Retention rate? Several classic methods to keep more users!

An APP and its users will go through four stages: meeting, knowing each other, falling in love, and parting. Every close contact carries the risk of "separation" because users may uninstall the app if they are slightly dissatisfied. Today let’s talk about how to get more “love users” and delay the time of separation as much as possible?

In fact, retention rate is the most basic indicator for analyzing different stages of users' life cycle. We can use daily retention rate to determine the willingness of new users to stay, weekly retention rate to determine the conversion rate of loyal users, and monthly retention rate to determine the product's life cycle, so as to rationally plan products and improve their value.

Of course, there are more advanced models to analyze loyal users, such as the RFM three-degree model, engagement model, and so on.

Step 1: Lay a solid foundation and make users fall in love with you at first sight

A good opening equals 50% of success. If a new user has a good experience when using your app for the first time, the possibility of staying will be very high, which means that daily retention is guaranteed. Let’s take a look at some of the details that affect the first impression.

(1) Brand awareness

Since the emergence of commodity economy, people are willing to pay for brands. A consumer who buys an iPhone is more likely to repurchase the brand than a consumer who buys a copycat phone.

The same is true in the wireless field. in the country, Zhihu’s new user retention rate should be higher than Quora’s. Zhihu has a greater brand influence in China.

(2) Appearance style

A good UI is the face of the APP. Its importance is self-evident. I have always believed that the impact of picture refinement on user retention is becoming increasingly greater.

If the graphics of an APP are poorly made, how can users believe that this APP can bring value to them?

(3) Newbie Guide

Onboarding is the first and most difficult hurdle in converting new users into old users. Proper onboarding can effectively increase the next-day retention rate.

Taking games as an example, if the onboarding guide is designed to be too difficult or too simple, it will lead to user loss. A good tutorial for beginners needs to reflect the basic gameplay of the game while also showing the highlights of the game to attract players to stay.

Let’s talk about another complex category, e-commerce. As we all know, the cumbersome registration and ordering processes of e-commerce are the biggest culprits for user loss. Therefore, many e-commerce apps spend a lot of effort designing attractive rewards to stimulate new users to register and place orders.

Once a new user has completed registration, filled in the commonly used address, and bound the payment method, it will become relatively easy to maintain and stimulate old users to consume through promotional activities.

Tip: You can track new user activities and analyze the daily retention rate and first-time order rate indicators together.

(4) Performance

How important is performance? Let me tell you a real case first. An e-commerce app with nearly one million users, with sufficient stimulation for new users and first-class UI design. However, after a round of large-scale promotional activities, it was found that the next-day retention rate was less than 20%. A friend asked me to help analyze it.

I downloaded this app, but had a heart-wrenching experience... The app crashed when I opened it for the first time. After finally starting up normally, the product images loaded very slowly, and after I scrolled for 2 or 3 minutes, the phone started to get hot! I checked the process of this APP in the mobile application management and found that it occupied several times more memory than similar APPs. With such operating conditions, it would be strange if the retention rate is high. (Why would I make such a low-level mistake? God knows~)

Tip: Poor product performance is the lowest level of mistake. Even if the team has limited manpower, it can be solved with the help of existing tools on the market and should not be ignored. Recommend several tools.

● Before APP release: Use cloud testing tools such as testin to test multiple mobile terminal models. Although the Android phone market in China is severely fragmented, in order to ensure the experience of mainstream users, it is recommended to at least select mainstream models to join the test matrix.

● APP is being released: Due to the complexity of the network environment, the user experience cannot be guaranteed in many cases. You can use CDN services on the market, such as Alibaba's multimedia services, to increase the loading speed of images or videos in a real network environment.

● After the APP is released: After completing the preliminary testing and multi-node deployment, we also need to actually monitor performance indicators such as response time, crash rate, network error rate, etc. in different cities, different terminal devices, and different operators . Here I recommend a mobile application performance monitoring tool, Tingyun.

