You’ve attracted users to your mobile app, but can you retain them? Data shows that most apps lose 95% of their daily active users within 90 days of installation, making retaining users more of a challenge than earning them in the first place.
Users give up on mobile apps for many reasons. Some download an app to experiment, only to find it doesn’t offer the value they thought it did. Others grow tired of poor UI design, aggressive monetization or a product or service that they no longer need.
Retaining users is one of several vital aspects of creating a successful, profitable app. While it can seem impossible to keep users coming back to your app, a few small changes to its design are often all it takes to convert users from try-and-go types into loyal, long-term customers.
Below, we’ve shared four user retention strategies that you can use to improve your app’s retention rate and keep users coming back.
Make signing up simple
The first step in retaining users is getting them to use your app in the first place. While it’s easy to encourage a user to download your app, getting them to create an account and sign in often takes far more effort.
Users are rarely patient when they download a new application, and the long and complicated registration process that many apps require repels just as many users as it attracts.
If your download to conversion ratio is low, your account creation or signup process could be a major bottleneck. The more time it takes to sign up for your app — in particular, the more fields the user needs to fill in — the smaller the percentage of downloads you’ll convert into users.
The easiest way to simplify your signup process is to use one-click registration. Let your users sign up with Facebook, Google or another social account and you shorten the account creation process from an annoyance into a simple, five-second task.
Onboard new users
When a user creates an account and starts using your app, do they know what to do? Are they aware of the next step to take, or are they dropped in any unfamiliar user interface without any useful instructions?
Streamlining signing up increases your download to sign up conversion rate. Likewise, using an onboarding tutorial to make new users more familiar with your app’s UI and key features results in a measurably higher retention rate.
After a user signs into your app for the first time, your goal is to make them feel as comfortable as possible. Guide them through your app’s key features and UI elements to make them feel as if they’re in their own home.
Your onboarding process should make users feel familiar and comfortable with your app, leaving as few questions as possible. At the same time, it needs to be short enough that users don’t feel as if they need to sit through a long, boring tutorial before they can start taking action.
Strike the right balance and you’ll win over users, reduce confusion and lay the foundation for a loyal, happy user base.
Push, but not too often
Push notifications are fantastic tools for alerting users to new developments and special offers, but they’re not a do-all device for improving retention and engagement.
Like any other channel, push notifications can easily be abused. Overuse notifications and you’ll notice users becoming annoyed and frustrated with your application, resulting in uninstalls and a decrease in engagement. You may even attract negative user reviews in the Play or App Store.
Push notifications are like promotional emails and SMS — they’re useful when done properly but annoying when done poorly. About 60% of users opt out of receiving push notifications, typically because they find them annoying or overly intrusive.
If your app uses push notifications, keep the following two rules of thumb in mind when working out how frequently to contact your users:
- Only send push notifications when your users will enjoy and benefit from receiving them
- The more frequently people use your application, the more frequently you can afford to send push notifications without coming across as aggressive or annoying
Like any other aspect of retention, push notifications work well when you strike the right balance of helpfulness and frequency. Send too few and users will forget about you; send too many and you risk irritating users, prompting uninstalls and negative reviews.
Provide value every day
By far the most effective way to bring people back to your app every day is to provide constant, ongoing value.
People check Facebook every day because it lets them check in on their friends, learn about the latest social developments and tell the world what they’re doing. People use Twitter every day to keep up to date with their audience, discover new content and promote their own work.
This value can be summed up as daily utility — constant, ongoing value that makes your mobile app part of someone’s daily routine. When you give users a reason to return to your app, you’ll eventually create a soft dependency that encourages them to return each and every day.
What reason do users have to return to your mobile app every day? Do they have notifications to check? A new deal or offer to discover? Friends and colleagues to talk to? Messages to read and respond to?
When you build a form of daily utility into your app, retaining users goes from being a challenge to a natural aspect of its design. How can you make your app part of your audience’s everyday routine?
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.
