Stop Losing Users — Boost Your App Retention With This Step-By-Step Guide

Retention is a very important concept when speaking about improving an app. If you want to take your app to the next level, you need to retain your users. Keep them interested enough to make them want to keep coming back.

Let’s structure the process:
- So how do you know if your users are coming back to the app? You need information.
- How do you get this information? With analytics.
- How do you receive the analytics? By implementing trackers inside your app.

About Trackers

Trackers are like triggers — the user performs an action and activates this trigger that will send the information back to you. You can track the user’s actions depending on where and when you place these triggers. Once you place the “traps” you can start analyzing in which phase they are escaping from you.

There are different types of trackers: the ones that come from taps, and the ones that don’t. Example 1: First time opening the app; Example 2: Tapping the Register button.

Take your time during this decision process, because this first step is crucial for you to get the right and most valuable information.

How To Start

You can start by displaying your app’s views next to each other, and separate them by features or categories. Take a deep look into your UI and decide which events you would like to track: for example, if you have a Sign In/Register view, you might want to track if the users skip this process (if possible), whether they prefer to register with their Apple or Google account, and how long does this process take. Tracking the time here could be beneficial — if the users take a bit too long to complete this flow maybe some tweaks could be made to facilitate the process.

If you have a tab bar, a menu, or a lot of options on your home view, you could add trackers to each of those buttons and see which ones are pressed more often and the ones that get very little attention from your users.

After mapping out where the trackers should go, don’t forget to name them. Create a file with the trackers’ names, and a brief description to be shared amongst the designers and developers. The developers will proceed to implement the chosen trackers, but this file is important to keep since you will need the tracker’s names to call them from inside the analytics software.

Analyzing the information

After having your trackers implemented, wait a week or two for the information to start gathering inside your dashboards, and this way you can extract more meaningful information from them.

How To Start

The best way to start is by writing down a few questions you want to answer. Continuing with the Register example, you might want to answer: do my users prefer to enter an email and password manually or Register through another platform? How long do they take to complete this Register process? How many users tap Sign In vs Register?

The options are endless, so you need to decide what you want to answer and prioritize those questions because maybe some answers will greatly influence your product, while others not so much.

Find out where your users drop the flow, drop the app, which features they use most, which ones they use less, and for how long. After you have these bits of information you can start grouping your users inside cohorts (audiences on google analytics).

What Are Cohorts?

Cohorts are groups of people that share the same characteristics. And what characteristics are these? The ones you define. You can create a cohort (group) of users who Register, as opposed to those Signing In, then create a cohort of people who Register using their Google account details. As you can now realize, some people will be inside both of these cohorts.

What Are Cohorts For?

By grouping people inside cohorts, you can perform specific actions tailored to each one of these cohorts. Sending push notifications to the cohorts of people who haven’t used your app in the last 2 weeks or sending in-app messages to users who never opened a specific feature in your app could help retain them in the future.

Taking Advantage Of The Data

The data you extract isn’t only meant to make cohorts, although this is also very useful. If you want to improve the retention inside your app you need information about how the app is performing now to compare it with the information about how the app is performing after the design changes.

How many users are covering the flows you had envisioned for them? How many seem to be struggling with a certain view? You need to sketch out possible solutions for the UI and UX of these views in order to improve the user’s experience.

Improving The App’s Experience

Now that you have the data about how each of your views and features are performing, it’s time to address the known problems. List all the problems you see the users are having with your app (according to the information you previously gathered and analyzed) and prioritize them. Start by sketching ideas to solve the major ones, and while the developers are implementing the first changes, you can start tackling the secondary ones.

Test and Iterate

Even if you believe you have found the solution for your user’s problems, never settle. Only the numbers can provide the certainty you need to believe the problem is solved (or at least it has a significant improvement). After the changes have been implemented, test them with your users and see how the numbers change. If they got worse, or there were no significant changes, try out different solutions. Don’t stop testing hypotheses until the numbers confirm that you have found a possible solution.

If you want to know of some strategies on how to increase user retention, check out this article made by my teammate Carmine Acierno.

Wrap-Up

It’s hard when you put all your effort into an app but then people are not feeling like coming back to it. Improving user retention is a hard subject to tackle, given the fact that the tools we have can only allow us to analyze data, but not provide a concrete solution. That is up to you. With the knowledge at hand and your creativity, you have the hard task to find out how to address the known issues by yourself. I hope this article can guide you on your long but exciting journey of improving your app’s retention. Thank you!

Rita Tavares
Lead UI/UX Designer at Air Apps