Launching your mobile app is a critical step in growing your business. The importance of launch can lead to a lot of stress and second-guessing over your launch strategy. Specifically, you may be questioning the timing of your release. It’s natural to feel some apprehension about whether your app is truly ready to be launched or if you need more time before release. In a sense, no mobile app is a finished product as there are sure to be regular updates throughout the lifecycle of the app.

Still, it’s important to make the release of the initial app version a success. So, how can you decide when you are truly ready to launch your mobile app? There are a few key steps you’ll need to take before you introduce the full, production version of your app into the wild.

Determine Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Before launching your app, it’s important to understand how you’re going to track how successful it actually is. To do this, you need to decide on what metrics, or KPIs, you’re going to use. For example, are you looking strictly for a high volume of downloads or are you also making sales through your app that need to be tracked?

Is it crucial to your mobile app’s success that users are frequently using it, or is sporadic use acceptable? If frequent use is important, then you may want to track daily active users (DAUs). If your app is the type that users only need to use every few weeks, then tracking monthly active users (MAUs) may be the better metric.

You can choose any data you want for your KPIs. The important thing is that you decide what they are before launching your mobile app. Otherwise, how can you be sure whether your launch has been successful or not? Your app will be out there being used, but you will have no idea if it’s being used the way it was intended or if it is accomplishing the goals that you have.

Optimize for App Store Search

Before unleashing your mobile app on the world, you should also be thinking about how it will rank in the app store. Whether you’re releasing an app on the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, users must be able to easily find your app. While you may use multiple marketing channels and a mix of paid advertising, your goal is for users to find your app through organic search.

Just like search engine optimization (SEO) is important for making your website easily discoverable in Google’s search rankings, app store optimization (ASO) is a critical component of getting your app in front of the greatest number of users possible.

So if you haven’t first gone through the process of researching keywords and planning your ASO strategy, then you’re not yet ready to release your mobile app. While it’s true that you can make changes as you go to improve ASO, you want to get off to a hot start when your app launches.

If you’re unsure where to begin with app store optimization, Apple’s search optimization guide details the factors used for ranking your app on its App Store. If you are releasing your mobile app on the Google Play Store, the Google Play search optimization guide straight from Google should get you off to a good start.

Have You Started Pre-Release Marketing?

Marketing isn’t only important after you release your app. It’s also vital to the success of your mobile app that you begin your marketing efforts before launching your app. By letting people know about the impending app release and creating some pre-launch hype, you stand a greater chance of your app gaining traction out of the gate.

Pre-release marketing is important because you don’t want to spend the first couple of months trying to gain ground-up momentum. Instead, laying a strong foundation for your marketing efforts for a couple of months before your app releases is going to create greater initial success, meaning that your post-release marketing efforts will be about continuing the upward momentum you’ve already generated.

You may be wondering how you can truly market something that does not yet exist in the marketplace. That’s where your app landing page comes into play. By creating an app landing page in the months before its release, you can begin your SEO efforts, start building an email list of potential app users, and you’ve got somewhere to send the traffic from your social media pre-release marketing campaigns–which you should also be doing.

If you haven’t done any marketing whatsoever yet, then your app isn’t quite ready for release yet. Give yourself a couple of months for pre-release marketing, and during that time you can continue beta testing, revising as necessary, and perhaps planning for future app features.

Has Your App Been Thoroughly Tested?

Before you release your app, it also needs thorough testing.

This doesn’t just mean that developers have programmatically tested throughout the development cycle. While this type of testing is important, it will only catch bugs and errors within the app that can be detected through code. This is why it is also important for users outside of your development team to do real-world testing on the mobile app before release.

This may look like an internal team of testers who are not developers, or you may consider a beta release to get outside perspectives on the direction of your app. The main function here is to test for usability. Developers’ brains think in a very specific way, and to them the way the app functions may feel completely natural and user-friendly. However, this very same app could feel clunky and unintuitive to your target app users.

By gaining these insights, you can tweak your app’s UI/UX and feature set based on the pain points that your testers point out while using the app. This will lead to a more polished, user-friendly app that will feel more comfortable to your target audience.

This is a critical step that should be taken before release. So, if you haven’t had your app thoroughly tested, then it is not quite ready for launch.

Always Go Into Launch Day Prepared

Launching a mobile app is a big step for your business, and you want to be sure you’ve checked all the boxes before launching. The critical pre-launch steps we’ve covered are:

• Determine how your app’s success will be measured (KPIs)

• Optimize for app store search

• Create awareness and hype about your app through pre-release marketing

• Be sure your app is thoroughly tested

Overall, your goal is to see some positive momentum as quickly as possible. If you’ve done everything we talked about, then your app is ready for launch!

If you’re still not sure, you can always work with a team of professionals to get your app conceptualized, built, and marketed. Camber Creative has been in the business for years and has overseen many successful mobile app launches. Contact our team today to make your mobile app launch a success.