Industry News & Events, User Acquisition
How to Reduce User Churn and Keep Users Longer
AppLovin
Feb 2, 2023
Feb 2, 2023
Industry News & Events, User Acquisition
User acquisition, retention, and engagement are all important KPIs — but there are a lot of ways to measure the success of your mobile app. Measuring user churn rate — how many users uninstall your app and at what point they do so — is equally critical. And while it will never be a metric to celebrate, it’s an important one to monitor and reduce. Here’s how.
For app developers, user churn is a fact of life. Industry experts estimate that almost 80% of users will uninstall an app the day after they install it. A week later, that number jumps again, and only 12% of users remain active. Expert Ankit Jain summarizes the behavior this way: “Users try out a lot of apps but decide which ones they want to ‘stop using’ within the first 3-7 days. For ‘decent’ apps, the majority of users retained for seven days stick around much longer. The key to success is to get the users hooked during that critical first 3-7 day period.”
That doesn’t give you a lot of time to win over users. Successful developers have to work quickly and analyze when, where, and why churned users are abandoning ship. Simply put, developers have to make sure users see and appreciate the value of an app right away — and fall in love with it soon after.
Before we dig into tactics to lower uninstall rates, there are some important stats to consider right off the bat:
These are all factors you’ve thought about early on, no doubt — but they’re still important to keep in mind as you bring your app to market. There’s no churn reduction strategy in the world that can defeat a poor user experience. If the app hangs for 30 seconds or takes up half of a phone’s storage space, can you blame a user for uninstalling it?
Assuming you’ve already tackled these fundamental issues, there are ways to win over users within the first day they’ve downloaded your app. These strategies focus on retention and engagement. If you can boost these metrics, churn reduction will follow.
Onboarding is the first touchpoint your users have with your app. Make sure it’s a fantastic experience. A few tips to make onboarding simple, clean, and efficient:
Read more Onboarding Best Practices
For the last five years or more, users haven’t just wanted personalization, they’ve expected it. Creating a personalized experience doesn’t demand personal or demographic data. You can learn a lot about users from the way they interact with your app. We see shopping apps do this all the time: explore or buy a few items, and suddenly your app and notifications are peppered with related products. It’s also the reason we love apps like Spotify, Netflix, and YouTube.
These apps learn our habits through careful in-app event tracking so every time we open them, the experience is uniquely ours. Think about how you can tailor your app’s experience to your users based on the features they use most, the rewards they like best, the times when they use the app, and other factors.
Stay connected with your users through in-app messaging, push notifications, social media, and/or email. While you don’t want to spam your users, you do want to stay in touch, so message purposefully. Let users know about special in-app events that might interest them, send notifications when their friends are online, remind them of an upcoming sale, or just thank them for being their awesome selves with a special discount or other in-app offers.
These communications can be made even more effective with deep linking, which can take users to a specific page within the app or game. A great example would be if a user had to leave a game in the middle of a tournament, a reminder could be sent to that user, encouraging them to jump back in before the competition ends. A deep link could take them to the exact spot they left in the game, without even having to manually open the app.
Time-sensitive rewards are a great way to entice users to keep coming back! For example, in mobile games, daily challenges and in-game currency work well. In retail apps, limited discounts and gifts with purchases are effective. The key is making sure the reward is valuable to your users, and ideally, tied to key features of your app. Offering rewards for “streaks” or consecutive daily logins is also effective.
Anyone who has ever used Snapchat (or has a teen who uses Snapchat) can attest to this. Similarly, the app-exclusive rewards offered by so many retailers and restaurant chains work well to keep users engaged and away from competitors — while also preventing them from uninstalling.
The best way to prevent churn is to figure out why users are uninstalling your app — and then fix it. Review your analytics to determine at exactly which point in their journey folks are jumping ship. Is there a page or feature that isn’t working properly? Are you overwhelming them with tutorials at onboarding? Maybe you’re annoying users with too much messaging, or using messaging and other content in ads that don’t represent what’s actually in your app. Any of these issues can be discovered by taking a thorough look at your analytics.
By paying attention to why users are abandoning your app, you’ll be able to chart a course to better engagement and retention, both of which work in lockstep with user churn reduction. As the app market continues to heat up, having a strategy to reduce app churn will be critical to the success of your business. By focusing on your app’s experience and keeping users engaged, you’ll be able to keep abandonment low — and LTV high.
Companies rely on AppLovin’s market-leading solutions and industry expertise to help optimize their monetization strategies and perform mission-critical functions, including growing and retaining new users.
To learn more, reach out to your AppLovin account team or open an account today.