(5) Promotion

The previous analysis is based on the premise that the users obtained through promotion are real users. Evaluating the quality of channel users does not mean that the higher the quality of the channel users you purchase, the better. Behind closed doors, the existence of low-quality users makes sense.

The promotion method I recommend is to purchase high-quality users at a high price to obtain high retention, help improve LTV, and bring value to the APP; purchase low-quality users at a low price to influence the weight of the application market , increase the exposure of the APP, and bring in some natural traffic.

Step 2: Keep meeting people by chance so they remember you

New users will go through a complete product experience cycle in 1 to 2 weeks. For users who remain after this cycle, their rate of churn will slow down, and they will perform better in various conversion indicators, making them the most valuable users.

I took 10,000 APPs and did a fitting experiment on weekly retention rate. It was found that the decay trend of this curve is similar to the decay trend of human memory.

[Popular Science: Human memory is a relatively mature subject. By finding the critical point of human memory forgetting and reviewing knowledge points at the critical point, it is possible to effectively alleviate the memorizer's forgetting of this knowledge point. 】

If this research result is applied to APP retention rate, we can use some product design and operation methods, combined with appropriate scenarios, to deepen the user's "memory" at the "memory boundary", reduce the user's "forgetting", and help new users become loyal users.

(1) In-app community

Taking financial management apps as an example, when users have financial management needs, they may not think that they have installed financial management apps on their mobile phones; by the time they see this app, the urge to buy has long disappeared.

If a community is built within the APP, the operator will regularly organize financial information to strengthen the brand. Promote user communication in the community. The frequency of APP being opened and remembered is much higher.

Tip: The community outside the APP can spread the brand and acquire new users; the community within the APP can improve user retention rate . Smart entrepreneurs plan communities based on needs.

(2) Push

Reasonable push can stimulate user activity and improve retention rate. According to the theory of the "memory curve", operators should focus on pushing at the "forgetting critical point" such as the next day, three days, and seven days. In addition, don’t forget to set a cool-down period (the shortest time interval between two push notifications) to avoid disturbing users too frequently.

Tip: When pushing each message, operators should consider the user's actual scenario and whether this message is exactly what the user needs.

Users are divided into multiple user groups based on dimensions such as frequency of use, payment amount, and time since first payment, and targeted new customer onboarding, brand indoctrination, loyal user maintenance, and lost user recall are carried out. Only precision can lead to effective operations.

(3) Check-in design

Daily check-in can effectively stimulate user activity and improve retention rate. Give some rewards to users when they sign in. Remember to give the "forgetting critical point" a higher reward stimulus, which will have a good effect.

For example, below is the sign-in design for PopStar! Eliminate the stars. We can study its values ​​together.

We have found that designing a higher reward difference at the "forgetting critical point" such as the next day, 3 days, 5 days, and 7 days can effectively improve retention rate

Step 3: Make users fall in love with you and not want to leave

The user life cycle (hereinafter referred to as life time) of APP is different, and different lift times require different product strategies. Understand life time through monthly retention rate and plan your product in advance.

Romano said that the life time of a popular APP will not exceed one month. If your life time does not exceed 1 month and your app has good virality, you will gain a large number of users in a short period of time, but these users will soon leave you like a passing cloud. Therefore, realizing monetization within life time is the most rational decision.

The life time of a game generally ranges from a few weeks to a year. Combine levels and grades to analyze user churn. If you find that the lost users are all naturally max-level users, you may need to launch more heroes or levels to extend the playability of the game.

The target users of some apps will undergo identity transformation, and these apps will have a fixed life time. For example, the life time of a pregnancy APP will not exceed 10 months. After 10 months of pregnancy, the expectant mother becomes a real mother. This mother will almost certainly uninstall the pregnancy app. By enriching the product matrix to meet the different identities of users, guide this mother to use the parenting APP. Loyal users are still your users, but the carrier has changed to continue to provide user value.

Summarize

Appearing in front of users at the critical point of forgetting can delay users' forgetting and promote the conversion of loyal users. Through the monthly retention rate, we can understand the user's life cycle and make product layout in advance.

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