There’s no doubt that the life of a mobile app is in the hands of a customer. Of course, the quality of development of an app depends on its designer but eventually its success or failure is decided by the consumer. Those with quality content and great customer experiences get the chance to stay at the customer’s home screen while those who fail to provide value will quickly be deleted or forgotten about. And why wouldn’t it? After all, customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal.
Remember, a happy customer is a loyal customer, and a loyal customer becomes a part of your brand but, in a rush to simply score the highest number of customers i.e. customer acquisition, one completely forgets about the ways to retain them, in short, customer retention doesn’t happen at all. The result – Downfall of the mobile app.
Did you know that only 40% of customers continue to use an app they downloaded a month ago? And only 4% of customers will still be using the app? And customer retention rates by even 5% can increase the value of business between 25% to 95%.
What Exactly is Customer Retention?
Customer retention is simply about keeping people coming back to your app. It is a way to measure your loyal customers by comparing the number of users you have at the beginning of a certain period with the number of users you have at the end of that period. Customer retention is what keeps users engaged, active, and profitable over the long term.
What is the Current Situation?
Usually, if an app is launched only once a week after installation, there is a 60 percent probability the user will never launch it again but that doesn’t mean you abandon your mobile app development halfway if started or your mobile app as it is as there are ways through which you can enhance them.
How to Boost your Mobile Customer Retention?
Boosting retention doesn’t mean you have to completely reinvent the wheel. The following retention-boosting tactics for mobile apps are enough to get some decent attention from your consumers.
Give Your Loyal Customers the Attention They Deserve
- To instill a habit of using your mobile app regularly among users, you got to make them feel special, in short, treat them with rewards. With in-app customer loyalty programs, instruct them to carry out particular actions that will be rewarded with a benefit available only for returning customers. You can offer mobile-specific rewards, virtual currency, specialized content access, coupons, special promotions, exclusive access to new arrivals, and other offers for spreading the news of your app, inviting friends to download it, for participation in social media, etc.
- Ask for feedback. Creating in-app feedback forms and asking users for it shows how much you appreciate their inputs. It will help you spot the areas on your mobile app that needs improvement as well as drive the app in the direction your customers want it to go. Also, after gathering and analyzing your new customer insights, don’t forget to thank and acknowledge your customers.
- Rather than just building an app, aim to build a broader, active, and passionate app community of users who share a common interest which will keep them engaged with your app even more and regularly.
Provide a Seamless Onboarding Experience
- The first impression can decide the future of your mobile app; hence make it as smooth as possible. Start with a warm welcoming in-app message followed by a welcome email within 24 hours for personalized first-time user experience.
- Don’t bombard users with too much information at the beginning, instead, guide them step by step.
- Make logins and account creation easy. Reduce sign up steps, offer multiple registration options like via social media, etc.
- Convenience? Savings? Entertainment? People use mobile apps for a purpose. Send gentle reminders to show that you value all.
- You never know which user is using what device. Therefore, the omnichannel approach will work best. Keep users engaged always with a mix of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, etc. to deliver a consistent user experience across channels.
Give Your Customers Some Time to Think and a Reason to Come Back
Stale content, too much pressure from your side, glitches, check yourself what is causing customers to not want to come back to your app. Offer dedicated and fresh content, provide them with something new and original each time they open the app, keep your app updated and free from bugs and glitches, and the most important stop spamming them. Send polite app notifications and give your customers the opportunity to opt-in to notifications.
Up Your Support and Security
- Your job neither ends after the completion of your mobile application development nor after the launch of your mobile app. In fact, it starts after all of that. Ensure 24×7 support to improve your customer engagement as well to assure that you are there for them whenever they need you.
- Another most important thing that you need to pay attention to is the security of your mobile app. With hackers and threats out there, people fear to provide their personal and financial details which you need to assure with the security of your app.
- Secure the codes, secure the device by identifying and eliminating functions that can expose the app’s data to risks that emerge from mobile system design, enable mobile data encryption and remote erase capabilities to prevent unwanted access to your app data and lastly secure transactions by adapting to risk-aware transaction technologies that will detect attacks on the security of transactions completed inside an app.
Win Them Back With Personalization
Personalization is what customers look for in everything today then why not include them in your mobile app? Provide a more unique and relevant experience to the users by displaying related products and customized content, giving individualized offers, sending notifications by including the user’s name, etc to make them feel valued.
Bottom Line
By now you might have understood how much customer retention plays a role in maintaining the health of your mobile app. Hence, start paying attention to all the above if you want your app to remain on the home screen of the users for a very long time. And if you want a mobile app to be developed with everything that is necessary to attract users, approach the best-known mobile app development company to ensure that your newly built mobile app drives growth and encourages customers to form a meaningful and long-term relationship with your business.
Author Bio: Rakesh Jain is a CEO and Co-founder of MobiCommerce, a leading Mobile app, and eCommerce development company build a next-gen app to disrupt an industry. He has a team of professional developers harness the power of the latest technologies and advanced methodologies to augment mobile growth strategy. He successfully caters to mobile app requirements of SMEs, progressive startups, and enterprises.