How to Boost Your App Retention Rate
Marketing | Mobile App Development | User Experience
With more than 1.5 million apps in the various mobile App Stores, we have overcrowded the app marketplaces. At another hand, tiny handheld devices are incapable of storing a number of mobile apps on the disk and its icons on the home screens.
If you think the app downloading rate, as a sole criterion for the success in the market, you are going to make a big mistake then. After downloading the app, engagement and retention of the app are vital for monetization or long-term success in the mobile app marketplaces.
Thin Line between User Engagement & User Retention Rate
Unfortunately, many app entrepreneurs and several mobile app developers hardly know the thin line between user engagement and user retention. In simple words, we can describe user engagement as the user behavior within an app and its metrics would be
- The time spent within an app
- How many key actions accomplished
Whereas, we can describe user retention as, how often an app opens and used. For better understanding, user engagement can measure with one-time usage while user retention relies on the frequency of usages means, several times.
Significance of User Retention Rate
No doubt, user engagement seats at the foundation of user retention, but it is not the sole criterion for success and most importantly, for monetization. If your mobile app lures the same user several times and remains in the system, we can say that it has higher average Life Time Value (LTV).
Thus, LTV could be a useful metric for the measurement of the User Retention Rate. You can easily define the success of your app in the market based on the high or low LTV of your mobile application.
How to Improve the App Retention Rate
Literally, there are several ways to enhance the app retention rate, but all are never applicable in all situations and for all apps. If you think it, at the contextual points, decide that which one is applicable. When it is applicable and for which app, you might have high success rate.
Let us check some of the effective techniques to boost your app retention rate.
Efficient Onboarding to Enhance App Retention Rate
After installations, many users hardly use app twice or thrice and sent it to the trash. After intensive research, it has revealed that only intuitive and easy to use apps remain on the home screen and used frequently. Therefore, developing an intuitive app is mandatory for engagements as well as retention.
However, seasoned mobile app developers always try to develop intuitive apps that need little efforts to learn how to use them. Unfortunately, not all apps are of the same nature or kind that allows developers to make highly intuitive apps. Intricate app features and functionality lead to the development of the less intuitive app and mobile developers have to take help of the concurrent onboarding technologies and techniques to provide righteous guidance.
Today we have tons of onboarding techniques used on mobile landscape such as
- Progress bars
- Tooltips
- Coach screens
- Training videos
- Interactive tutorials
- Email lessons
Therefore, if we want to introduce actually useful one or two in our apps, we need to classify them in following perspectives so we can decide their contextual significance and apply them accordingly.
- Benefits-Oriented Onboarding
- Function-Oriented Onboarding
- Progressive Onboarding
You can find details that which technique is effective when on the web easily, as a lot of literature is available today.
Apps for Users’ Routine
If you want to make your mobile app frequently used, bring it into the routine of the user. Normally, users use the product frequently when it involved in the routine life and used unconsciously as a bare need.
If users make your app usage as a habit, they definitely will use it frequently and more often than other useful apps. However, it is not easy to create each app with such attributes, but there are several tricks to bring it in the habit and improve the retention rate greatly.
Impeccable Customer Service Support to Improve App Retention Rate
Of course, each mobile app developer or a company tries to make app bug-free and problem-free, but in real life and varying use cases, it is hard to create such ideal product at once.
Therefore, developers rely on user feedback and try to improve the performance or solve the problems of the actual users in next iterations or app updates.
However, not all problems are major and need to address in app versioning; there are several minor issues that can be addressed by a team of marketing professionals or technical supports. They can solve such problems easily and offer immediate relief to the users or complainer.
Therefore, a robust support service is essential to increase the initial and mid-way engagements of the scrappy users who used to use your app willingly. There are many ways to offer quick and long-term supports such as 24/7 instant messenger supports, user guides in the form of documents, FAQs, Videos, Tutorials, etc. are some instances to depict.
Judicious Use of Push Notifications
Usually, push notifications are deteriorating
user experiences if not used is top and with appropriate tools or service providers. If you have content that indeed can add some values in the life or business of the users, push it on right time and in the lowest frequency, so users won’t get annoyed at all and inspire to pay attentions to your notifications.
Therefore, seasoned mobile app developers prefer standard service providers such as PushWood, Parse, Urban Airship, and Appoxee.
Use of App Deep Linking Methods
Users need several external resources to be informed users and utilize the full capacities of the app. There are multiple ways to access such resources within a device, app store, and on the Internet. The app deep linking method is bridging the gap between native URL scheme and HTTP links.
Mobile developers can use app deep linking within an advertise, in an email on mobiles, or in the social media messages and draw users successfully to the useful resources cited.
Thus, these additional resources and such efforts increase the user engagements as well as inspire them to use the app more often than a normal app.
Offer Socializing Opportunities to Boost App Retention Rate
When you involve more than one users in your app at a time, natural human interactions will begin and keep the users engaged in the app as well as addict them to come back again-and-again.
There are many ways to do it, but various games and competitions are great for deep and prolonged socialization in the mobile app particularly when multiplayer or multi-user activities are there.
For e-commerce apps, direct integration of social media during buying processes offers opportunities to collect the opinions and reviews from the social circles for transparent shopping decisions.
Personalization
Offering personalized experiences on the web is not new, but in a mobile app with dynamic updates is tough to code and manage. However, with the advent of technologies and expanding web services including cloud service, now, it is possible to record the personal choices, behavior, and update the app content in dynamic ways using such services.
Real-time Updates
Everybody like fresh content and updated info. Therefore, app developers have to use real-time updating technologies for the products and content updates. Thus, we can retain the interests of a big audience on the mobile app and manage them in contemporary ways.
Factors affecting the user retention’s are not static, but changing with the pace of time and technologies. If you are passionate to offer the best user experiences keeping those as mentioned earlier fundamental at heart, great user retention is not tough to achieve.
Addon Solutions have a team of highly experienced and
expert mobile app developers who are accustomed to all such techniques and know how to as well as where to implement which technique to boost app retention rate.
What you need is to exhibit your trust by signing up your
mobile application development project and ask the mobile app marketing team to infuse great app retention rate ingredients during and after the app development stages.
Of course, we have tried to include maximum, and proven factors are affecting app retention rate in the post, though, chances are enough to miss any important one. Therefore, we request our esteemed users to add it in our comment box so others can know and leverage it in the next app development projects.
Addon Solutions is a
top Mobile App Development Company with over 500 apps built using different platforms. We have an expert team of iOS Developer and Android Developers in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Get in touch with our expert team.
