Churn Rate

What is a churn rate?

The churn rate shows you the rate in which users uninstall or never return to an app. New user acquisition is expensive for mobile marketers, so it is important to protect your acquisition investment. Keep churn rates to a minimum by implementing a number of different customer retention methods, from improved user experience (UX) to personalized notifications.

What causes users to churn?

Studies have shown that approximately 90 percent of users churn within a month. This can be for a number of reasons, including:

• Confusing first-time user experience: complicated navigation or onboarding process
• Bad user experience: app crashes or slow loading times
• Poor customer service: lack of a customer support team to handle issues with purchases or services
• No personalization: badly timed promotional campaigns sent to the wrong segments or at the wrong times
• Forgetfulness: failure to re-engage users who opt-out of some channels (like push) across other channels (like email)

Fortunately, there are many strategies that mobile marketers can implement to keep churn rates to a minimum.

How can marketers prevent churn rates?

To encourage user retention and decrease churn rates, mobile marketers must engage their users across multiple channels, with relevant content tailored to their past behaviors and preferences. This is important throughout a user’s lifecycle, starting a conversation the first time they open the app and engaging them even if they go dormant.

When marketers are ready to launch cross-channel campaigns, they can set about implementing the following customer retention methods.

Push Pre-Permissions

This Leanplum feature suppresses the system’s default push notification prompt and instead triggers an in-app message that explains the value of push to users at a better time. For example, a music app may trigger Push Pre-Permissions to appear after a listener favorites a new artist, explaining they push can help them stay up-to-date when that artist releases a new album. The travel brand Last Minute Travel increased engagement rates by up to 182 percent using this feature.

Once users opt-in, you can send relevant push notifications that keep your app top-of-mind.

Cross-channel marketing

Even if you do everything right, every user still won’t opt-in to push notifications. Email is a great channel to re-engage users who never opted-in — or uninstalled the app altogether. Marketers can take this one step further by personalizing content, from as simple a step as addressing the user by name to using the segmentation methods above to alert them to new promotions. This will encourage users to re-open/reinstall the app and engage once again.

Segmentation & targeting

As a best practice, marketers should collect data based upon demographics, lifecycle stage, in-app behavior, and preferences, and then group users into categories based on similarities.

For example, a marketer may have a group of women aged 20-35 interested in outdoors activities. Using this data, marketers can create personalized notifications about hiking gear on sale or an organized backpacking expedition coming up. Relevant messages ensure they retain and convert.