Demystifying Museum App Downloads

Do you struggle with achieving high download rates for your app? Or perhaps you’ve heard from peers that visitors don’t download apps, so you’ve never deployed one? Maybe your department did try in the past, but didn’t have the support of your larger museum team? Whatever the case, you are not alone.

Achieving high download rates is challenging, but there are a few key necessities to launching and maintaining a successful museum app — and they all come down to getting it consistently into the hands of visitors.

Read more about museum apps in the 21st century

Does your app only see 1% download rate?

Most museums struggle to get their mobile guides into the hands of visitors. So how do some of our partners reach take-up rates above 30%? What’s their secret to a high rate of use (Capture Rate)? It all starts with the visitor services staff. It’s easy to put the blame on the visitor: “Visitors won’t download an app!” Instead, it’s more useful to look at your museum’s front-line operations, and how your mobile guide integrates with your visitor experience as a whole.

It is worth being precise about what a high rate actually looks like, because the spread is wide. Across seven years in which we logged downloads and recorded admissions side by side — 1,164,811 downloads against 11,229,263 admissions — our portfolio ran at 10.4%. The median institution-year was 5.3% and the strongest reached 32.7%. A good result is several times the sector norm, not a majority of your gate. For a closer look at how three of those institutions moved their own numbers, see what the pandemic really taught us about museum apps.

Taking a few tips from other sectors of the hospitality and retail industries can be extremely helpful when approaching a new strategy for encouraging mobile guide take-up. The barrier to promoting a mobile guide is often rooted in the institution’s mission-based approach, and not wanting to seem as if you are “selling” something to a visitor. But when that “something” is useful, furthers the institution’s mission, and improves the experience onsite, it is actually helping the visitor.

Who is the first person a visitor sees when they enter your institution? What does that person’s welcome script look like? Does it include an excited and encouraging message to use or download your mobile guide?

Still unsure if a mobile guide is right for your institution?

Check our infographic on the key differences between native and web apps. Some museums even opt for both.

Three tips to increase downloads

1. Signage, signage, signage! Visitors need a visual. They want to know what they are getting if they download your app. It’s rare that someone will buy something or take up an experience sight unseen. This means your signage must also be visual and demonstrative of the mobile guide.
2. A solid visitor services script. The team members selling admission are often the first people your visitors see. They are a hugely valuable piece of the visitor experience puzzle! A solid welcome script should bolster the best things about the experience — one of which is your mobile guide. Your VS team will be most effective at this if they have used your mobile guide, understand the features, and have even picked out personal favorite things about it to share with guests.
3. Practical and useful functions (not just bells and whistles). Encouraging visitors to use your guide is a much easier task when it is positioned as a “must have” rather than a “nice to have” for a complete experience. This means ensuring your mobile guide has features that accommodate any kind of pain point visitors may have onsite. Useful tools in your mobile guide are key, including things like wayfinding, translations, or even a coupon to the gift shop.

All in all, a mobile guide is not a “build it and they will come” sort of endeavor. It takes the buy-in of each department to share in both the promotion and success of your mobile guide. Just like a new exhibition or event takes time and energy to build awareness and encourage participation, so does your mobile guide. After all, it is a useful tool for storytelling, wayfinding, donating, discovering, and connecting with your visitors through every step of their experiential journey.