In the wake of today’s app-centric lifestyles, it becomes increasingly difficult to retain customers. Are you hitting your mobile app retention goals?

Your app may have thousands of new downloads every day, but how many of these downloads become active, engaged, and profitable customers?

Just like any product, finding a base of loyal customers is crucial to stay ahead in the business. When it comes to an established, successful and profitable app, attracting “new” user is not a roller coaster deal. Keeping and retaining your existing users active, engaged and eventually loyal is a key factor for the success of an app. Until you put efforts on your retention strategies, don't even bother to calculate ROI and reflect it to the rest of your team.

Only Seamless & Mandatory Sign Up

If you’ve visited a website, and before you could understand what’s exactly it is, you would have to login in order to look forward then probably it's a quick press on the ‘close’ button, right?

So, make your users comfortable and more engaged, the next question is when is it the right time if you would do this.

Request for signup when a user wants to take a specific action preferably, an action that’s not part of the initial app exploration. For instance, when a user is trying to book a ticket, create an alert, personalize a specific feature or purchase something. Always give your users a good reason why they should log in and offer them easy ways to login to your app via social networks.

Request Permissions When Needed

Request for the permissions that you really require, no more, no less. Some permission requests can be delayed and added when a user request to execute a certain action that can’t be done without granting access of some sort. Now, if you delay those requests, you will increase the “yes” chances, in addition, your user will also have a better understanding of the request. If possible delay permission requests, prompt them only when they are relevant to user action and tell them why you need the permission.

Analytics

New solutions are popping up every day, so keep up to date with new related analytics tools as this area of inbound analytics is hot!! And the analytics solutions can help your app retention a lot. For instance – with the new Facebook analytics, you will get insights into your most active users by Gender, age, and additional demographics. It allows you to identify your quality users and focus on them and by that increase my retention.

Relevant And Smart Push

Send push just to bring in users back to the app. For that, you need to be smart about it, otherwise, you will gain the exact opposite.

Keep the WIIFM rule, what’s in it for me. The notification should emphasize why it’s worth using your app right at that moment. Either valuable content, alerts, a promo coupon, or trying out a new feature. Be specific on your push if you can’t say anything smart, just don’t push.

Keep Them Engaged

Every app should have a strong internal trigger to engage users with appropriate social media platforms. For that, you can make use of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn to promote updates of your app and which sounds interesting when it also makes your users engaged with fun and compelling content.

Here’s how it works: If you focus on your social pages, and you create best in class content, will not alienate your users and reduces both engagement and retention of users. After all, users are more likely to remember you and your app and pay attention to what you have to say, hence to engage in your app.

Show Off Your Updates

Additionally, new features and updates are a way to increase user retention. Continually improving your app and adding features will let your users know that you are serious about offering a great user experience. Let the user know about the changes you’ve made whenever you made an app update. Users will also be enticed to open your app and check-out the new features you are offering. Every user needs to get a better experience, so make sure you tell them exactly what’s new in order to keep them returning.

Final Thoughts

App engagement and user retention are critically important, which makes incredibly invaluable to the success of your business. So be prepared for something that bumps your numbers in a purposeful way that add value to your app. Pay attention with the user-focused approach, to ensure that your newly built mobile app drives growth and provides a great opportunity for customers to form a meaningful relationship with your business. Retaining customers and constantly improving your user experience has a great impact in the highly competitive app landscape.