SDKs (software development kits), or devkits as they are sometimes known as, are the plug-and-play equivalent of mobile app development. Let’s look at how SDKs can help marketers in their mobile marketing efforts.
The responsibilities of mobile marketers today consist of personalizing the app experience, understanding user behavior, developing revenue streams, and drawing meaningful information from analytics to enhance the app. Each of these activities needs different sets of instructions (programming code).
Now the app dev team can build these functionalities in-house, but it takes a lot of time and money. Along with these constraints, a major downside of doing this in-house is that the finished product can’t always be error free due to the lack of expertise.
Luckily, there’s an easy solution to this.
Enter mobile SDKs.
In this article, we will go over what SDKs are and how they can help marketers improve different aspects of mobile marketing.
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What is an SDKs?
**A software development kit is a set of 3rd party software development tools that can be integrated within your existing mobile application to enhance its functionality.**
A less computer-esek explanation for mobile SDKs can be as follows:
Let’s suppose that you want to add a push notification functionality to your mobile app. You can go about developing this feature in-house, but considering time constraints, it may not be a priority for your app dev team. A wise alternative for this is to implement a mobile marketing SDK such as Braze (formerly Appboy) or OneSignal in your app that lets you send out push notification. This will save you plenty of time and let your developers focus on their area of expertise.
**On an average, an android app uses 15.6 different SDKs, and an iOS app uses at least seven separate SDKsOpens a new window .**
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Categories of Mobile SDKs
Various categories of SDKs cater to different requirements of programmers, product managers, designers, and marketers. These are a few key SDKs that are crucial for mobile marketing.
1. In-app Analytics
Standard in-app analytics SDKs are divided into two categories – quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative analytics SDKs track the traditional metrics such as bounce rate, users, page views, etc. while the qualitative analytics SDKs help you understand user behavior by unveiling why users perform certain activities.
2. A/B Testing
Like marketers experimenting with landing pages, ad campaign copy and creatives, etc., A/B testing SDKs help marketers test out different hypotheses regarding UI elements to optimize the app experience.
3. Attribution
In the age of data-driven marketing, attribution SDKs help marketers track results of your marketing campaigns. These SDKs track app downloads across different channels, as well as in-app purchases, user acquisition sources and allow marketers to optimize the cost per acquisition (CPA) metric.
4. Mobile Marketing Automation
Mobile marketing automation SDKs take care of push notifications, in-app messaging, SMS, emails, and other areas of personalization. Just like traditional marketing automation platformsOpens a new window , mobile marketing automation SDKs enhance the overall UX of the app.
5. Monetization
**If your app works on a free-mium pricing model, placing ads in your app might be a key revenue stream for you. In such cases, monetization or advertising SDKs allow you to place ads within your app through ad networks.**
6. Feedback
It is necessary to seek user feedback during different stages of the user journey to gauge how well they’re engaging with your app. Feedback SDKs gather customer feedback through surveys, ratings, and notes helping marketers and product managers better the app.
7. Location Intelligence
Location intelligence SDKs send out notifications, information, offers, etc. in real-time based on the location of the user.
Why Should Marketers Care About SDKs?
For mobile marketers SDKS offer a plethora of benefits, namely:
Hit the Market Early
The development of any product or feature needs a lot of time and resources. Since the developers of SDKs already do the legwork, SDKs have become the plug-and-play equivalent of app development. Integration of an SDK saves a lot of time that would otherwise be spent in experimenting and debugging of different features, thus allowing app makers to release the product early.
Cost Effective and Dependable
Cost-effectiveness is a clear byproduct of time and resources saved by implementing an SDK instead of going for full-fledged feature development.
Another major benefit comes with using SDKs is reliability. A team of experts builds SDKs, you don’t have to sweat the minute details. Just integrate them within your app, and it’s all systems go!
Rank Better in App Stores
**One crucial criterion for apps to rank well in respective app stores is the app-crash rate. A high app-crash rate not only derails the overall user experience but also adversely affects your app store optimization efforts.** Using third-party SDKs minimizes the risk of app crashes because of their reliability, and your app is saved from being penalized by app stores.
Security
Security is an extremely fragile and crucial element. With the frequent news of data breaches, users are now quite cynical about the use of their personal data. Developing stronger security measures is a major undertaking that requires a team of experts with constant process interations.
**If your app requires payment processing, using a payment SDK can provide you with essential security measures ensuring that user data and their payment details are safe and secure.**
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Conclusion
The right SDKs used in your app can act as a jetpack propelling the app to the top of the app store, and helping your app gain mass acceptance. However, a poorly chosen SDK can become a deadweight impeding the growth of your mobile marketing efforts.
Whenever you choose an SDK, conduct a proper research to make sure that the SDK will serve its purpose while keeping user data secure.