From becoming a part of Alchemer to celebrating our 11-year anniversary to the publication of our seventh-annual Mobile Customer Engagement Benchmark Report and much more detailed below, 2022 was a tremendous year for Apptentive. We’re excited about what our future holds in 2023! The highlight of 2022 was empowering more companies to give a voice to their customers. In fact, our customers reached more than 1.2 BILLION customers with Apptentive in 2022! Aside from those amazing stats, here are some of the top highlights from this past year: Joined forces with the voice of the customer experts ..read more

We have some exciting news to share. Today, Apptentive, the standalone company focused on delivering Customer Love for mobile customers around the world, becomes a part of Alchemer, a customer experience company with 13,000 customers. While our unique voice and approach to the world will always exist, Apptentive’s first chapter comes to an end today. Our next chapter will enable us to take our philosophy of Customer Love and excellence in mobile to many more customers than we could reach on our own. When Mike, Andrew, Sky, and I started Apptentive in 2011, we wanted to make it easier for custo ..read more

If you’re not tracking metrics, analyzing them, and tweaking your app accordingly, you’re missing out on potential optimizations that could dramatically  improve customer experience. Setting mobile app KPIs (key performance indicators) for revenue, performance, and CX is an important first step toward accomplishing this. But there are tons of KPIs to choose from. How do you decide which ones are right for your app? It’s important to figure out what your goals are with your app first, then your top KPIs accordingly. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of the most popular KPIs that mobile a ..read more

Have you ever been looking for a recipe online but have to scroll all the way through a long, drawn-out story about the author’s family to get to the actual recipe? We won’t do that to you today. Instead, let’s cut right to the chase: Retargeting the right customers at the right time and in the right place is the ultimate key to driving mobile customer engagement. Now, it might sound like common sense to say, “just retarget your customers to boost engagement,” but let’s break down what this actually means. The concept of retargeting mobile customers is not a new idea by any means, but few bran ..read more

“Should we buy this software or should we build it?” The build vs. buy question is both one of the most common and one of the most challenging dilemmas facing product managers.  Juggling your company’s immediate needs with long-term goals is always tricky, but when it comes to purchasing a tool to make your team’s lives easier, managers tasked with the decision to build or buy often struggle in what seems to be a comparison of apples to oranges. In the case of software, the dilemma becomes increasingly difficult as most enterprise companies have the resources and talent in-house to build ..read more

Over the past few years, many people in the development community have sounded off about “rating nags” and the “please rate me” dialogs that some apps show, with perhaps the most pointed critique coming from John Gruber, of Daring Fireball. He shared his frustration with the usage of ratings prompts and said: “I’ve long considered a public campaign against this particular practice, wherein I’d encourage Daring Fireball readers, whenever they encounter these “Please rate this app” prompts, to go ahead and take the time to do it — but to rate the app with just one star and to leave a review alon ..read more

If you’re reading this in December, that means you’re already in the thick of it with holiday campaigns and chaos. But if you have a breather, we’re excited to share some data-backed mobile engagement findings, specifically surrounding how seasonality impacts customer sentiment! Bookmark this page for next year’s insanity (and to remind yourself not to get down when your app store ratings look a little less-than-happy in the winter months). We wanted to know: Are customers happier in the summer? Grumpier in the winter? When’s the best time to solicit feedback? While we can hypothesize that th ..read more

Building a successful app can mean big business. But, it also requires a proper plan to reach your target market and stand out against millions of apps already successfully positioned in the market. There could be many apps available in the market that resemble your app, so it is critical to differentiate your app from your competitors.  You likely already know the challenges your up against, so let’s get right to it and talk about how to face these challenges head on!   What does a successful app look like? 1. A bright and compelling icon Top apps grab people’s attention with ..read more

Both downloads and engagement are equally in-focus for winning mobile apps. We talk a lot about how listening to and acting on customer emotion is key to retention and improving long-term ROI. Today, we shift the focus toward making your app more visible to encourage downloads at the very top of the funnel with a three-pack of app store optimization tools we love. App store optimization, or ASO, plays a critical role in app discovery and customer acquisition. ASO requires an ongoing, data-backed investment from all app publishers. To help, there is a marketplace of app store optimization tools ..read more

Positive reviews tell you what people like about your app and what you are doing right. They make you feel good about your work and offer encouragement to keep going. At their best, they are both inspiring and validating, giving other potential customers in the app store a reason to buy or download your app. Negative app reviews, however, are a different story. They make you second-guess yourself, and your app, and can give you a biased representation of quality. The reality is this: You will get both positive and negative app reviews, and they’re equally important to the process of understand ..read more