Not Knowing Your Customers Costs Money

When it comes to knowing their mobile customers, many companies have a bad case of tunnel vision.  And it’s a problem that costs them a lot of money.

Retailers, game companies, and publishers can see a lot about what a customer is doing when they’re inside their mobile application.

But they’re seeing only a small slice of the customer’s activity. They have no idea of what the customer does outside their app. Once they leave, what do they do, where do they go, what do they buy or play or read?

The apps they carry on their phone reveal a lot about a person

Companies can use that information to learn a great deal about that customer’s interests and behavior.

More importantly, not knowing what other apps are on your customer’s phone can be very costly.

You could be paying too much to acquire customers

If you don’t know what your mobile users are doing outside your app, you could be paying much more to acquire new users than you should be. If you’re paying $2, $3, maybe even $4 for each new user acquired from outside sources, you could be wasting a lot of money.

You could be acquiring those new users much less expensively. You could save yourself from writing a large check every month to Facebook, Twitter, Fiksu or another data broker.

How? You need to know more about your users and what apps they were running on their phones.

Run the numbers to prove it

Consider an example to compare the costs of acquiring a new customer through two different options:

1. Buying a new customer from an outside broker
2. Acquiring a customer on your own by better understanding their interests

Option 1: If you’re a gaming company looking to acquire new customers, you could buy those customers from an outside broker. For the sake of illustration, assume you pay a $3 cost per install (CPI).

Making some reasonable assumptions about conversions, a campaign targeting 1 million users might yield 15,000 new users. That means you’ll be paying the outside broker $45,000.

Option 2: But there’s a second option. Instead of buying users for your game from a third party data broker, consider acquiring them from your own existing users. If you could discover what other games are on their mobile devices, you could identify likely users for the new game. You could then cross-promote to these users through targeted ads or promotions, a much less expensive way to reach them.

Seeing all the apps on a device lets you target customers more cost-effectively

Estimate that is would cost $3 per thousand (CPM) to deliver an ad to those targeted users.   To reach 1 million users would cost $3000. That’s a fraction of the $45,000 that you would have paid an outside broker for those new users.

In other words, you’re paying 15 times more for new users than you should be.

Plug in your own numbers. See for yourself how much you’re overpaying.