Acquiring a large number of app installs means very little if the users neglect or simply abandon the app after the install. Many apps today face the challenge of staying relevant in the crowded app market. A panel of app marketers and tech experts shared their insights on how to retain app users during the IAB Make Mobile Work webinar.
With the goal of continuing the conversation, Adam Ben David, VP of Supply-Side Platform, Developer Solutions at ironSource, shares his thoughts below on the three steps for effective app user re-engagement and retention.
If humans have shorter attention spans than goldfish, how many re-engagement touchpoints does it take to retain a user? Sadly, this isn’t the setup of a tired joke. It’s the reality that app marketers are living in today. Unfortunately, our eight second attention spans, along with the oversaturated App and Play Stores, make it extremely difficult for app marketers to re-engage users who have either dropped off or never opened the app after installing it.
Fortunately, there are three proactive steps that app marketers can take to ensure that the right users stay on for as long as possible.
1. Set the Foundation with UA
When starting to build out your user acquisition strategy, keep quality in mind. CPE campaigns, for example, are more likely to get you quality users who stick around and actually engage with your app than CPI campaigns. If the users you acquire are high-quality in the first place, then you don’t have to worry about struggling to re-engage irrelevant and unresponsive users down the line.
In order to discern which channels you should spend most of your effort and budget on and which ones you should put on the back burner, use this time to test as many different engagement channels as possible, including email marketing, push notifications, social media, and paid advertising. Attribution solutions, like Tune, Kochava, or Appsflyer, are a must, helping you optimize your UA campaigns by measuring post-install events.
It’s also absolutely imperative that app marketers have a solid analytics solution in place so they can better define success metrics, measure retention, and create the right messages later on, as several of the speakers in the latest IAB Make Mobile Work webinar pointed out.
2. Add a Layer of Analytics
In addition to attribution solutions that track user acquisition analytics, you should also have tools that track success across in-app activity, push notifications, in-app messages, and even email marketing and social media.
Localytics, which is an app analytics platform, is a good place to start. It’ll help you learn where in the appflow users are dropping off, informing you where your attention is most required.
In the webinar, experts also identified Urban Airship and Swrve as helpful platforms to track and measure re-engagement performance, which will communicate how many engagement touch points it takes to convert users, where the most engaged users come from, etc.
3. Build up with Creative Strategies
Naturally, your goal is to hit the optimal LTV, which we can achieve by breaking down the analytics. Is this level too difficult? Did the signup form fail? Is the paywall frustrating? Where do users typically fall off?
Before initiating a re-engagement campaign, be sure to solve these drop off problems. Then delve into creating innovative strategies that hook users and grab their attention. For example, you can send that user a push notification saying, “We know that level was hard. Here’s a free weapon to get you through it!” If it’s a technical error, fix the problem right away and reach out to the user, letting them know that the error they encountered is solved. In any case, re-engagement notifications should give the user a clear reason to continue.
If you want to really reach for the stars, try converting your already active users into daily active users by analyzing their behavior and see what it takes. As Jared Zlotnick from Google mentioned, deepening relationships with valuable users is one of the most overlooked opportunities.
In a case study that Jared presented, we learned that Foodpanda began this process by segmenting their users into ‘purchasers’ and ‘non-purchasers,’ trying to understand what exactly made the ‘purchasers’ convert. Was there something special about lunch on Monday? They then used location, time, and restaurant availability to customize creatives and ultimately convert the ‘purchasers’ into daily users. To nudge the ‘non-purchasers,’ Foodpanda offered incentives like discounts, which would eventually lead them down the same path as the ‘purchasers.’
The takeaway here is that there’s always room to grow, as long as you use analytics to your advantage.
Sneak Peak: How Ad-based Monetization Can Work for Re-engagement
In addition to the standard re-engagement techniques mentioned above, app publishers are finding that some forms of ad-based monetization also drive re-engagement, increase retention, and improve overall LTV.
Specifically, we’re seeing that rewarded video ads, which users watch in return for free in-app rewards, work really well to boost user retention, since they create a cumulative positive user experience. While intrusive advertisements might disrupt the appflow and convince frustrated users to drop off, rewarded videos are completely opt-in, so users watching them have actively chosen to do so.
Most importantly, rewarded video ads keep users in the game for longer, allowing them to continue playing, as opposed to losing a user who drops off because they are stuck without being able to or wanting to make a necessary IAP. In fact, we’ve noticed that users who are served rewarded video ads eventually become long-lasting and paying users, becoming more engaged with or even addicted to the game, and deciding that that paying for IAPs are actually worth it.
This, in combination with the right analytics, can produce excellent results. Earn to Die by Not Doppler is a great example. By studying their analytics, Not Doppler was able to serve the high engagement rewarded videos exactly when their users began losing steam.
To drive it home, Not Doppler used their data to set the reward payout to match the strength of one of their app features. It’s a delicate balance, if they set the reward too low, it wouldn’t have worked to generate re-engagement and retain the user.
In the end, after understanding where, when, and how to serve the rewarded video, Not Doppler got their engagement rate to reach 25% – 38%.
With mobile advertising continuing to evolve and mature, we’re seeing ad units that actually drive increased engagement with the environment they appear in. It makes sense, therefore, to start treating ad units like other app engagement touch points, i.e. measure, track, and analyze them.
Conclusion
Like anything, to properly build re-engagement and retention strategies, you set the foundation first and slowly move your way upwards. It begins with analyzing, studying, and understanding your users, reaching out to them in the most effective way, and continuing to use data to optimize throughout. If everything is in the right place, you’ll end up with highly engaged users that have high LTVs.