What is Mobile App Re-engagement and Retention?
In simple words, Mobile Apps re-engagement refers to retaining existing users who already have your app installed back to interacting with your app. In other words, mobile app engagement is providing your users a reason to keep coming back to your mobile app, open it and perform the desired action.
Businesses have to keep exploring new ideas and strategies to target users who have not engaged with the app in a certain amount of time or who have not completed a post-install activity in order to get them to use the app again. For example, if a user has downloaded your app but has not interacted or been active with it for 30-45 days or another determined amount of time (may vary), you could trigger a campaign pointing those users to remind them of your app and product. Similarly, if a user performed an in-app activity such as adding a product to a cart, but never executed the purchase, you could also run a re-engagement campaign to prompt them to finish their order.
The goal and campaign are essential to reminding current users of your app in order for them to perform an in-app activity that ties to your business goals.
How is it different from Web Re-engagement?
First of all, app users are more dedicated to the business and product as compared to website users. This is because app users make more effort and give more time to install and run the interface, which shows the dedication of the app users towards the product and service.
Meanwhile, a web re-engagement/retention campaign won’t necessarily bring users to the app and will likely focus on getting users to the desktop or mobile website. Web re-engagement campaigns basically use web cookies to understand which users to target for a campaign and segregate them, run personalized ads, and measure campaign performance, while mobile app re-engagement campaigns have generally used universal identifiers like the IDFA and GAID.
Ultimately, mobile app re-engagement will help you revive churned users and poke the existing users who have not interrelated with the app to resume in-app activity, helping reach your critical KPIs. Whether your aim is to get users to spend a particular amount of time in the app, click on a certain piece of content, or increase their in-app money spending, your metrics for measuring re-engagement will rely on the kind of app your business has, whether you’re an app-first brand, eCommerce brand, or a social media app.
Why is Mobile App Re-engagement important?
According to experts, the ratio of churned users is very high as compared to potential app users. These users are typical of high value, especially when they are also using the competitor business app also.
The process of engagement and retention of valuable users is a complex thing but has numerous benefits and costs for businesses. As per the recent survey, retaining existing users is 5 times cheaper than acquiring a new user in the house.
It helps to reduce your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), which automatically increases ROI (Return on Investment). Another benefit of user re-engagement and retention is it enhances user lifetime value (ULV) and because elevated ULV ultimately corresponds to the number of money users spend in your app over the course of their lifetime. This whole process, in the long run, increases the company’s total revenue.
Ultimately, re-engagement campaigns are a vital part of any marketing strategy in order to optimize ad spend and to help increase ROI.
Methods of Mobile App Re-engagement and Retention:
- Effective onboarding
- Push notification
- Content is a key
- E-mail campaign
- Ad campaign
- Two-way communication
- In-app analytics and insights
Effective on-boarding
App launch or onboarding is a crucial part of business in today’s scenario. Well-effective and planning-based app launch makes good chances of its survival.
Here are some ways to simplify user onboarding:
- Reduce the number of steps to create an account or sign up and include multiple registration options (login with Facebook or Google, for example).
- Keep your app interface (user and visual) simple, user-friendly, and time-efficient.
- Offer feature education throughout the onboarding experience to initiate the app’s functionality, but don’t overload users right away.
Push notification
Push notification is the most commonly used feature for retention and re-engagement for app users, but very few use it efficiently. As per the latest report, the users who experience some degree of personalized brand interaction are more likely to return to an app for 10 or more sessions.
An interaction can be as simple as providing useful information as users progress through the app or sending a push notification welcoming users. This kind of interaction also leads to shaping the journey of the customer.
The right approach is likely to be a big opportunity in the push-notification tactic to re-engage and retain your existing user. Instead of sending countless push notifications to the user and making him puzzled and irritated, businesses should adopt a systematic process-based approach to interact and make a relationship with the user. Notifications like sales, discounts, offers, events, etc. should be customized and sent according to the personal and demographic details of the user after knowing his/her personality and interests.
Content is a Key
Just because you have a good user experience interface and a well-designed app is not the only reason to keep your users retained. There are many more factors which also pay their contribution in this.
To make your users re-engagement in the app you should think as per their perspective. The most common thing in your app to which your user interacts is content. All features, notifications, descriptions, blogs, videos, pictures are a part of the content, and this is the most significant element of your app. Without content, there’s no way to interact and convey your motive to the user.
Email campaign
An email campaign is a classic way to retain the attention of the user because of the high readership and revenue potential when done right — for every $1 USD you spend on email marketing, you can look for an average return of $4 USD.
From sending users information about promotions, educational and entertaining content relevant to their interests, or notifying users about new products and features on the app. The Email presents a multitude of opportunities to cater to the interests of various user groups to draw them back into your app.
Advertisement Campaign
Paid advertisement is also another way to re-engage and retain the users. In this, companies organize a campaign and set the desired target to accomplish. While organic/owned channels are the principal ways for brands to interact with their existing users and keep them engaged, paid re-engagement can be a great complement to this strategy — but it needs to be intelligently used.
Organizations spend millions of dollars on different social media networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc., to promote and grab new users, but very few succeed. In this case, ROI (Return on Investment) should justify (meet the desired goal) the investment on Ad campaigns; otherwise, it would be considered a loss of money and resources of the organization.
Two-way communication
Consumers want to build relationships with brands and more specifically, they want to feel valued and appreciated to connect with their chosen app. That is why opening a two-way communication line is extremely prime. How do you know what your users want if you don’t receive their feedback? These communications help apps gather feedback, solve customer problems, and improve product functionality over time.
Customer retention time increases when they find that the organization is also listening to them and keep changing things in-app according to their will; otherwise, they could switch to competitor apps.
There are multiple platforms through which app organizations can start two-way communication and get valuable feedback from their users, Apple App Store, Google app store, and they can in-build a page for communication.
In-App Analytics and Insights
Last but not least, when you are making all these given efforts to retain and re-engage your users, you must measure your performance by doing it. Analyzing users’ engagement data is key to building an efficacious app engagement strategy.
A strategy can only accomplish its goals and objectives when you analyze your performance and keep doing up-gradation according to predefined intervals. Push notifications give you valuable insights into your users. If you want to know how to upgrade your app user engagement, then you need to understand and religiously practice mobile app analytics.
The feedback & numbers from your push campaigns help you to understand what engages your mobile users.