Capturing users’ attention towards your app could be a big challenge, but extremely important. After all, there is no point in creating a mobile app if no one uses it, right? Understanding your app’s user retention and how it sets a new benchmark across industry verticals is an integral part of your customer engagement strategy.
According to Statista, the average costing of acquiring a mobile app is nearly $4.00 and it continues to rise. With the high cost of acquisition, you need to make space for user retention in your marketing budget to garner maximum ROI. Keep in mind, how engaged and loyal users are for your app will define its real success.
In this guide, we will walk you through app retention strategies to generate more revenue. But before we get into that, let’s talk about app retention.
What is App Retention Rate?
The retention rate is basically the percentage of users who use your application over a period of time. You can calculate the aggregate retention rate by simply the total number of monthly active users divided by the total number of installs. Measure the app engagement by the following metrics:
- Number of downloads
- The active number of users
- Session interval
- Session length
- Lifetime revenue
Understanding users’ engagement gives a clear idea of your ROI results. Thus, it is smart to optimize your mobile app development process consistently and maintain a close relationship with the user to reach your marketing goals. Keeping that in mind, let’s look at the strategies to boost your app retention.
1. Promote Two-Way Communication
Customers want to feel appreciated and comfortable now more than ever. That’s why encouraging two-way communication is crucial. The best solution is to hear what the audience has to say and get through the bottom line of the issue to build lasting relationships. Being responsive and address queries early will enhance your engagement and retention rates.
2. Personalize User Experience
Another way to improve your app retention is to provide a personalized experience to users. This can help build customer loyalty and make your app stand out from the crowd. You can offer a personalized experience using the following two factors:
- Static personalization: It uses factors that don’t change. For instance, placing a user’s name in a push notification.
- Dynamic personalization: It involves behavioral factors. The best example is users’ purchase history and preferences.
Extra Tip: More natural way to offer a personalized experience to users is to include cart abandonment emails and tailored recommendations.
3. Efficient Onboarding
Initiate your onboarding process as easy, enjoyable, and intuitive as possible. An app onboarding experience can be categorized into three aspects:
- Benefit-oriented onboarding to outline how mobile app can add value to users’ requirements.
- Function-oriented onboarding showcases your app features and how it allows users to learn more.
- Progressive onboarding describes app features to users in a specific sequence to broaden the scope of understanding.
It’s all about knowing audience psychology. If you’ve been successfully delivering what users desire, they will be confident enough to keep coming back. Also, make sure your app navigation should be less time-consuming and seamless. And don’t overload users with too much information, keep logins and accounting creation simple for a great start.
4. Push Notifications
As we all know, push notifications are simply messages those pop up on users’ device. It is a medium to deliver relevant information and updates to users even if they’re not active on the app. Mobile push notifications work as a powerful factor to boost user engagement in the form of promotional, informative, and survey-related notifications.
Below are the tips to enhance your app’s retention rate:
- Pick a suitable time: Don’t deliver push notifications to all users at the same time. Keep different time zones in mind and make the most out of them.
- Customize notifications: Track your user’s behavior and send push notifications accordingly.
- Don’t overdo: Don’t annoy your users with so many notifications. And also, don’t be inconsistent. Sending relevant and engaging notifications is key.
5. Give Perks to Engaged Users
Giving coupons and extra benefits to engaged users is a way to create brand loyalty. They will recommend your mobile app to others and help create loyal followers. You can create an intensive program as per the nature of your app. For instance, if your app uses in-app purchases as a monetization model, then you can provide time-based discounts to your loyal users.
Final Words
You might have understood the significance of user engagement and retention for your mobile app’s success. You can take help from iOS or Android app development company to implement these strategies in the best possible manner to continuously develop and optimize your application.
At eSearch Logix, we believe app engagement and user engagement are equally important. That’s why our marketing team is highly focused on converting active long-term customers, increase average lifetime value (LTV), and yield desired results for your app. Talk to us to build proven app retention and ROI strategies that strengthen your app performance.
