Aug 08, 2019
AppsFlyer and MoEngage have come together to discuss the aspects of App Retention. Mr Himanshu Dilip Kulkarni, the Director of sales from AppsFlyer, will share his insights on building a strategy around retention and keeping the customers engaged. Mr Ashwin SL, the head of Marketing at MoEngage, will also shed some light on the best practices in the app retention space.
AppsFlyer is a data-oriented company. They see data from an unbiased lens. They help companies in extracting relevant pieces of information from a massive amount of data. They look into 1 Terabyte of monthly data points. They have several clients that have a considerable consumer base. Companies come to AppsFlyer for solutions to understand their consumers better, increasing ROI and retention.
It is believed that a 5% increase in customer retention will increase the company’s profitability by around 75%. The market is increasingly shifting its focus from acquisition to retention. According to emarketer.com, about 21% of the users abandon an app after 1st use.
The most critical aspect of customer retention is user acquisition. One has to be very careful in getting the funnel right. It is essential to tap into the right market and attract the rightful user of your product. Once you acquire the right customer, the aspect of retention comes into the picture. If a user downloads your application, the first 3-4 days are highly critical. It is vital to give your user some incentive to stay.
There are several things that you must keep in mind while you are trying to retain customers:
 The actual work starts post the installation of the app. Earlier, the installation was a KPI but acquiring the correct user is most important. The purpose of the app is only fulfilled if your users are making use of the app.
 An app needs to bring app events to the right user. Once the event is launched, the company must try to make the most out of it. Enriching the app events translates to adding attributes to every step that a user takes. The first step would be to measure the detailed in-app user actions followed by enabling relevant retargeting campaigns. This will increase the app’s engagement with the customer and hence increase retention.
For instance, for a gaming company, an in-app event can include the following:
A similar approach can be taken for eCommerce, Travel apps, etc.
Once you have launched an in app-event, you now have actionable data points with you. Data-driven campaigns are known to improve retention rates significantly. The data helps the company in measuring the important signals. Two reports that are highly relevant to a data-driven marketeer are:
These reports help in segmenting the users and optimising the campaigns. Focus on the sources of the retention data. Targeting, communication, etc., could have gaps that would lead to poor retention.
Creating a cohort helps companies to draw collective insights. This can be done by aligning the data correctly.
 User experience is essential if you want to retain customers. Deeplinking is a technique that is proving itself to be instrumental in enhancing the consumer experience. Landing on the right page can also improve the consumer experience.
 Retargeting your existing userbase can drive and uplift revenues by 63%, about 50% higher than acquiring new customers. Retargeting campaigns create a different kind of impact on the users. They feel valued, and this increases the LTV per user.
Companies like Nykaa were focussing on increasing the user base. They made use of the data for effective audience segmentation, and this helped them in retaining customers.
The effectiveness of the data is instrumental in retaining customers. This retention can be both organic as well as non-organic.
 Mr Ashwin highlights how data and effective campaign can help companies in retaining customers. App retention point is a set of actions that separate users who can be retained from the ones which would result in a churn. For an app like Slack, 2000 messages sent in a team can be a retention point. Similarly, for platforms like Netflix, a user watching 2-3 episodes every day can be considered an app retention point.
A company needs to have an understanding of the baseline and the overall retention rate. It will help you in understanding the point of maximum dropout for your app. Forming a hypothesis is important. You should be able to find a sweet spot that works for your app. You need to run campaigns that can drive customers to the sweet spot.
Some metrics that can turn out to be a win-win for your app are:
Once you identify your working retention, building a strategy that will drive your customers to that retention point is essential. Companies like Tokopedia were experiencing a high churn rate. They traced back to the customer journey and transformed the entirely new user onboarding process. Building an automated workflow also helps your cause. Channels like push notifications, E-mail, SMS, etc., reduce the churn rate.
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