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Archive for November, 2011

Integrating Pushes for the Holidays

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, not only with holiday celebrations but also in the mobile world. Mobile engagement increases a significant amount around now as users shop, travel and have more time to keep up on the news.  A recent survey done by a consumer research group noted that 48% of shoppers plan to use their mobile devices to help with their shopping. Stores across the globe are releasing special holiday shopping apps to take advantage of this significant percentage.

If you haven’t released your TapLynx app yet, this may be the time to do it. Whether you’re in development mode or your app is live, it’s not too late to integrate push notifications, powered by Push IO. Push notifications are a powerful way to engage your users this holiday season and are a good add on to any kind of app. Integrating pushes will help you stand out among the handful of other holiday apps fresh on your users’ mobile devices.

Here are a few tips from the team at Push IO to maximize the mobile shopper frenzy:

  • Mobile users plan to use their apps to comparison shop this season. If you’re a news publisher, we recommend featuring any content related to gift tips in your publication content. As soon as you publish these, push notify your users.
  • Mobile alerts drive about 1 out of 3 users in stores. It has been found almost 30% of these users will then make a purchase inspired by their pushes. If you are a store, we recommend maximizing on these sales leads with your pushes.
  • Send out push notifications about deals, specials, holiday hours and any other relevant content. They’ll be looking for updates throughout the holiday season.

Happy building this holiday season!

TapLynx Half Off for Black Friday!

Friday, November 25th, 2011

Looking to buy an iPhone licenses? Today’s your day! In honor of Black Friday, we’re offering all iPhone licenses for $299! That’s half off the normal list price. That’s $299 for an iPhone app you’ll own forever featuring customization, push notifications, social media sharing and your blogs, podcasts, photo galleries, video streams and social media streams. Head here to purchase your license for just $299.

Still in building mode? No worries. You can purchase your license while still developing so you can catch this one day offer. Once you’ve downloaded XCode4, to get started, check out this video that will walk you through building your app step-by-step. Both this video and this one will then help you customize your app. If you need more support, head on over to our Google Group and our Wiki, both maintained by TapLynx experts and our staff here in Colorado.

Happy holidays and happy building!
The Team at TapLynx

 

Maximizing Your App: Exploring TapLynx Features

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011


Once you’ve begun to make your App your own, TapLynx has a few features we recommend you dig into. If you think about it, any given iPhone owner typically has between twenty and forty apps on their phone. The key to an app’s success is creating a living, breathing app that reminds users it’s there among the other handful on a users’ phone. The tips below will help you bring your app to life, maximizing user engagement.

Customization

TapLynx enables you to quickly and easily customize your app. We recommend you do this out the door to be sure your branding is carrying through your mobile presence. Head to the ‘Tutorials’ page under Support on the TapLynx site to watch our ‘Customization’ videos that will guide you through personalizing your app.  Basics we recommend include streaming your social media feeds, incorporating your brand colors and images throughout and syncing up your font with your other online copy.

Push Notifications

Here in our office, we’re big fans of push notifications. We believe they are the key to keeping your app living on a static iPhone or iPad screen, not only reminding users you’re there, but also engaging them with fresh content streaming through your app. TapLynx powers content-specific pushing (i.e. a push when a new blog post goes up or a new video is added to a stream) and broadcast pushing.

We recommend you utilize broadcast pushing periodically, when you have pressing news. On an ongoing basis, we’ve found stream-specific push notifications are key to making users feel like they are shaping their experience with their app.

We advise keeping these best practices with push notifications in mind:

  • Give your users a lot of control over how they engage with pushes.
  • Don’t over send your pushes: find the balance between engaging and over-engaging.
  • Build a strategy. Be clear about how you’re using pushes.
  • Include push settings in the app so users can decide what streams they will receive.

Set up your push notifications here.

Happy building!