4 Time-Tested Ways To Boost User Retention for Your Mobile App

How to Ensure High User Retention for Your App? Consider These 4 Methods

Do you know the vast majority of mobile app users abandon an app just within one month after downloading it? As per the statistics received from Statista, a whopping 55% of mobile app users leaves an app and never comes back to it just after downloading within a month. Another Localytics study even offers a more alarming figure. According to this, 21% of users just launch an app only once after downloading it and never uses it the second time. Don’t you know where to start with your effort about boosting the retention rate? No problem, we are here to provide you with a few sure-footed steps and measures to optimise the user retention rate.

What Is Retention Rate?

The retention rate in the context of mobile apps refers to the percentage of app users who continue to use the app after they downloaded and opened the app for the first time. For instance, suppose among the 100 app users who opened the app for the first time only 30 users launch the app the next day. So, the retention rate for the app within this period will be 30%. Let us now explain 5 time-tested methods to boost user retention rate for your mobile apps.

1. Simple Onboarding

 A simple and frictionless onboarding will help in reducing the user retention rate to the maximum. Usually, more steps are there for the users to begin using an app, more users decide to abandon it. This is why you need to ensure a minimum number of steps in the sign-up process, a few information fields to fill up and simple features to get things done. A good user onboarding is important to create a solid first impression on the user and to create a positive impetus for the users to come back to your app. A quality onboarding technique can enhance the lifetime value of an app by 500%. Here are some effective steps of user onboarding.

• Facilitate easy user login and set up of the account by reducing all the signup steps and form fields. You need to allow guest login and social media sign-up as well for quicker onboarding.
• Instead of overloading users with a lot of information from the very first go, educate them about the features and functions slowly as users progress.
• Offer an on-screen layout to show every one of us loves our individual choices and preferences most and so any app that remembers and caters to our likings is more likely to win our heart than apps offering everything with a “one size fits all” approach. This is why personalised user experience is so important to boost user engagement and retention rate.

Question is, how you can incorporate personalisation in the app user experience effectively. From mentioning the name of the users contextually to referencing user locations or keeping user behaviour and preferences in consideration throughout every aspect of design and marketing, you should not leave any stone unturned to utilise the scope of personalised user experience. [the_ad id=”13151″] Some of the effective ways to incorporate personalisation into user experience are push notifications, emails, and in-app messages. Apart from these, you can also incorporate customisation into contents for different types of user preferences.

2. Keep Track Of The Reasons For Uninstalls

However harder you try, some of the users will always abandon your app. But when you know the principal reasons for abandoning your app, you can take positive measures to cure these glitches and increase the retention rate significantly. Here we explain some common reasons for uninstalling an app and the way you can prevent them.

• A bad UX: A bad UX starts with a cluttered user interface with too much cognitive load and goes to the extent of difficult navigation. So, make sure your app looks clean, beautiful and offers ease of use. You also need to ensure faster loading speed for your app.
• Bugs: Bugs in the code make the user experience tremendously frustrating as they cause performance glitches and inconsistent app behaviour. Make sure your app is absolutely free from bugs and coding errors when launched for the users.
• Irrelevant messages: Messaging helps you to stay in touch with the users and boost engagement. But over-utilisation of this tool can lead to uninstalls and abandonment. Make sure messages are truly relevant and they do not irritate users at all.
• Updates: An app update that changes too many features or the entire look and feels without taking loyal users into consideration can face abandonment from many users. So, when upgrading and rolling out versions make sure of improving aspects what are needed and leaving things when they are just perfect.

3. A/B Testing The Risk-Pro Areas

A/B testing is the most effective and efficient method to validate the features and design decisions. When you validate each and every aspect of your app with A/B testing, you can make the app more enjoyable for your audience and in turn can boost retention rate. Besides running as many A/B tests as possible also use a robust analytics tool to know about the areas that need more focus on retention.

4. Embrace Smart Marketing

Do you know a considerable portion of the users across all niches of apps simply abandon apps because of the irritating messages that hit their notification folder incessantly? Yes, this is why in-app marketing should embrace smarter ways to reach users without causing irritation. Take a look below at some of the best practices.

• Email marketing: Utilise the potential of e-mail marketing to connect to your users outside your app. Use it sparingly and contextually to drive results.
• Geofencing: If your business besides having a mobile app attends customers across brick and mortar stores, geofencing will alert the users when they are nearby to any of your store locations. This smart method will help increase business conversion and physical footfall of customers.
• Rich push notifications: Now push messages in both Android phones iOS10 allows sending messages with rich media contents comprising images, GIFs, and videos. These notifications are more powerful in conveying the messages.

Conclusion

Last but not least of all advice will be to ensure a customer-centric focus and identifying triggers of positive response from your app users. User retention requires a continuous and proactive approach, rather than a one-time measure. Following these steps will definitely help you to design and develop future-ready apps.