5 Success Factors You Must Master for App Sustainability

App sustainability is one of the biggest concerns for many app developers, business owners, and marketers. Imagine launching your app with a lot of fanfare. You made all the right moves before and during your launch day. You attracted thousands of users and you received numerous downloads. 

However, the crucial question is, how do you keep those users engaged and stay connected? How are you going to generate revenue and maintain your great app performance? Most importantly, how are you going to sustain your initial success?

If you have asked these questions or you have thought about them, then you have come to the right place. In this post, you will learn the five crucial factors that you should know and master to ensure your app’s sustainability.

What is app sustainability?

App sustainability simply means how you’re going to keep your app relevant, functional, and successful over a long period of time. For your app to be sustainable, it must endure and withstand various challenges that could quickly or slowly rise in an ever-evolving digital world. 

App sustainability goes beyond the time when you were just developing and launching your app. App sustainability aims to achieve long-term app success by establishing a solid foundation for your app’s performance, keeping your users engaged, and implementing effective monetization strategies. 

To give you an overview, these are the five factors you must focus on when improving the sustainability of your app:

1. App value
2. App performance
3. User engagement and loyalty
4. Monetization
5. Innovation and adaptation

With that said, let’s now discuss them one by one and see how you can master them.

1. App Value

How valuable is your app? How does it benefit your users? If you’re a user of your app, what would make you want to use the app more often for a longer period of time?

As you can see, these questions are really important because it determines your app value. As long as your users see your app is valuable, they will still use it, and the more they use it, then the more your app will be sustainable. In short, app value plays a crucial role in determining the sustainability of your app.

How can you improve your app’s value? Here are some important tips:

• Understand your target audience – put yourself in the shoes of your users. Know their needs, preferences, and pain points. Conduct market research where you should analyze their behavior and see how you can better meet their needs.
• Improve user experience – your app might be valuable, but how do you deliver that value to your users? That’s where user experience comes in. Focus on creating an intuitive and seamless user experience, which you can do by simplifying app navigation and streamlining workflows.
• Personalize your app – allow your users to personalize or customize it to their liking. When you do that, your users will more likely feel that the app is their own.

2. App performance

Users have a lot of expectations, and you need to meet or, better yet, exceed those expectations by improving your app performance. After all, any user expects that your app should be fast, reliable, and responsive. There should be fewer to no errors or bugs.

Here are some of the ways you can improve your app performance and, therefore, your app sustainability as well:

• Use the right codes – apps should run on efficient and optimized codes. These codes are written so that they don’t consume too many resources like bandwidth and battery.
• Manage how your app uses resources – for your app to work well, it should optimize its usage of phone memory, network connections, and CPU.
• Reduce the size of your app and lower startup time – while it is true that your app needs to use a large amount of memory to become fully functional, it doesn’t mean you can’t reduce its size. For example, you can compress images, use the correct file formats, and remove unnecessary assets. When your app is lightweight, it becomes faster, which users find delightful.

3. User engagement and loyalty

As you may already know, downloading your app isn’t enough. They should be using your app as well. The more engaged your users are, the more your app becomes popular and the more business opportunities you get. An app with loyal and engaged users will surely last longer than other apps with unengaged users.

Here are a few important tips for you to engage your users and make them your loyal customers:

• Improve onboarding experience – you want to create the least friction when it comes to onboarding. You want it to be as seamless and easy as possible. You can provide guided tours, clear instructions, and interactive tutorials to make the onboarding process uncomplicated and convenient.
• Reward your users – users feel valued and appreciated when they receive rewards from you. You can incorporate gamification elements in your app and rewards that would make your users happy. Rewards can be in badges, leaderboards, incentives, and levels.
• Push notifications and in-app messaging – sometimes, users just need a little reminder to return to your app. But be careful, and you should send the proper notification at the right time to avoid annoying your users.
• Build a community – your users aren’t simply just another name on your list. Instead, these are real people who have emotions and needs. Building a community of your users could dramatically improve engagement as they are encouraged to interact with each other. You can do this through social sharing and discussion forums.

4. Monetization

Creating, running, and maintaining an app costs money. If you want your app to be sustainable, you need to find a way to support it financially. That’s why you must have the right monetization strategies to improve your app’s sustainability. If your app’s profit is unfavorable, you will soon find it impossible to keep your app running anymore.

Thankfully, there are some vital strategies you can do to improve monetization. These are the following:

• Study your target market – discover what may cause your users to pay for your app.
• Choose the right monetization strategies – whether you earn through ads, subscriptions, or selling products or services, you must know which monetization model best fits your app.
• Diversify your income streams – look for different ways to monetize your app. You can combine ads, subscriptions, in-app purchases, and even sponsorships.

5. Innovation and adaptation

As they say, “The only thing that is constant is change.” Change will come your way. Change happens in app stores. New competitors arrive. Users may have unique needs or behavior. The app that best adapts and innovates are the same apps that would surely succeed.

Here are a few things you can do to innovate and adapt for your app’s sustainability:

• Constantly improve your app – you can’t simply create an app and let it stay the same. You must add new features, remove outdated ones, and eliminate bugs and errors.
• Stay updated – app stores regularly add new updates. Please know these updates and adjust your app accordingly. Moreover, it would be best if you took note of industry trends and new technologies that you can use to improve your app.
• Study your competitors – check how your app is doing their business. You can learn from them. See what they are doing right and try to duplicate that in your app. Identify their weak points and see how you can take advantage of them.

Get the right help in sustaining your app.

Your app’s sustainability plays a significant role in the success of your business. That’s why you should never ignore this aspect. Not only that, but the app market is fiercely competitive. Launching an app is never enough. To ensure that your app thrives in the long run, ensure it is sustainable. You can try to figure out how to do this independently or get the right help.

That’s why, ShyftUp is here for you. ShyftUp has the expertise, experience, and technology to create business plans and campaigns to foster your app’s sustainability. They have the proper understanding of how to ensure your app’s profitability in the long run.

Give their team of experts a try and see how your app can achieve your business goals!

What are the key success factors for long-term app sustainability?

There are different key success factors that you should consider if you want to improve your app's sustainability. These include app core value, user engagement, app performance, app reliability, monetization strategy, continuous innovation, adaptation, marketing, user satisfaction, and competition, to name a few.

How can I ensure the growth and success of my app over time?

There’s no one single way of ensuring the growth and success of your app. You need to perform a combination of strategies that include performance monitoring, regular updating, identification and removal of app errors and crashes, fostering user engagement, and studying your competition.

What are the challenges that apps face in maintaining sustainability?

There are various challenges that apps face to ensure their app remains sustainable. These include fierce competition, user acquisition, engagement, and retention, changing market trends, user needs and behavior, technological advancements, app discoverability, and monetization.