Retention

In mobile marketing, user retention refers to the percentage of users that keep using an app. Also referred to as app retention, this is an essential metric for any mobile marketing strategy as it ensures you’re keeping users engaged with your app and results in much more profitable user acquisition over the long run.

It’s also extremely challenging: many metrics on mobile app retention show that less than 10% of users you acquire on day 1 are still active in your app on day 30.

Retention can be calculated as the number of users you have at the beginning of the period divided by the number of users at the end of the period:

Retention = (Users at end of the period – users acquired during the period) / Number of customers at the start of the period) x 100

User retention is essential to any mobile app for several key reasons, namely:

• It costs much more to acquire new customers than to retain existing users 
• Retaining customers over the long run results in a higher customer lifetime value

There are several tactics that marketers use to retain users including paid advertising, email marketing, and so on. Regardless of which channel you use, Storyly highlights the importance of user retention and loyal users:

Maintaining app retention is important because once the user deletes an app, they’re not likely to download it again. The loyal users, on the other hand, are your potential customers to boost mobile marketing campaigns, which costs less than acquisition. These customers prove to be more profitable because of their app retention.

In particular, user retention campaigns fall into the following 9 categories:

• Awareness
• Onboarding
• Transactional
• Promotional
• Referral
• Upsell
• Updates
• Feedback

As with any type of marketing campaign, analyzing and optimizing your results over time is essential for success.

As a leader in marketing analytics and mobile attribution, Singular enables marketers to easily track and improve the performance of their retention campaigns. With Singular, you can use the Retention page to track and analyze user retention patterns for your products.

As highlighted in our retention FAQ page, Singular defines and calculates retention as follows:

“Retained Users Xd” – the number of users who have remained active X days after the conversion.

In summary, user retention is an essential part of any app marketing campaign as it can drastically lower your overall cost of acquisition and increase your customer lifetime value. Singular enables marketers to track and optimize the results of their user retention campaigns with granular marketing analytics and campaign performance data.