Most of the smartphone users use more than 50 apps on their devices. Therefore, it’s really challenging to retain the users’ interest in your app. Users want loyalty and dedication. When you are promising them an extraordinary user experience, you must keep your words; otherwise your app will get lost and saturated in the marketplace. We live in a world where options are endless, competition is high, and sad but true, loyalty is rare. Brands like Starbucks, McDonald’s, Instagram, RunKeeper have been successful in retaining users’ interest because they have consistently maintained loyalty, boosted sales, and enriched the overall customer experience.
According to a study, only 16% users try out a failing app twice or more. Rest 84% users will never burden their device storage with such a failing app.
There are a number of reasons for which users uninstall a mobile app or become apathetic to an app. It might be a daunting task to retain the users in your app, but it is not impossible to deal with. Over the years, I am dealing with a number of businesses and marketers. From my experience, I’ve come to know about some strategies to retain users in a mobile app that will never go wrong.
Let’s find out 10 strategies that can help you keep your users engaged:
1. Be Careful to Design the First Time User Experience (FTUE)
We all know that first impression is the last impression. Same is applicable to your mobile application as well. Users would not be interested in your app if you fail to make their first experience smooth and easy. To make the first time users familiar, you should launch a walk through to guide them. You should demonstrate what your app is going to offer the users. A simple and intuitive design should be your priority. You need to implement overlay help screens to make the app features and interfaces easy to understand.
2. Design a Simple Onboarding Process for New Users
You should develop a simple onboarding process for the new users. Most of the apps require the users to login before they start using the app. You should optimize the login in such a way that the entire process gets easier for the new users. You can try various login options such as social platforms and email to make the process less time-consuming and seamless. Even it would be better if you can allow the users some activities without registration or login.
For instance, “Small Business Forum” is a forum where people can discuss their business issues. Users can read the posts without registration, but if they want to post or write something, they need to register.
3. Introduce a Well-Designed Notification System
You need to design an excellent SMS or push notification system. Your customers should be provided with a steady and thoughtful notification stream. Apps using a well-developed notification system as a CRM tool can be found to be stickers than the apps that do not have mobile CRM through SMS or push messages. A right push message can hit the jackpot.
Customers always prefer to be in control. Sometimes, untimely and excessive messaging irritate the users and make them abandon your app. You should always remember that users prefer brands that give them flexible opt-in and -out all the time. You should build this trust factor by interacting with users through messages and push notifications.
4. Give Your Users Reason to Return to Your App
If you want your users return to your app, you should give them productive reasons to win their confidence. The best way of keeping your users involved is to provide something your users need almost everyday. Whenever they return, please them with fresh and relevant information to make them return again and again. In order to do this, you should track and test all the possible variations of the provided information. It will help you decide which types of data are most effective to please and delight your users.
5. Offer Immediate Value to Your Users
Every user has a specific purpose for which they download an app. Are your users getting their purpose fulfilled with your app? Whenever they have any internal trigger, they will be looking for a solution. You should be ready to offer them immediate value in such situations. You need to understand what is your users’ purpose of using your app, and accordingly, you should provide them a simple solution.
For instance, just look at the example given below. This is “Pill Identifier & Drug List App”. There are many people who need to take more than one medicine regularly. Often they find it difficult to remember which medicine is for which purpose. This particular app offers their users an immediate solution to this problem. It helps the users identify a medicine by its shape, color, and imprint. Apart from these, it offers benefits like pill reminder, price checker, BMI calculator etc.
6. Re-engage Inactive Users with Humorous Contents
Content is still the king. I can bet on that. You just need to optimize it in a proper way to re-engage your inactive app users. Email is one of the best ways to remind the inactive users of your app in an unique way. You can use tools like intercom that can track user activity to send to your users triggered messages. Do remember one thing, this strategy will be successful only when your content is effective and interesting. If you fail to make your email different from the other slipping away emails, the users will remain as apathetic to the email as they are to your app.
7. Surprise Your Users with Attractive Rewards
You would be surprised to know that most of the users download apps in the hope of winning special offers and discounts. Attractive rewards please the first time users and increase the download by boosting your brand loyalty. In other words, it helps you retain your users.
8. Make Share Easier to Integrate Community
Modern people spend a lot of time on social media. Marketing strategies have always been made keeping the customer’s tendency in mind. Therefore, it is important for your app to be enough “share friendly”. First of all, during your mobile app development phase, you should focus on building an inherently social app. It should promote itself when shared. You should make sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ easy for the users.
Look at the example given below. With this “Stress Relief Adult Color Book” app, users can work on a number of themes and color them to combat stress. What best is the users can share their work on social network. It helps the users showcase their skill and at the same time, the app is also getting a chance of being noticed by a number of people.
9. Consider an Event-Based Triggered Automation
You should not miss an opportunity to interact with your app audience when they complete an in-app event. When you have full attention of your audience, you should send additional information or promote future activities to get a better result and user engagement.
10. Utilize Mobile Deep Linking
If you have not thought about deep linking, you are doing it wrong. Deep linking is a process for launching a mobile app through a link. This link helps you send the users directly to a particular page or screen inside your app when it is opened for the first time. It improves the user experience and engages the users.
In Conclusion
Mobile app marketing has no sure shot formula that can take your app to the top over the night. You should analyze what works best for your app and optimize your marketing strategy accordingly. The strategies, provided here, are tested and proven again and again. With the help of these tricks, you can garner loyalty, satisfy your users, and improve your brand reputation.
What do you think about this article? Is it helpful? If you need to know something else about mobile app development and marketing, please feel free to comment below. We will get back to you with best possible solutions!
Sudeep Banerjee
Sudeep Banerjee is the Founder and President of Mobixed, the leading mobile apps development company of California. A visionary entrepreneur, Sudeep's expertise lies in various fields including web development, digital marketing and app development. He believes that apps would act as powerful vehicles to drive sales for businesses in the near future.