I can certainly tell you that when I hear an app developer complain their app is losing users day in day out, my heart breaks. For the first month, several individuals build Android applications, drive the ads, and then pass on to another app and neglect their initial app. You would have a drastically lowered app retention rate if you do not develop the app, and this would have a follow-on impact on your whole business.

Often, several people do an excellent job making an Android app and focusing on promoting pre-distribution applications. Then, boom, they quit the app after all the good work to die a miserable death. Why is this?

This is because people feel that if the app is fully operational, it will simply be good enough to go on. And although this may be valid for big app firms, it’s not quite realistic for the little ones. It would be best to spend time and energy in your app to ensure your app retention.

I wouldn’t want to creep you out. The time and energy I’m talking about are negligible relative to the time and effort required to bring the app running smoothly first. Nevertheless, if you want to keep your app users, you have to make sure that you apply the fundamental strategies.

Below is a set of questions that you should want to objectively address and determine whether you will or will not return to an app user:

1. Is your app updated regularly enough to be appealing?

2. Is your app engaging enough?

3. Why would someone want to go back to your app?

4. What benefit does your app user gain for returning to your app?

What is app engagement?

App engagement is more about how apps users communicate with an app. It is important to measure how users interact with your app since it helps you assess its effectiveness or weakness.

With the following indicators, you will be able to calculate your mobile app engagement:

The rate of downloads: the higher the number of downloads, the better. You can’t hold users you’ve never got, after all.

Active users of the mobile app: This is how often people use the app. As such, it is a vital metric for app retention.

Session interval: This is the duration between your app’s two successive sessions. It indicates how much anyone launches your mobile app and uses it. This can calculate stickiness.

Session length: Very literally, this shows the duration users spend on your app. The lengthier the session, the better.

Lifetime sales: This is the overall income you receive from an app user before they stop using it. It can be calculated by calculating either advertisement income or sales value per user on a monthly average.

Measurement of user interactions offers you a better view of your ROI. You can also establish a stronger partnership with your user. It’s better to measure this constantly so that you can refine your app as appropriate in line with your marketing and business objectives.

With too many applications on the app market, if you want to increase your app retention rate, you need to be frank with yourself and recognize the value of creating app retention strategies.

App retention strategies

There are many ways in which you can address app retention:

Update your app and its content

Keep the contents new. Things are evolving all the time, and nobody likes to learn the same details all the time or play the same game again and again. Adjust the contents, change the characters in your game. Such minor improvements will help to increase the app retention rate.

Engage your audience

Know that the users who use your app are actual people. Get them linked up by connecting them with your social media. The more the app community is linked to you, the more likely it is to click on the app to see the unveiling improvements.

Send notifications

Let the public know that you’ve improved and updated the app. Some improvements include the uploading of a new APK. This would give an update notification to the users instantly. Other modifications can arise due to improvements made to the URL that you connect to. You need to give them a push message to inform the users about these changes. AppsGeyser provides three free updates every month to the first 100 users of your platform.

Offer incentives

Offer your users a justification to come back. All of us enjoy offers and feel like we’ve got a steal when we land one. You could attach coupon codes to the app as an app management strategy to attract users to return to the app. Once a week, monthly, or however you see fit, renew these vouchers to guarantee that the users are informed that they have been updated.

The existence of your mobile app can rely on your reward packages. For instance, if it’s a smartphone app that uses in-app purchases as a monetization framework, then you can give your faithful subscribers time-sensitive discounts. For referrals made by your users, you could also even give incentives.

Personalize user experiences

Another approach to improve app retention by smartphone users is to adapt the app’s functionality to the user. It will help you distinguish your app from rivals and keep your users active by personalizing the user experience.

It also leads to building customer loyalty in your app.

The more you learn about your users, the better their experiences will be personalized. Using both static or dynamic variables, you will construct personalized experiences.

Static personalization utilizes non-changing variables. For instance, it can be as easy as putting the usernames of your users in a notification.

Dynamic personalization focuses mainly on behavioral variables. The clearest instance of this would be the buying history of a client.

Nonetheless, take note that your user’s information would enable you to tailor customizations for your users. After all, you wouldn’t want to be accused of being too intrusive by using information that is regarded as too private.

Other common methods of personalizing user experiences include emails about cart abandonment and customized suggestions. Google Play Store also recommends smartphone applications that are related to what the user has previously downloaded.

Use gamification to increase app retention

Research by Apptentive revealed that after the first week, the average mobile game retains 36% of its users. This is significantly better than any smartphone app of any other kind.

To reap the benefits of these results, you don’t have to be angry birds. In reality, in regular mobile apps, it’s progressively popular to include game-like features. This is known as gamification.

Game-like characteristics are the kinds of stuff that make it interesting and enjoyable to use your app. They are, most commonly, bonuses, such as collecting points for doing certain actions.

For instance, you may allocate a level to the user in a reading app based on the number of stories the user has read for the day.

Conclusion

We’ve seen in this article the value of user interaction and retention to an app’s growth. We have discussed different methods to improve app retention to that effect. You can control data from the outset, enabling you to optimize your app’s onboarding flow and tailor user experiences to their needs.

Gamification, email gamification and push notifications can improve user interaction and provide benefits to active users and constantly improve and refine your mobile app.

The ball is in your court now. Sure, it’s no easy ride to develop a good app. However, there’s no reason why your app can’t be the next big thing if you follow and execute these app retention strategies and complement them with powerful app marketing strategies.