Do you know what it takes to make your app a success in Emerging markets like China, India and Brazil? Have you given enough attention to these emerging markets and optimized your app to address the top pain points that restrict your app from a global reach?
Some of the fastest growing countries like China and India, for smartphones are easily luring developers towards them. In order to succeed in these markets it is necessary to understand how these users are different from the ones from Western countries. With the following infographic, you can learn about top 5 biggest mistakes developers make while targeting these emerging markets. Don’t be one of those developers, learn and correct the mistakes before users leave negative reviews.
Let’s look at each of these mistakes one by one.
1. App missing local language support
While this is a no brainer that you can’t succeed globally if you are offering support for just English (US) in your apps, but still there are many developers (am guilty myself) who fail to offer localization of their apps in other languages. There are many tools and services out there (like Get Localization and OneSky) which can help you get your app localized. You can also opt for crowd-sourced localization if you don’t want to shell out money for getting this done, however I am not sure if that is really an effective way for getting localization done.
2. Pricing not suitable globally
There is a reason all the app stores allow you to adjust the price of your app and in-app purchases individually for different countries and regions. If you want to succeed in some of the emerging markets, try setting a little lower price point for your digital goods otherwise you will quite often find users complaining about high prices in reviews.
3. Incompatible payment channels
If you are offering digital goods in your apps, then you also need to consider the option of providing the best possible payment option to your users in emerging markets. Credit card is still not so popular in a lot of these emerging markets and you need to provide alternate ways such as mobile carrier billing or locally poplar payment services. Payment companies such as Fortumo allow you to extend the reach of your digital goods to more customers via their payment channel.
4. Offering limited integration with social networks
While integrating with social networks like Facebook & Twitter is great and allows you to grow the reach of your app using these social channels, you need to remember that there are other popular social networks which have higher user base in some of the emerging countries. For e.g integrating with wiebo when targeting users in China and VK.com when targeting Russian users will be a better idea.
5. Wrong distribution channel
While this may not be true for apps on iPhone or Windows Phone, but for Android apps to be available only on the Google Play store would mean missing out on 80+ million users who are having android devices without the Google Play store. There are many alternate android app stores which help fill the absence of Google Play store and you ought to target them in order to reach more Android users.
Let me come back to the original question before ending the post. Do you optimize your apps for local markets? What is the download rate and in-app purchase rate in some of the emerging markets compared to the US for your apps?
