After someone installs your app, how long do they remain a user? Data shows that most apps lose 77% of their daily active users within three days of installation, and 95% of all daily active users within 90 days.
These statistics certainly look worrying, especially if user retention is a key aspect of your app’s monetization strategy. Luckily, it’s possible to beat the odds and retain a far larger percentage of your app’s users than the average through some small, highly effective tactics.
Below, we’ve listed five tips to help you reduce churn and retain engaged, active users for your mobile app. If you’re interested in learning more about retention, be sure to check out Neumob’s excellent 12 Best Practices to Boost App Usage and Retention in 2016 guide.
Choose advertising that integrates naturally with your app
Balancing advertising performance and user experience is always a challenge, especially for a mobile app. If your app depends on advertising to produce revenue, it’s important not to overdo it and leave users with a compromised experience.
One way to improve user experience and reduce churn rate in an ad-supported app is to focus on native advertising instead of typical CPM display ads. Since native advertising is designed to blend into your app, it usually has less of an impact on experience than traditional banner ads.
This improvement keeps users engaged, improving retention. Many native ad networks also pay higher eCPMs than traditional display or interstitial ad networks, letting you monetize your app in the process.
Use a great analytics SDK and take your data seriously
The key to improving user experience and reducing churn is understanding exactly how people use your app. Mobile analytics makes this possible. Make sure you use a high quality analytics SDK like MixPanel or Flurry to gain as much data as possible on your app’s user behavior.
Once you start generating statistically significant analytics data, look at key metrics that affect user experience, such as crash rates and load time. Look for factors that could potentially hurt user satisfaction, such as Wi-Fi latency and performance issues.
Digging into your analytics data might not be fun, but it helps you spot weak points in your app that negatively affect user experience and increase churn.
Update frequently to fix bugs before they annoy your users
Buggy apps are rarely popular apps. No matter how much value your app offers to users, you’ll struggle to retain your audience if your app is held back by stability and performance issues or common bugs.
One of the best ways to avoid bugs is to roll out frequent updates of your app. Perform detailed QA and bug tests using MyCrowd to discover issues, then act as quickly as possible to fix them in a weekly or bi-weekly update.
The shorter your development cycle, the faster you can solve bugs that could otherwise result in bad ratings and comments on Google Play and the Apple App Store.
Optimize for speed and performance to avoid losing users
Is your app slower than it should be? In addition to bugs, few things annoy users as much as slow performance. Add excessive battery usage and data consumption into the mix and even the best app can quickly earn the scorn of its users.
No matter how good your user experience and value proposition might be, bad performance is sure to hurt your app’s retention rate. If you’d like to improve performance, try using a mobile app acceleration SDK like Neumob to speed up your app by as much as 200 to 1,000 percent.
It only takes a single motion to uninstall your app, and users rarely waste time getting rid of an app that hogs their battery or loads slowly. Optimize your app for speed and performance and you’ll be the choice that stays on their mobile device — not the one that end up uninstalled.
Keep in touch with users via notifications, email and remarketing
The key to great relationships is contact, and app-to-user relationships are no different in this sense. If you’d like to improve your app’s retention rate, keep in touch with your users through push notifications, email and remarketing.
Successful apps typically use a mix of channels to keep in touch with their users. The use push notifications for short-term contact, emails for weekly or monthly updates and remarketing using Facebook Ads or Google AdWords to reconnect with users that were previously active.
Over time, even the strongest of relationships can break down without regular contact. Keep in touch with your users — using a variety of channels, if possible — and you’ll see a definite boost in your retention and engagement metrics.
Get 12 practical and effective mobile app retention tips
Struggling to retain users? Neumob’s 12 Best Practices to Boost App Usage and Retention in 2016 contains 12 actionable, practical and effective tips to help you retain more users for your mobile app.
MyCrowd QA is a self-service QA platform for companies to test their mobile apps and software. Utilizing a pay-per-bug model, customers only pay for the bugs their testers find.
