App retention tips! 3 key app marketing strategies that deepen your user stickiness

Why is app marketing important?

If a business develops its app without a complete app marketing strategy layout, certainly there will be challenges and difficulties in acquiring new customers and retaining users, which may eventually lead to the profit limitation of your app. It is not enough to just rely on the business to promote the software or advertise widely, which is why many enterprises are looking for marketing platforms to better attract customers to interact with the brand, and maintain close interaction and communication with customers after entering the app.

If you still don't know why an enterprise needs the right marketing tools to do a good job of app marketing, you can understand the importance of mobile app marketing in the user's life cycle through the following data:

• In 2021, more than 435,000 apps will be downloaded every minute, indicating not only the high level of consumer usage and demand for mobile phones but also the increasingly fierce competition in the app market.
• It now costs five times as much to acquire new users as it does to retain existing ones!
• Reducing attrition by just 5% can increase your app's revenue by 75%!
• According to the statistics, the average retention rate of a user drops around 7 days and 30 days.

As competition increases, the cost of acquiring new customers increases, and paid advertising revenue decreases, retention becomes the key to success in the entire marketing ecosystem.

App marketing isn't just about advertising, it's about getting users into habits

App advertising mostly refers to the process of delivering ads to users on mobile devices, which is only a small part of mobile app marketing strategy. What's more, consumers are getting tired of paying more and more for ads that are placed on mobile websites or in different apps.

3 app marketing strategies enhancing user experience and letting your users stick to your app!

There may be a lot of factors in app marketing that companies didn't realize had a big impact on the user experience. The marketing strategy for your app should cover every stage from launch and exposure to download and use. Let's share with you three effective app marketing strategies.

Strategy 1: Optimize your app onboarding process to improve retention

The onboarding experience is the starting point for users to enter the app. If the onboarding guiding experience is not enough, it will seriously affect the app experience, and this is a problem that many brand apps are facing. Encountering with such short-term retention rates, companies should re-evaluate their current onboarding process. According to the xdite blog, there are four main reasons why users don't want to continue using an app:

1. 30% left because they didn't know how to use the app
2. 30% left because they didn't realize the value they were claiming
3. 10% because they think the product is bad
4. 10% because other competitors are doing better

In fact, you can see that just by filling in the "not knowing how to use" gap, users immediately realize the value of the product or service, and this basically increases retention significantly. Ideally, onboarding should allow users to pick up your app with the least learning time and cost to increase usage of its features and gain insight into its core values. The retention of an app is not necessarily directly related to the quality of the product, but the most important thing is to get users to build "habits".

We therefore strongly recommend that enterprises design "examples of use, including feature introduction, progressive usage guidance, and presentation of core features" into the Onboarding process, and effectively communicate Onboarding content to users through In-app channels and other in-app updates. Guided design, such as multi-card, allows an enterprise to easily create an interactive Onboarding process to facilitate the use and experience of features without having to write code. Using in-app rotating card solutions like OneSignal allows you to deliver features in an efficient and scalable manner, providing a better hands-on experience for users. In addition, OneSignal can help you evaluate the effectiveness of those Onboarding cards and help you optimize them.

The Onboarding phase is also the best time to request permission and access from the user. If the app function of the enterprise needs to access the user's camera, Bluetooth, photos, and other content, it can obtain the user's consent as soon as possible after this time to show a positive first impression. At the same time, getting permission to send notifications during the initial user experience can provide you with more ways to promote user interaction to strengthen user engagement. For iOS users, in particular, adding a prompt to the Onboarding process can be used to better assist Apple users in accepting push notifications, thereby increasing their subscription rate.

Strategy 2: Encourage users to rate and review, and actively collect first-hand feedback to help with feature optimization and brand impression

Whatever permissions are requested, improve brand trust by notifying users before they encounter native prompts. By explaining why and what you're sending push notifications to in advance, you'll be able to give users the information they need to make a decision -- and increase their willingness to opt-in.

Collecting advice directly from users on the UX elements of their satisfied and dissatisfied apps is one of the surest ways for companies to optimize their apps. This enables enterprises to promote the optimization and solve users' pain points for specific functions more directly and effectively so that users feel listened to and valued, so as to provide more active feedback and deepen interaction. A game app, for example, could use an internal survey to collect feedback from players on the usability, flow, and design elements of a new level launched in the game.

OneSignal's in-app surveys and reviews provide a direct channel between businesses and users, seamlessly gathering the data and insights needed to optimize their products. In addition, reviews play an important role in a new user's decision to download an application. The data shows that 77% of users read at least one review before downloading a free app.

Strategy 3: Design exclusive app experience and message promotion according to different customer groups

User expectations of personalization increase with the number of data point an organization can collect. In order to provide a more personalized app user experience, enterprises can categorize users and design different marketing messages and strategies based on their purchase stage, preferences, specific behaviors, and other personal information data to show their understanding. If you haven't already, start with OneSignal, which strategically sends notifications related to users' purchase stages, preferences, and behaviors.

To do a good job of subdivision, you need a powerful customer analysis platform to systematically collect and organize all the key user app interaction data for you. By using data analytics providers like Mixpanel via OneSignal, you can better segment your user base based on in-app purchase and behavior data.

OneSignal's powerful messaging push amplifies app marketing

OneSignal is designed to help brands effectively cultivate user engagement through multiple messaging and data insights, seamlessly manage their user communication pipeline, and easily set up push notifications to increase marketing effectiveness. If you haven't used OneSignal yet and want to learn more about product features or industry success stories, find us to help you learn more about how OneSignal can help you increase user engagement and retention! Master Concept is a certified OneSignal partner. Through our marketing consultants, we will provide product consulting and demonstration, introduction services, education, training, and technical support to ensure you get the best experience and value from using OneSignal. We provide services in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Macau, and other Asia Pacific regions.