One of the driving principles of the mobile marketplace is that users want NEW. New apps, new updates, new content. In fact, over 60% of users who go onto digital marketplaces, do so, because they want to try something new. While this is fantastic for user acquisition, this presents a problem for user retention because if you’re not keeping the user’s attention, they’ll quickly be looking for something that will.
The key to effective user retention can be broken down into three:
- Understand user behavior in your app
- Identify roadblocks to retention
- Use tactics & tools to re-engage users
All of this starts with understanding your users. If you don’t understand what they want, how they act, or their opinions, you really can’t craft a strategy on how to keep them happy. First, check out your Cohort analysis report.
Why?
BecauseCohort Analysis is a powerful report that allows customers to measure and compare users based on their specific customer journey. You can measure the impact of your marketing campaigns on specific days, see how effective they are in generating loyal users, and compare which campaign performed best.
Another good report is that Active users – Find out how your users interact with your app over time, so you can better understand why they may be staying in, or leaving it. It displays your 1-day, 7-day, 14-day and 30-day active users next to each other. This helps you answer some important questions regarding your user retention. For example, if your 30-day actives number is much higher than your 1-day active user number, most users are not coming to your app more than once during a 30-day period. This can indicate you need to add fresh content to your app on a more regular basis and maybe you need to re-engage users through marketing campaigns / notifications etc’.
The 3rd report is about Recency. This report shows how much time passed between app sessions.
You might discover users who only open your app once a week. Once you’ve identified users that engage with your app infrequently or have stopped using it entirely, how do you re-engage those audiences?
You could send push notifications to those users after 3 days to remind them about the app. You can even tailor the message to include incentives. A gaming app, might want to send a push notification with an offer of free in-app tools to users who haven’t opened the app in a while.
Good luck!
Ido Green 