How to Improve APP Retention Rate?

The sole purpose of business is to create and retain customers

Our APP marketers are always better at getting more and more people to use our products and become our users. But how do you keep them when you have them? It may not be hard for a new app to attract hundreds of millions of users. But it’s never easy to keep these users and increase the number of users to 100 million.
Although users retention needs us to spend a long time to complete the work, we can still take some measures to improve it in the short term and can improve user activity, such as some marketing activities or according to the user’s usage of history to their push precise related news. This is a good way to interact with the users to let them participate, users can be obtained from these activities and news to get more valuable things. Therefore, the app retention rate will be increased.
In a project management APP, for example, we can send those who download the APP but not create a project an introductory tutorials, or inform them of our new app functions. These messages not only create value for APP users but also increase the APP retention rate. Doing all of these tasks won’t cost us much energy and time, but it will give us a lot of unexpected rewards.

Three stages of user retention

It’s not a quick fix to start using our APP from users to be loyal to our APP.If we don’t do anything, we don’t know when the user will be in the arms of a competitor. Therefore, this requires us to understand the three stages of user retention through data and take effective measures to retain them.
Here are the three stages of user retention:

• Early retention: let new users take action to start using our products.

• Medium-term retention: get existing users into the habit of using our products.

• Long-term retention: let long-term users achieve more value through our products to enhance their loyalty.

We need to constantly show our customers the value of our products, otherwise the user will sooner or later turn to our competitors.

At this point, just remember that user retention is our goal, and then break it down into phases. This is more conducive to creating more targeted and effective lifecycle management.

Early retention — inspire “aha moment”

We encourage users to use our products usually within 7 days after the download, if we failed to arouse the curiosity of the user during this time, let he is interested in our products, after that he may never use again. That’s why we want to make sure that when we register our products, we can immediately see what our products are worth to us. This is known as the “aha moment” when users see the value of our products and think, “oh, that’s it, I get it.” New users can only get value from our products through actual operation. For impression notes, new users can create a to-do list. For Youdao, the user can be able to translate through a photo, via voice query. Your true love users will do these things themselves, but for the less active users, we need a little push. The message push is the most effective tool at this time.

Medium-term retention — encourage users to get into the habit

“No trigger, no action, no habit, no retention.”
WeChat, alipay, baidu search these products all have one thing in common – they let users develop usage habits. When we get into the habit of using these products, it’s impossible to imagine what it would be like to have one day without these products. So how do you guide users to develop these habits in our products? There are triggers behind every habit.

There are a number of ways to boot a user’s triggers, such as notifications, alerts, and so on — but E-mail and in-app push messages are especially effective. Take a blind date software as an example:

As a dating APP, if you don’t upload photos and keep up-to-date personal data, it’s hard to get romantic offers from the opposite sex. No one falls in love with an anonymous avatar. Therefore, it is necessary to edit an email or push a message in an application, telling the user to improve the information. Trigger success often depends on depth of notifications and nudges. Send an email rather than in the outside of the scene, is not as good as the user is often visit key pages for a reminder, the operation guide: “have no face, you will not be the objects of search, quick upload avatar” to a more direct and effective, if the user cannot be gained from such actions he felt something of value. No one will spontaneously complete the personal data. So back to the product itself, what can the user get out of it, what can they do here? This is the reason why they continue to stay. If your message doesn’t connect to the user’s intent and goals, it doesn’t have any effect.

Long term retention- keep the spark alive

If we are lucky enough to develop a large group of users, we will feel that the day is worth a lot of money. The mobile Internet industry is very competitive, and once we make mistakes, users are likely to lose it to their competitors. We must continuously show the value of our products to the user so as to maintain the stability and growth of the retention rate.
There are a number of ways to improve user retention, such as rewarding users, but getting older users to recommend new users through push messages can also help us to keep them.
Recommending new users looks more like a new strategy than that, but its benefits go far beyond that. Domestic mutual gold products often use this strategy. Here, we take a taxi software as an example:

Inviting friends rules here has the following 3 benefits:

• The credible reputation recommend or bring in new customers.

• Habits begin to form because a group of friends are beginning to rely on the same product.

• Bilateral recommended projects encourage existing users to share, while reducing the risk of new users.

(right: the new and old customers can get a coupon, is a win-win situation) such a rule would encourage existing users form habits, also get new users at the same time, these new users are likely to repeat our old customers recommend behavior, so a virtuous circle, to increase new users at the same time improve the retention rate.

Turn our users into lifetime users

Today’s APP operators must keep winning and retaining users to survive. It would be great if you could turn existing users and new users into lifelong users.