- January 15, 2021
Retention rates are important across all types of business. Almost all companies will try to retain as many customers as possible while attempting to attract new ones. Nobody wants to allow their business to just walk out the door and not return. Although it’s great to get new customers constantly, the average CPA is much cheaper for returning customers. We examine how this applies to app retention rates.
Now it is established that it’s cheaper for returning customers than acquiring new customers. So, it is easy to keep customers, right? The answer is no. Especially when it comes to mobile or even desktop apps. Your competitors are not only working to retain their own customers but are actively trying to attract new ones away from you. Also, according to UplandSoftware, 71% of app users are lost within the first 90 days of using the app. However, 57% of all app users are lost in the first 30 days. This figure of course can change depending on the type of app.
The best method to boost your retention rates is to be proactive. Having a growing or loyal base of users will help your app continue to grow and succeed. Find out how your brand can increase retention rates.
Strategy to Increase App Retention Rates
Engagement is the key to increase your retention rates. Firstly, ensure that your app onboarding is clear and easy to understand. In certain cases where the onboarding is either confusing or difficult your retention rates will decrease dramatically. If you have a simple straightforward onboarding process, where possible, your retention rates won’t suffer from it.
If it suits your app, add in-app messaging to engage with your users, and receive feedback. Also, having messaging within your app has been proven to increase app retention up to three times. In-app messaging isn’t always a requirement but if it is relevant add it as a feature.
This one is a bit tricky to manage properly. However, push notifications are crucial to engage your audience and encourage continued use of the app. It engages your users outside of the app as they receive a notification on the home screen. Using personalised and targeted messages to individual users will boost your engagement rates. Just be mindful that push notifications can be overused and bridge on annoying if done too frequently. An overreliance on push notifications will result in lowering your retention rates by annoying your users, so plan them carefully.
Briefly mentioned earlier, you should personalise the user experience for each individual as much as possible. Tailor the experience as much as possible using data the user inputs into your app. Also, add remarketing into the mix to draw user’s attention back to your app if their engagement rate drops off. Remarketing is more difficult as a lot of app users will opt out of push messaging so it should not be relied on solely to retain customers. However, combining remarketing with proactive engagement will greatly benefit your app retention rates.