An Introduction To Dayparting For Mobile App Developers

If you have never heard of dayparting before, this post will give you a short introduction to this valuable marketing strategy and why you should be using it. Dayparting is the process of targeting your marketing message to your app users (or potential users) during specific times of the day.

It can be applied to in-app marketing such as push notifications or external marketing like Facebook Mobile Install Ads. Since you do need to know quite a bit about your target audience, it does take a little more work to implement than other marketing strategies, but the payoff can be huge.

The Benefits Of Dayparting

The bottom line is that dayparting seeks to make the maximum impact for the least amount of work or advertising cost. If you are spending money on ads, you only display ads at the time of day when your users are likely to act on your marketing message. This can reduce your total advertising cost and increase your conversion rate.

If you are sending push notifications, you also want to send a message to your users at the optimal time of the day. Just like with paid ads, your goal is to improve your conversion rate, but in this case you also want to limit the number of times that you send notifications because you do not want to bother people too often. Knowing the right time to do this can actually make your notifications useful and not intrusive.

Keys To Effective Dayparting

To be successful with your dayparting strategy, you need to know when is the best time to market to your target audience and what is valuable to them.

As an example, let's say that you own a local sandwich shop that only serves lunch. You have an app that allows users to see your current menu, place an order through the app and be notified when you have special discounts.

The best time to contact them with an ad or notification would probably be around 11:30 a.m., just before they are about to eat lunch. You could send them a discount coupon along with something else that they might find valuable or entertaining. This could be an inspirational quote of the day, a joke, an update on the weather or an update on a local sports team. Depending on which marketing platform you are using, you might even be able to target people who are only within a certain radius from your sandwich store.

This is a very straightforward example and not all apps will have the luxury of having such an obvious dayparting strategy. Therefore, you will need to collect some data to find out what the best time to contact people and what they might find useful.

How To Collect Data

To better understand who uses your app and how they interact with it, you should install app analytics to get data such as demographics, engagement, retention, conversions and more. There are several options, but one of the best ways to get started is to install Flurry. Their analytics service is available for every major app platform and the best part is that it is free.

Once you understand when people use your app the most and what parts of your app they use frequently, you can start to get an idea of how you will implement your dayparting strategy. Of course, you will still need to do a lot of testing to optimize your approach, but at least you will not be starting blind.

Conclusion

You can implement dayparting in different ways and on various platforms and we will take a more in depth look at how to do this in future posts, but we hope that this introduction has given you a good starting point. Knowing when to market to your target audience and how to provide value at the same time can go a long way to establishing a relationship with your users while increasing the revenue from your app.

Did you know about dayparting before reading this post? What other questions do you have about dayparting?

Photo Credits: Clock, Checking Phones