Worried about Day 1 App Retention? Get to know who you are onboarding
Low Day 1 App Retention rates are a huge financial sinkhole. With fewer tools available for effectively targeting new online users, apps can no longer afford that revolving door of users that happens when user acquisition metrics get more attention than retention figures. But how do you hook wandering customers when you don’t know anything about them?
tl;dr
You can improve performance of your Day 1 app retention using the Anagog SDK, which generates powerful, unique insights on each user within moments. That means that you can present modified onboarding flows based on different personas. For more, read on.
Making a good impression on Day 1
Anybody that has worked in sales knows that, “You never get a 2nd chance at a 1st impression”. This should also be the mantra of mobile app developers, given that the percentage of users who download an app only to abandon or discard it within a few days is astounding. Obviously a proportion of those downloads shouldn’t have happened in the first place; maybe a result of poorly targeted or over-aggressive user acquisition campaigns. However, low Day 1 App Retention rates can be avoided by optimizing the introductory phase of the app, the onboarding.
As a result, companies invest heavily in fine-tuning how users first encounter their app. It is a race against time to increase Day 1 App Retention by converting them to frequent users before they lose interest and churn away. Some companies spend embarrassing amounts on the app’s graphical interface. Others focus on obsessively iterating the onboarding process, cutting down on the number of clicks required to start using the app. Some apps are so eager to avoid losing users along the way that they bombard them with messages and popups until the users regret downloading the app to begin with.
It is not surprising; investing in customer retention and activation is the most logical thing to do, and the sooner the better. However, how can you ensure a good first impression when you don’t know who you are trying to impress? How can you optimize a user experience when there are so many different types of users? How can you encourage someone to become a frequent user when you don’t know what they are interested in?
Bringing intelligence to the phones
Anagog decided to invest research efforts and apply the power of our Edge AI to help crack this challenge. Experienced sales people know how to size up a prospect as they enter the door; what would be the virtual equivalent of that? We discovered that the mobile phone is more than just a platform for a user’s mobile app experience. It can also provide you with insights into how you should optimize that experience for that individual user. For example, how much more efficient could your onboarding process be if you knew that the user was tech savvy, or in an older age group, or is more comfortable in a different language? What might you do differently for new users who belong to the segment with the highest potential lifetime value?
A mobile phone knows these things and much more about its user. Once you embed the Anagog SDK into your app, it generates those insights for you to apply instantly and improve the onboarding process for that user. Without Edge AI to keep all the data on the phone and away from prying eyes, this could have been creepy. However, since all the data is already on the phone and doesn’t have to leave it, it remains private between the user and the app on the phone. Yes, that’s right: No external systems or people need to have this data in order for you to act upon it. Surprised?
That’s our secret sauce… Using Anagog’s Edge AI capabilities, the phones now segment themselves and “choose” the relevant option for each user. Moreover, the insights can be anonymized, for use in audience-wide analytics, giving you a broad view of your entire user-base.
A focus on Day 1 retention is a smart investment
The commercial impact for this is huge. The cost of user acquisition was rising even before Google and Apple made it even more expensive. It is imperative for companies to make a strategic effort to reduce churn in all phases of the customer lifecycle. The sooner you can optimize the customer experience and personalize it for each individual user, the better. You’ll have a better chance to engage them and convert them into 1st time users, 2nd time users and eventually into daily or monthly users (DAU or MAU).
First impressions matter and customer retention matters even more. Anagog gives you the chance to learn about your users before they come in the door, so you can increase Day 1 retention by making sure that the first impression is a good one.
