyzed, including data from third parties. By being able to track a user’s full mobile journey from onboarding to loyalty, marketers can make better decisions to increase mobile ROI.