An introduction to user retention

You’ve created a great app. You’ve devised a clever acquisition strategy that’s won you thousands of downloads. Now you just need to keep your users coming back. Simple.

Or maybe not. User retention is notoriously difficult for mobile apps. The churn rate for app downloads after three months is a whopping 68%. While the average 30 day retention rate is just 7% for the App Store and 6% for Android.

The good news is we know a thing or two about user retention, and by addressing these four key areas in your engagement strategy you’re much more likely to be part of the 7%.

1. Get the right permissions

You can only engage your users if you have permission to contact them. And if the comms you send them actually land in their inboxes. That’s why it’s worth focusing on getting opt-in to push notifications at the onboarding stage, encouraging account set-up, and using best practice email deliverability tactics.

What is push notification opt-in?

When a user opts into push notification they are giving you permission to send them push notifications from the app. These notifications are a vital channel for engagement and retention. In fact opted-in users are four times more engaged and twice as likely to be retained. Set users’ expectations in terms of what they’re going to receive, and what’s in it for them.

Account set-up

Getting users to set up an account is a great way to capture key contact information – like phone number and email address – paving the way for ongoing communications. Again, there needs to be something in it for them, so think about the value you can offer users who do set up an account.

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability are the measures you take to make sure – as far as you possibly can – that your email successfully arrives in your subscriber’s inbox. Rather than going into their junk folder, or bouncing back to you. Verifying user emails, making it easy to unsubscribe, and using the right URLs are all ways you can increase deliverability.

2. Make the most of the onboarding opportunity

It’s your users’ very first experience with your app and it sets the tone for the relationship you hope to have with them. So a strong onboarding process is critical.

Onboarding can happen on and off the app, so consider the content you’ll deliver to users the first time they use your app and – once they’ve opted in – what you can send them via email or SMS.

Serving up a short tutorial on entering the app is a useful way to explain what it does, how it works and why they’ve made the right choice by downloading it. While a well-written welcome email or SMS gives you an opportunity to thank your users and even reward them. Think first purchase offers or free gaming credits. Just make sure you’re personalizing comms with the data they’ve given you.

3. Think omnichannel

To effectively engage your users, you need to think about the bigger channel picture. Your ongoing engagement strategy should represent a joined-up approach to push notifications, in-app messaging, in-app events, and email marketing. By considering how you use these channels together to deliver the right messages at the right time, you’ll keep your app at the front of users’ minds without annoying them. You’re looking for the key touchpoints in the user lifecycle so you can optimize the frequency and cadence of your communications and increase conversion.

What’s the difference between app message frequency and cadence?

Frequency is how often you send messages and notifications to your users – for example, daily, weekly, or monthly. While cadence focuses on timing – the optimal time to send messages and the amount of time between sends.  

Planning your omnichannel strategy

Each channel has its own strengths and best practices, so it’s important to consider what you want to achieve, and which channel gives you the best chance of succeeding. For example, push notifications are good for getting instant engagement, bringing users straight to your app. So they’re great for promoting new content or a special offer.

That said, if your app is a streaming service and your user is halfway through their favourite show, they’re unlikely to be receptive to an in-app message promoting new content. An email, which can be read at the subscriber’s leisure, is much more likely to achieve traction in this instance.

Understanding your users’ behaviour and tailoring the type and timing of your comms accordingly is key to getting cadence right. Which is, in turn, the key to maximizing engagement and conversion.

4. Put data at the heart of your strategy

When it comes to user engagement, data has two fundamental roles to play. The first is to give you valuable insight into your user base to help you target them more effectively. And the second is to track the effectiveness of your communications and help you optimize them.

Personalisation

Unless you launched your app today, you should have masses of consumer data available to help you understand more about the people using your app. The more you know about them and their behavior, the better you can personalize your communications – giving them content you know they’ll like, when you know they’re most likely to want it.

In our recent survey, 41% of managers said that hyper-personalization was their highest priority. While 32% said they’re most likely to enhance their martech stack with customer messaging platforms, like Braze or Irritable. They all understand the power of personalization in retaining their hard-earned users.

Measuring effectiveness

The data your comms generate is invaluable when it comes to analyzing how effective they’ve been, and making improvements to content and cadence. But beware vanity metrics like number of email subscribers, social media followers, or volume of downloads. Uplifts in these metrics can paint a positive picture, but they lack the substance or other, more actionable metrics, like:

· Churn rate, which measures how many users have stopped using your app over a given period of time. It’s usually calculated as ‘number of users lost in a period / number of users at the beginning of that period’ and it gives you an indication of how successful your marketing efforts have been in retaining users over time.

· Daily app users, which shows the extent to which your app is part of the daily lives of your customers. The higher the number, the better as it shows your users are regularly engaged and engaging.

· Push notification opt-in and open rates. Looked at together, these metrics tell you how effective your push strategy has been in bringing users directly to your app. If users are opted in but not opening messages, you’ll know you need to make changes to your strategy or tactics e.g. subject lines.

How CMA can help

If you’re looking for help with any aspect of user engagement and retention, including onboarding and ongoing customer relationship marketing (CRM), we can help. We combine a unique, data-driven approach with deep expertise to deliver mobile marketing strategies that unlock lasting value for your business, right from the get-go.

Get in touch with CMA here