As a marketer, it’s easy to focus on growth as the ultimate metric of your app’s success. Many app developers and entrepreneurs pay the most attention to acquisition metrics like new users, downloads and installs, all while ignoring the other side of the customer acquisition picture.
That other side is retention — the process of keeping the users you’ve earned. In a lot of ways, user retention is even more important than customer acquisition for creating a successful, profitable app. The better your app’s retention rate, the easier you’ll find it to:
- Generate revenue from your app (existing customers are approximately 50% easier to market to, according to Marketing Metrics)
- Get positive feedback through reviews and ratings
- Acquire new users organically through word of mouth
In short, retaining users helps you grow your app and acquire more users, all without the costs of a traditional customer acquisition campaign.
One of the most effective ways to retain more users for your mobile app is through a rigorous approach to quality assurance. The better your app is, the fewer bugs it has and the smoother its user experience, the more likely people are to keep using it — and even invite their friends.
Below, we’ve shared four ways QA testing can improve your app’s user retention rate and make it easier for you to keep users engaged, interested and happy.
Fewer Frustrated, Unhappy Users
For mobile users, nothing is quite as annoying as discovering a great app only to have the entire experience ruined by buggy, poorly tested code.
Imagine if instead of sending messages to your friends, Facebook Messenger froze every time you opened it. Within a minute or two, you’d be searching the App or Play Store for an app with similar features and fewer bugs.
The buggier your app is, the faster people will abandon it, even if it delivers incredible value or offers a unique experience. Many of these users will leave negative reviews, hurting your ability to acquire new users organically through the Play or App Store search.
It only takes a single major bug to drive users away from your app. Give QA testing the attention it deserves before release and you’ll be able to find and fix critical errors before they affect your app’s user retention rate.
A Better User Experience
Since bugs are the ultimate annoyance for users, QA testing has obvious usability benefits. The biggest is that removing bugs prevents crashes, slowdown and other occurrences that ruin your app’s experience for end users.
It only takes a small bug to ruin the experience of using your app, even if you’ve invested in high quality user interface design. A single defective button on an order or account creation form can reduce your conversion rate to zero, while broken images can damage even the prettiest UI.
User experience matters, and users will quickly abandon an app that wraps real value in buggy, defective packaging. With better QA testing, you’ll find and fix user interface bugs before any of your users have the chance to see them.
More Organic Referrals
Organic referrals — recommendations from your app’s existing users — are the best leads that money can’t buy. When existing users invite their friends and colleagues to use your app, they come pre-warmed, already familiar with your app’s value proposition and major benefits.
Because of this, they’re more likely to become loyal users. If your app is monetized through an offer or product sale, they may even become your best customers. 54% of chief executives rate customer referrals as their most valued source of leads.
The key to organic referrals is delivering a great experience. If your app has a great interface, very few bugs and an experience that keeps bringing users back for more, they’ll quickly tell their friends about it. Over time, those friends will tell their friends, creating continual growth.
More Time Investment
Did you know that more than the average Android app loses 77% of its daily active users in the first three days after installation? Or that most apps lose 95% of their daily active users in three months after they’re downloaded and installed?
Retaining users is tough, and most apps don’t fare particularly well. Since users are so likely to abandon an app shortly after they download it, keeping people engaged and interested is a sign that you’re encouraging people to invest their time into your app.
For the most part, people aren’t entirely rational. App users are particularly prone to the “sunk cost fallacy” — a belief that because they’re spent time on something, it’s worth spending even more time on that thing in the future.
This has been used for user retention purposes most visibly by game developers, who emphasize progress and investment in the form of levels, bonuses, collecting and progress metrics.
You don’t need a game to encourage users to invest time in your app. Provide value backed up by a smooth, bug-free user experience and you’ll draw users into your app, making it less likely that they’ll ever decide to leave.
Improve Your Retention Rate With QA Testing
On average, 95% of daily users will abandon your app within three months of downloading and installing it. Great QA testing helps you create a user friendly, bug-free app that beats the odds and retains users far longer than the industry average.
MyCrowd QA is a self-service QA testing platform for companies to test their mobile apps and software. Utilizing a pay-per-bug model, customers only pay for the bugs our testers find.
