Are you considering the development of a mobile application for your business?
Before you bring a mobile app into this crowded marketplace, you should consider this one major dilemma many businesses are facing:
Customer retention
Without a thorough understanding of the retention challenges of today, your business will have a long, uphill battle in its future. Your business shouldn’t have to confront the retention challenge empty-handed, which is where this guide comes into play.
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What is the Status of Mobile App Retention Today?
In a study by Localytics, 2015 was a strong year for app retention. It wasn’t the best year ever though, as 2012 still holds the lead by far. However, it still demonstrated a consistent probability of maintaining customer retention.
Despite a struggle in the first half of 2015, the app retention surge in quarters 3 and 4 brought the statistics up to 18%, which is a two-point increase over the previous year.
Mobile app retention is still a major challenge for businesses today. Customers are likely using your mobile app once and abandoning it. The question is:
Why?
You’ll never be able to increase mobile app retention rates unless you understand what mistakes you’re making. The next section will give you everything you need to make this happen.
What Mistakes Should Businesses Avoid to Increase Mobile App Retention Rates?
You’ll find that there are five major reasons why customers abandon your app, with a plethora of related mistakes you could be making for each.
1) Does your app provide a valuable experience?
- Mistake 1: you’re providing too many features without honing in on what’s actually needed
- Mistake 2: you haven’t perfected the onboarding process
- Mistake 3: you’re not giving users a personalized experience
2) Is your app reliable and efficient?
- Mistake 4: your app is constantly crashing
- Mistake 5: your app is incredibly slow to load
- Mistake 6: your app requires login before offering anything of value
3) Does your app invade user privacy?
- Mistake 7: your app doesn’t explain why it’s asking for certain permissions
- Mistake 8: your app asks for permissions too soon
4) Is your app UX design up to par?
- Mistake 9: you require too many steps to proceed or complete a task
5) Is your app customer-focused?
- Mistake 10: You don’t address user issues
This is just a short list of only some of the mistakes you can make, affecting your user retention rate. To better understand these critical errors and how to fix them, we’ve included some recommendations below:
- Focus your app development around only a handful of select features that will help your user before your business.
- Make your onboarding process an experience of value for your user rather than an extensive hassle.
- When someone is using your app, give them a relevant experience with personalized elements, which will help your user want to stick around.
- With only 16% of users returning to an app with bugs, it’s imperative that you prevent your app from constantly crashing.
- Studies say that the average human attention span is only 8 seconds, which is less than that of a goldfish, so don’t let your app be slow to load.
- Constantly asking for users to login can hurt customer retention, so build an app that either doesn’t always require login or provides good reasons why the user should want to login each time.
- Strategically plan when you’ll ask for permissions in order to give users good reason to allow them.
- Mobile app users are oftentimes on-the-go, so don’t make it difficult for them to complete a task quickly and hassle-free.
- User reviews should be a top priority for you because this is where you learn what you’re doing right as well as wrong, so take these comments and apply them.
What Else Can Businesses Do to Improve Their Mobile App Retention Rates?
To increase mobile app retention rates, you need to know what’s going wrong. Now that we covered that, it’s important you learn the best practices for mobile app retention.
Apptamin created a thorough guide on what your business should do in order to improve upon your customer retention, and we’re going to highlight these points here.
- Instead of overloading users with too much information, focus only on providing what they’re actually looking for in your app.
- Keep users engaged with your app by consistently giving them something of value.
- Pay attention to how customers are using your app in order to learn what’s working and what’s not in order to make future improvements.
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You now know the state of mobile app retention. You’re aware of the common mistakes businesses make with their apps. You’ve also learned how to make your app more successful via best practices.
It’s time to apply all this with your own project for increased mobile app retention rates and overall app success.
We are a digital product innovation firm specializing in mobile, IoT and wearable applications, and we’re here to help enterprises, agencies and funded startups reach their audience in these new, progressive ways. Contact us today to set up a consultation so that we can define, design and deliver an app for your business that’ll be so compelling, users will have to stick around.
