When it comes to mobile apps, user retention is critical to your success. There are methods for increasing user retention rates. From sending personal email communications to educating your user about products and services, there are marketing techniques that will lead to more active users of your app. Below are several measures you can implement to optimize your app and increase user retention.

1. Make it Easy and Natural to Come Back

You want a means of returning that is easy to use: think about one-click solutions. Additionally, part of keeping users interested in your app involves using engaging communications. While automated communications are convenient, they are not always practical or the best option for communicating with users. Setting out and performing an email marketing campaign that fills a user’s inbox with several emails a day filled with not-so-useful information will cause a decline in user retention. It is better to keep the emailing simple, and offer incentives that supply your users with an immediate reward or value.

2. Get to Know Your Users

There is plenty to learn about your users and the information you gather will prove telling. When you examine user behaviors and sentiments, it can teach you a lot about your application, and you can discover what you need to do in order to improve retention and/or activation rates.

One method you can use to learn more about users is to make use of surveys. Offering users surveys allows them to give you anonymous feedback. You can learn what pain points exist that are ultimately influencing your user activation rates. Typeform is an excellent survey tool and you can use in-browser pop ups to get active users to participate in the survey. Kissmetrics and Google Analytics are two more tools you can use for learning more about your user base.

3. Use New Features to Entice Customers

Customers love the latest feature or product, and if your product is enticing, you will get your users to engage. When you decide to launch a new feature set or product, it is imperative you also establish a complete marketing campaign for the product or feature set. Then, you can monitor your users’ behavior to learn how to communicate with your users with greater effectiveness. Finally, direct targeting of specific users is also something you will want to consider.

4. Urge Users to Take Advantage of Your Services

When offering service to your users, you need to use every resource available to you; make it easy for users to connect with you and talk about your products and services. Offer a fax line, phone line, email or live chat solutions. Use your customer support solutions, the product itself, and your product marketing as leverage. Educate your users. The more the product proves to be a useful resource, the greater the likelihood you will retain your users.

5. Make the User’s Experience Personal

Personalize the communications you have with your users. For instance, you can use a service like Vero for email campaigns. Vero adds the user’s name, the platform the user relies on, and the communication includes store domains, website information, and more. To personalize your communications, make sure you have photographs of your workers to give your messages a personal touch.

6. WOW Your Users Immediately

The key to increased user activation and retention is to offer users something of value. The greater the value a user can derive from a product, the more they are likely to become active and loyal users. You want to establish a business to consumer relationship based on trust. You need to impress your users immediately. Keep your competition in the back of your mind, and remember to WOW consumers as fast as possible.

7. Give Your User Access to Integrations

Do you want to compound the value of your app? Then you need to build integrations. When you have product integrations with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media solutions, the app becomes more useful and valuable to the user. Other integrations you can include are Evernote, Zapier, Kissmetrics, Google Analytics, Buffer, SoundCloud, Pocket, and Gmail.

8. Retain Interest with Fresh Content

Keeping users engaged means having content to offer, and not just ordinary content, but fresh content. The material you supply has to be something of interest to the user too. It is a good idea to use a balanced approach by offering value and product oriented content. Offering content through a blog is one way to engage users. You can offer them the option of subscribing by using a tool like Zapier or Qualaroo. Plug in the services and products you offer in blog posts (free advertising), and offer content on a regular basis. Being consistent establishes trust.

9. Remember the Importance of Onboarding

Onboarding is vital to your success: it is a process where you take a series of steps or measures to get your user to the moment called the “must have experience,” and you couple this action with the implementation of best practices to make him an active user. Onboarding is a mixture of using your product; educate the user, and implementing selling techniques. Experiment with resources like Vero, Intercom, and Qualaroo to complement the efforts of your onboarding campaign.

10. Intelligent Marketing

Successful marketing is not a haphazard effort. Rather, marketing is a carefully planned and implemented campaign. Marketing is not a single event, but several events in succession. Marketing is something that is continuous and evolving. Consider the features of your product and categorize them into three levels, the first consisting of features of high value, the third category consisting of features that are not necessarily a priority. You can use the feature categories to market effectively and with greater proficiency.

By Dmytro Bilkun, Marketing Manager at The App Solutions, a mobile app development company