When you advertise a mobile app or mobile-friendly web page to your clients, readers, or customers, they have some expectations. Not meeting those expectations can hurt your customer’s trust in you, drive down your app store rating, and reduce app sales significantly.

The good news is, you can avoid losing customers to a badly designed or out of date mobile app and all you have to do is make sure you stick to a few key principles. When designing a mobile site or app, you should have a couple objectives in mind:

• Convenience
• Fast load times
• Easy to browse experience

If you can keep following these principles, you’ll be on your way to app heaven – high sales, good ratings, third party recommendations, and organic testimonials. However, if you fail, you will struggle to retain customers, and your app will be one of the 90% that are uninstalled after first use.

One Bad Experience can Ruin a Great App

I myself use a great task management system through my pc’s web browser, and I love it. However, the mobile app takes about 10 seconds to load every time, and I often find myself avoiding it unless I absolutely need to see something. The system is fantastic otherwise, but that load time issue alone would lose me as a customer if I did most of my task management through my smartphone. If there was a competing service that offered similar features and had a fast loading mobile app, it might be enough to make me switch. Remember: a chain is ultimately only as good as its weakest link. No matter how perfect the design or developed the featureset is, if you have a slow app, the rest won’t matter.

8 Tools to get your App a 5 Star Rating

Whether you’re a brand new company starting an app from scratch or an established firm looking to improve your image, these 8 tools tools will maximize your app’s user experience and optimize your returns:

Test Flight

Before launching to the world, you need to know what a few key testers think of your product first. Test Flight is the best platform for developing and testing mobile apps quickly, allowing over the air distribution of your app. It also provides data management and tracking of your beta testers, telling you who is using your app and what feedback they are providing.

Application Research Optimizer (ARO) by ATT

If users start to notice their battery life disappear when they run your app, or that other apps don’t run smoothly with yours running in the background, they’re not going to use it. ARO is a great system for making your app manage resources more efficiently. ARO gives metrics for all resources an app consumes, from processing power to battery life. And don’t think these aren’t important- 59% of users who delete an app say they do it over slow responsiveness, and 55% for high battery consumption.

New Relic

Get real time information from your app’s users. New Relic for mobile apps is a service that allows specific issues to be identified without asking users to submit bug reports, and you can identify trends across various mobile hardware, versions, and operating systems.

Apptentive

Apptentive is a great platform for communicating directly with your users and proactively cutting off negative feedback before it becomes a bad rating. Additionally, if the feedback is positive, Apptentive will remind them to rate the app in the store. Integrated surveys and a message center allow you and your users to communicate any issues openly, and a dashboard allows you to track data on a greater scale. This is a great tool to use on your way to a 5 star app.

Millennial Media

You might have a great app, but you’ll still need to promote your greatness. Millennial Media is a one stop shop for both developers and advertisers, making it simple to either monetize your app or advertise on other platforms. Specific control and precise metrics allow you to know exactly where your money is going or coming from, and a single unifying dashboard allows easy access to all the information you need.

MobileDevHQ App Store Optimization

Whether you’re on your way to app heaven or something bad has happened in your rankings in the app store, ASO is a great program for tracking your app’s success. With email updates for popularity changes, suggested best keywords drawn from a huge library of search data, and localized rankings in over 100 regions, ASO will make sure your app isn’t outsold by lesser competition.

App Annie

App Annie is one of the fastest growing app analytics systems on the market, and represents over 90% of top 100 app publishers on Apple, Google, and Amazon products. App Annie is focused entirely on analytics, so if you don’t plan on advertising or monetizing your app through advertising, they might be the choice for you.

AppBaker

Building apps across multiple platforms can be costly, time consuming, and inefficient for a development team. AppBaker is your answer- It allows you to build your app without having to write any code at all. With a template based platform to build and buy apps for Android, iOS, and HTML5, you have everything you need to get your app off the ground, all in one spot.

Conclusion

Sometimes you do all the work, follow all the best practices, and use all the best tools available, but you still don’t see your app take off right away. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and most apps don’t see immediate growth. With these tools, you’ll be giving yourself the best chance possible to succeed in the ever more competitive (but expanding) mobile market. Keep at it, and with the help of these services (or maybe even Fresh Consulting), your app will run with the best of them.