Are you inquisitive to know what magazine apps are all about? Or how a magazine app enriches your reading experience? We’ve got you covered so come, let’s explore.
The digital era has witnessed a rapid migration of print magazine readers to the magazine app exclusively. Many—if not most—magazine readers who read content frequently trust apps for easy consumption and access benefits. Such an app contains issues that publishers create and distribute periodically to keep their readers engaged and feed their interests. The app gets enriched every time a new issue is published.
Depending upon one’s interest or desire, a magazine app may be based on any genre like sports, fashion, news, or a customized app altogether. For example, Flipboard is a famous magazine app for providing personalized content. It allows publishers to collect relevant articles, images, videos, and other content as per their readers’ interests and priorities and create a completely customized magazine experience.
Advantages of a magazine app
Easy distribution and access
A magazine app is quickly distributed and accessed over the internet to multiple platforms and devices irrespective of geographical boundaries. It becomes hassle-free for both the readers and publishers as they can achieve their respective tasks according to their comfort. Launching a magazine app in various app stores increases the reach to the audience and leads to more visibility and brand recognition in the market.
Instant connection
App publishers remain constantly in touch with their readers by sending the latest updates, trends, news, and much more. Notifications sent at the right time greatly help in being visible to the reader and encourage app usage. Other communication options like surveys and feedback allow the reader and publisher to react instantly to each other.
Engaging
Content is made more engaging by using rich multimedia features like audio, images, and video. Other features include simple navigation, slideshows, web links, clear layouts, graphs, tables, 360-degree view, pinch and zoom, and others. While decreasing human attention span, these quick controls on fingertips help readers with the interactive flow of consumption. As a result, the app traffic increases and also attracts potential customers.
Revenue generation
Publishers follow monetization techniques for their apps to generate profits. Some of the revenue generation methods include in-app purchases, subscriptions, ads, and others. Another strategy, often called ‘freemium’ includes a perfect combination of free and paid services, where a reader is offered free articles or chapters to preview the content and is attracted to continue consumption on paying the subscription charges.
Offline library
Sometimes readers are unable to access the online pages, or the process is much delayed due to poor or no connection at all. The offline library comes to the rescue in such times. One can download the desired monthly or weekly issue beforehand and save it in an offline library. Thereafter the reader can access these articles anytime at their convenience.
This suggests that publishers choosing a magazine app to increase readership can get an edge over competitors. While an app may seem expensive and challenging to leverage without techie mates, that’s not the case today. Publishers now have a choice to pick ready-made apps or so-called white-label apps. A ready-made app can prevent them from developing an app from scratch. The publisher can simply use its brand logo on the pre-built app to own it and push content directly on their readers’ smart devices.
Let’s explore how publishers can use a ready-made magazine app to share desired content with their customers.
How to run a magazine app?
With the off-the-shelf app, publishers no longer require programmers to develop and run an app. This means publishers can simply begin with the content creation process, using magazine software from a vendor that offers to handle all technical aspects of app development and submission to app stores. In a nutshell, all they have to do initially is create content and sit back while the creation is pushed to their live app.
Here’s an overview of how publishers can kick off their branding using a magazine app while also enriching the experience for their readers:
Step 1: Interactive content development
The app content is designed to provide a seamless user experience by optimizing the look and feel of the product by adopting the following tactics:
- HTML5 fully-responsive design to adapt to the user device.
- Jump links, page-flipping, or scroll-down options to enable faster and clear navigation through the issue’s pages.
- Integration of more engaging and interactive content to gain and retain the audience.
- Categorization of the content into categories like the special edition, reports, and so on to make the content easily searchable.
- Native device features are appropriately utilized to enhance the functionalities.
- Automatic switching of the orientation from landscape to portrait or vice-versa.
- Optimized page load speeds for faster downloads and refresh.
Step 2: Content distribution
The app is then submitted to various app stores. Once the app is live, publishers can start pushing created content to the app on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. This can be broadcasted to all app readers or targeted readers in the form of separate issues. A publisher can also send timely alerts and notifications to inform their customers about new, upcoming issues as part of a marketing plan.
Step 3: App optimization
The app is on an App store, and now it’s time to increase its visibility. There are several ways to make apps discoverable in the app stores, which can help place the app at a higher rank on the App store. Once the app is downloaded, a reader can instantly start consuming the content or save it in the app library to read later as and when desired. Readers further have the option to bookmark their favorite articles or delete the articles read.
Step 4: Social sharing
The magazine app further allows sharing of the content amongst your community or family on social networks and other platforms. This can help publishers increase brand awareness and unlock untapped potential. Also, the reader can directly communicate with the publisher using comments, feedback, and others.
Step 5: User behavior tracking
A publisher of a magazine app has the advantage that it can track the in-app behavior and other required analytics of the readers. This helps the publishers to find the weaker areas and allows them to improve their brand services.
Conclusion
To conclude, with the increasing population consuming mobile content, a magazine app helps to reach more customers and provide them with valuable content. It helps in increasing brand awareness, marketing, consumer base, and credibility.
If you’re wondering about a magazine app for your business, Magplus could be the best partner. mag+Now, a newly launched content-reader app, allows publishers to create engaging content with in-built authoring tools and features. This tool offers to develop fully-responsive content that can be published to multiple channels, such as Android and iOS devices, with a single click.
Most importantly, you’d be relieved from app development and submission steps. Our team would design a perfect app with the help of your insights. From alerts to subscriptions to ads, you’ll be able to run a full-fledged app within a few seconds. To know more about the ease of creation of a branded app, contact us today!