What to Track for Your App's User Retention Rate

As businesses think critically about the success of their mobile applications, user retention becomes a key piece of information for companies in all industries. Find out the different aspects of user retention to discover which fits your company’s bottom line. How do you keep people coming back to your mobile app? This is a simple question with a challenging answer. Instead of waiting for customers to leave without any warning, it is critical for businesses to reexamine a mobile app’s user retention rates. Businesses must put together plans to keep their users engaged, active, and profitable over time. After companies find a mobile app development company to build their product, teams need to factor in how to keep their users coming back after that initial download.

What is User Retention?

User retention is a key metric that measures the growth of digital products. User retention goes beyond customer awareness; it looks at first-time users in a specific timeframe and then figures out the percentage of those users that return. Businesses can calculate user retention rates by reviewing:

• Onboarding: A user must have a successful onboarding process after downloading a mobile app
• Activation: After onboarding, customers and users must experience value from the product
• Habit: What triggers users to come back?

Once the areas of a customer journey are clear, where do companies go next? It is important for companies to look a little deeper when it comes to user retention. For any user retention process, companies must think strategically while factoring and examining these elements:

• Customer churn
• Revenue churn
• Existing customer growth

Customer Churn

A company’s customer churn refers to the rate at which customers stop doing business with the company. If a customer opts out of a subscription renewal or stops playing a mobile game, a business has a churned, or unsuccessfully retained, customer. A lot of factors can impact this metric, some of which are natural. Users can move on, but businesses want to maintain as much of their base as possible. Calculating customer churn depends on the volume of business your company receives. Depending on that level, it might be necessary for your internal team to track churn regularly. Whether it is through considering new mobile app trends to keep business or remedying what made them leave in the first place, customer churn is a user retention metric that businesses can improve upon.

Revenue Churn

Revenue churn rate refers to the percent of revenue your business has lost over time. If a person cancels an order, changes a subscription plan, or simply ends engagement with the app, businesses are likely to experience some element of revenue churn. Since money keeps the lights on, it is important for businesses to track this metric consistently. Measure brand insights such as social media engagement regarding your business’s customer base for ideas on how to approach customer dissatisfaction. You can boost user retention through improving marketing campaigns, social media engagement, and other marketing strategies that can improve a company’s ROI and revenue.

Existing Customer Growth

An important aspect of having a successful business is retaining the existing customers you have. If your users already are paying customers, they at least recognize some value that your business or app brings. It is on you to keep it up. A lot of companies go through a brand evolution to retain their customers: Offering new features and offerings are other ways to engage customers and encourage them to spend more money on your platform. Existing customers often also include the users that are loyal to your business. These loyal customers are frequent users of your service and product, so it is important to keep them happy. Review past purchases and in-app behavior to determine who your most loyal customers are. With numerous purchases under their belt, it is still up to the business to ensure that these customers are satisfied for a lifetime.

Meeting Consumer Demand Helps Businesses Improve User Retention

Measuring user retention is key for any successful business. For any company looking to sustain and compete within their specific market, teams must look at these trackable user retention metrics:

• Customer churn
• Revenue churn
• Existing customer growth

Understanding the behaviors of customers is critical for a mobile application’s longevity. Once factors leading to churn are evaluated, your business is in a better place to improve user retention.