Top Tips to Improve Your Mobile App Retention Efforts

You can ask anyone who has been operating in the SEO industry about whether or not it’s possible to trick the search engines to boost rankings and they’ll tell you it’s not possible. While you may have been able to get away with it in the past, you can’t do it any longer. The algorithms are far more advanced than ever before. You won’t be able to achieve high rankings by attempting to ‘game’ the search engines any longer. Your website needs to be quality and responsive. It needs to have relevant and useful content. The same is true if you are talking about apps within the mobile marketplace.

The Google Play Store is one of the most popular mobile marketplaces you’ll find. They have the same type of algorithm that ensures the best apps are easy to find at the top of the rankings. However, you may be wondering how they go about ranking apps in the store. Apptaura can help you if you are aiming to develop a mobile app.

Right now, the more important ranking signal is retention. Your retention numbers are going to dictate where your app ranks. If someone is using your app after 30 days, they are likely having a great experience with your mobile app. It’s performing as they expected and it’s living up to what they want from it. Therefore, Google marks this down and uses it to boost your rankings.

While the primary ranking signal used to be your app’s rating, that’s no longer the case. This is still an important criterion, but it’s no longer what’s primarily being used for ranking justification. Retention is the main focus for your ranking potential. Wondering how to boost your app’s retention efforts?

1. Making It Easy to Use

First and foremost, you need to make your app easy to use. Your app shouldn’t be difficult to use for anyone. Someone should be able to download your app and get the most out of it without any additional effort. No one should have to go through a ‘read-me’ or anything else to learn about how your app works. They should be able to intuitively navigate and get the most out of it. A lot of developers make the mistake of including instructions for their app. The fact is, no one is going to read the instructions. This is going to lead to them having a poor experience with your app. This will then lead to your retention efforts going downwards. By making the app intuitive, you’ll be able to boost your retention efforts and keep people using your app for longer. An android app development service can help.

2. Creating the Right Expectations

Another area where you should be focusing is on creating the right expectations. You don’t want to overstate what your app is capable of doing. No one wants to download an app that sounds amazing to find out that it cannot do half of what it advertises. Instead, you want to understate and overdeliver. As long as you are honest and transparent about what your app is capable of doing and what it’s not capable of doing, you should be able to keep more people using your apps. A lot of users will only look at screenshots and they will completely ignore the app’s description. Therefore, you need to be setting the right expectations within each.

3. Improving the Experience for First-Time Users

Another area you want to focus on is improving the experience for those who are just starting using your app. You don’t want to make the signup process a long, tedious, and difficult one. Ask for as little information as possible. No one wants to give out all of their personal information just to use a single app. Also, you want to make things easy to decrease the friction created throughout the entire process. If you can use social platforms as a sign-on method, a lot of app users will enjoy this because it makes the entire process much easier.

4. Invite Old Users Back

You want to create a push messaging campaign to try to get former users to start using your app again. Don’t spam them with offers, but you should try to win them back with incentives as they were interested enough in your app to download it in the first place.

5. Keep Things Fresh

Ideally, you want to update your app with new content and features regularly. This can keep your app interesting and it can keep people coming back to see what’s new.