In the highly competitive world of mobile app marketing, the key to long-term success lies not just in acquiring users but in retaining and engaging them.
While traditional marketing strategies often separate user acquisition and retention into distinct efforts, the most successful app growth strategies recognise the critical intersection between the two. By creating a seamless transition from the initial user acquisition phase to ongoing engagement and retention efforts, mobile app marketers can foster a loyal user base that drives sustainable growth.
Read on to learn how analysing your user engagement can fuel your user acquisition and retention efforts and what strategies you can implement to maximise your app growth efforts.
Where do User Acquisition and Retention Meet?
User Acquisition refers to the marketing tactics that drive new users to a mobile app. This process involves the application of strategies designed to generate installs. Retention, in this context, refers to the percentage of users who continue engaging with an app over time. This app metric is typically measured at 30 days, 7 days, and 1 day after users first install the app. Paid subscriptions offer an efficient structure for tracking your user retention. With these structures in place, you are able to observe the amount of users engaged with your app and the way their numbers develop over a time period.
Both the concepts of user acquisition and retention intersect quite well and are mutually reinforcing. A crafted user experience (UX) leads to high user engagement. High user engagement, in turn, translates to high user retention rates. Strong retention is a key metric for a successful app, and high user retention rates demonstrate the successful application of a user acquisition strategy. Read here for more insights on approaches and strategies that can be applied to your user acquisition and retention efforts.
Ultimately, user engagement results from a well-nurtured user acquisition strategy and successful user retention.
To accurately distinguish between user acquisition and app retention, it might be useful to think of acquisition as an app’s short-term gains. Despite the rapidly growing number of new users, it will mean little to your app’s overall success if you fail to retain those users. On the other hand, retention could be seen as synonymous with long-term gains and indicative of an app’s overall value and performance potential.
For these concepts to truly come to life, users must be led on a seamless journey through the user acquisition funnel, where they’re given engaging content to interact with at each touchpoint.
From the moment a prospective user is first exposed to your app or brand, their initial curiosity must be met with consistent value and satisfaction, encouraging them to continue through the process, gaining more knowledge and expanding on their experience with your app. A streamlined journey throughout this process should help generate higher user retention rates. Here are the strategies to help you increase app retention rates.
Strategies to Acquire and Retain Your Users
- Analysing Retention Data
Where growth strategies are concerned, leveraging retention and engagement data is key to creating a solid strategy for user acquisition and retention efforts.
Analysing retention data allows you to identify high-value user segments, guiding your acquisition efforts to target users with the highest potential for long-term engagement.
By conducting cohort analysis, you can pinpoint which user groups exhibit the best retention rates and highest engagement levels. Cohort analysis is a method of segmenting users based on a shared characteristic over a specific period to measure key performance indicators (KPIs).
Some apps have successfully used lookalike audiences, creating campaigns aimed at profiles similar to their most retained users. Understanding the behavioural patterns of retained users can inform user acquisition and retention strategies, ensuring that you attract users who are likely to stay and engage.
2. Tracking Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics are another valuable tool for optimising user acquisition campaigns. Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as session length, usage frequency, and user actions like subscriptions or purchases helps refine user acquisition and retention strategies. In the context of app marketing, ensure you are utilising MMP data over platform data for an accurate picture of how users are engaging with your app. Examples of MMPs include Adjust, AppsFlyer and Branch.
Analysing content preferences reveals which creatives and platforms drive the most engagement, allowing for targeted investment in future campaigns. Additionally, A/B testing based on insights from highly engaged users can be used to optimise ad creatives and messaging, enhancing overall campaign effectiveness.
3. Leveraging User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is a powerful driver for organic acquisition. Encouraging users to share their experiences on social media or with friends can significantly boost your UA efforts. In-app challenges that prompt users to create and share content, as well as featuring UGC within the app and in ad creatives, foster a sense of community and trust.
TikTok is a popular platform that has integrated UGC very well. When combining UGC with paid ads on TikTok, TikTok’s targeting options allow you to gather relevant data on your users and their behaviour, which can be re-applied back into your user acquisition and retention efforts. This will allow you to craft informed strategies that will help supercharge your user engagement, your user acquisition and retention and overall app growth. We have data on the utilisation of both TikTok and Snapchat for user-generated content, which you can read more about here.
4. Referral Programmes
Another effective strategy that can be used is retention-driven referral programs. By leveraging retained users, you can drive new acquisitions through incentivised referrals, making the process simple and seamless.
Continuous monitoring and optimisation of these programs can ensure that they remain effective.
Finance apps like Monzo and Revolut excel in using referral programs to grow their user base, offering rewards and easy sharing options to encourage users to invite friends, capitalising on their existing loyal user base to fuel further growth, see example below.
Once you have your strategies in place, you’ll want to know how best to measure your efforts. Read on to learn how to measure your user retention rates.
Measuring User Retention Rates
Measuring user retention rates is crucial for understanding the long-term successand sustainability of a mobile app. App retention rate is essentially the inverse of user churn, (user churn being the percentage of users who uninstall or stop engaging with an app over time.) So for example, if your 90-day Retention Rate is 25%, then your churn is 75%.
This metric indicates the percentage of users who continue to engage with the app after their initial download. As mentioned before, retention rate is typically measured at key intervals such as 1 day, 7 days, and 30 days post-installation, and it’s the foundation for an app’s sustained growth and a pivotal part of an app’s user lifetime value (LTV).
An app’s retention rate is then measured by comparing the number of users an app has at the beginning of a given time period with the number of users the app has at the end of that time period.
Based on that, the monthly app retention rate is calculated by dividing an app’s monthly active users by its monthly installs.
A higher retention rate suggests that users value your app, highlighting its effectiveness in meeting their needs and expectations, especially as
the average app loses 77% of its daily active users (DAUs) within the first 3 days after install. Monitoring these rates allows app developers and marketers to identify patterns, understand user behaviour, and make data-driven decisions to enhance the user experience.
A low(er) retention rate shows you that there are problems with your app that need to be addressed. The exact point where users tend to churn can indicate a variety of problems. For example, high churn on Day 1 may suggest that there are some problems with your onboarding process, whereas high churn by Day 7 may indicate that your app is not engaging enough.
Ultimately, retention rates provide valuable insights into user satisfaction and loyalty. Research done by Business of Apps states that 90% of app users who engage with an app at least once a week are more likely to be long-term users. This kind of data serves as a benchmark for refining acquisition strategies and ensuring sustained engagement.
Determining a good retention rate from your users will vary from app to app. For example, news apps generally average around 33.1% retention rate on Day 1, well above the average, whereas other apps will carry different averages.
The type of app that you are trying to grow will ultimately determine how you structure your app growth strategies. But essentially, your goal as an app marketer or developer is to offer an onboarding and general user experience that ensures that a given percentage of each month’s cohort of new users stays engaged, allowing the app to grow at a steady and sustainable pace.
Conclusion
From the strategies outlined above, hopefully, you are able to align with us on the conclusion that the analysis of retention data can identify high-value user segments, leading to more effective and targeted user acquisition and retention strategies.
By delving into retention metrics, businesses can uncover invaluable insights about their most loyal and engaged users and optimise accordingly, attracting higher value and more targeted users.
This strategic approach transforms raw data into actionable intelligence, driving superior results in engagement, user acquisition and retention.
For more app growth insights like this, have a look at our app marketing blog here.
