Once you’ve identified potential roadblocks, you can figure out how to re-engage users who have stopped using your app. Let’s look at the Audience reports “Loyalty” and “Recency” which can help you engage users once again:
Introduction
The “Loyalty” and “Recency” reports can show user interest in your app based on how frequently and recently users re-opened the app in a given time frame.
The Loyalty report
Let’s first look at the Loyalty report located under Audience and Behavior. In this report, we can see the number of sessions, average session duration, number of screens per session, and the goal conversion rate, broken out by how frequently users have returned to your app.
Let’s look at the conversion rate trend in the Loyalty report. We can see that users with fewer than three sessions have lower conversion rates. It’s possible that this set of users encountered technical roadblocks or didn’t find the game compelling enough to return. You may want to try to use advertising to motivate less loyal users with free promotional credits or other incentives early in the game.
If you want to identify reasons users aren’t returning regularly, you could create a segment of users that visited infrequently and investigate whether they share any common attributes. For example, these users may have come from a marketing campaign that’s bringing in the wrong audience. You could also investigate the similarities that more loyal users share and market the app to comparable users.
The Recency report
The Recency report is similar to Loyalty, except that it shows how much time passed between app sessions. With this report, you can plan promotions or app updates based on how frequently users re-open the app. For example, if you compare two date ranges and see a change in how frequently users return to your app over time, you might consider building a fresh user experience like adding new game levels or a new in-app store.
Re-engaging users
Once you’ve identified users that engage with your app infrequently or have stopped using it entirely, how do you re-engage those audiences? You can appeal to those users with a variety of marketing strategies such as email marketing, push notifications, and remarketing campaigns.
Email marketing can notify users about updates in the app or promotions that might get them to re-engage. You could even customize your email messages based on the attributes you’ve learned about the segments that have disengaged, or target users based on how much time has lapsed since they last visited.
You can send similar messages using push notifications, which allow an app to communicate information in a phone overlay without needing the user to open the app itself. Push notifications can also use audio and vibration to get the user’s attention.
A gaming app, for example, might want to send an email or push notification with an offer for a free month subscription or free in-app tools to users who haven’t opened the app in awhile. Or, if you’ve included social sharing with your app, you could motivate lapsed users with a little friendly competition that challenges them to beat their friends’ high scores.
Conclusion
Regardless of what marketing strategies you pursue, the Loyalty and Recency reports can offer valuable data to target and re-engage users who have stopped using your app. You can also use remarketing campaigns, which we’ll cover in the next lesson.
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