4 Facts About User Retention in Mobile Apps

October 29, 2015
 
Ashley Rondeau

Remember the 10 mobile app metrics you need to track? We want to put a spotlight on one of our favorites: retention. Many argue that this metric is the one to rule them all because a high retention rate is what keeps you in business. The more customers you keep, the healthier your company is. Recently, there have been some greats insights into this metric in the mobile world that you might not be aware of. Here are 4 facts you need to know about mobile user retention.

1. Organic-sourced users have higher retention rates.

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A new study by AppsFlyer revealed that retention rates for (non-gaming) users gained through organic sources were much higher than the retention rates users gained through paid ads. Sure, this makes sense: if a user is organically searching for an app, he or she is more likely to really want to keep that app.
What is surprising is the stark difference in the 30 Day Retention Rate. As seen above, for Apple app users, there is a 133% higher retention rate for organic over paid. For Android, it was 156% higher. This is a huge difference! Knowing this, how does this affect your app marketing strategy when looking for more loyal users? Knowing this difference between a new user from AdWords compared to a new user from Facebook, do you need to readjust your marketing spend? At the very least, this should have you thinking twice about optimizing your marketing channels for retention.

2. Twitter drives the highest organic retention rates.

The same study by AppsFlyer revealed that Twitter was a surprise behemoth as an organic channel for new, loyal users. For example, on Android, Twitter showed a 25% higher user retention than users sourced from AdWords, giving it the top spot over all acquisition sources for retention.
Why are users sourced from Twitter so much more loyal? It’s hard to say, though we can speculate that it has to do with the unique way brands and users interact on the social media platform. Twitter is where people go to have a near real-time conversation with brands. It feels more intimate than both Facebook or LinkedIn. Because brands can directly communicate with users in this way, those who choose to install an app they see on Twitter may make a more conscious choice (ie. high user intent) which leads to higher retention rates.
Whatever it may be, don’t underestimate your app’s Twitter presence for this reason.

3. The jury is out on why users delete apps.

In August 2015, Millward Brown Digital published the results of a survey of over 2,000 mobile app users. One of the questions asked was “why have you deleted apps from your smartphone?” 72% answered that it was because they rarely used that app. Fair enough.
Then just this month, ITR released a survey of 4,000 smartphone users who answered in a completely different way:
Why do people delete mobile apps
Source: tnooz.com
As you can see, the top reason, with 50.6% of the vote, was that the app “took up too much storage.” Amazingly, the reason of: “didn’t use them” actually came in dead last. And if that wasn’t confusing enough, TechCruch wrote in 2013 that uninstalls were most heavily influenced by buggy apps.
What’s going on here? Different audiences? Was the question asked in different ways?
We think it’s just that users are very fickle and very precious with their time and screen space. After all, retention rates fall to near 3% after 30 days across all app verticals (from AppsFlyer data), so it’s a tough issue to suss out overall. But the thing to keep in mind is that any advantage you can gain to increase retention by even 1% can put you miles ahead of your competition.

4. Being the squeaky wheel might be that advantage.

A new study by Appboy has shown that multi-channel messaging increases new customer retention by 130%, compared to just 71% from single push campaigns. In other words, those brands that sent more than just one push notification to get customers to finish onboarding didn’t retain users nearly as well as brands that also messaged users via email or in-app messaging. Multiple reminders seem to increase retention.
Of course, this is walking a knife’s edge. Too many messages and users will get annoyed and never come back; too few and retention goes down. This is just another reason companies need to be diligent about testing and analyzing metrics constantly to see what strategies are leading to higher loyalty rates.
Retention still remains a difficult key metric, especially as the app marketplace only grows more crowded. We at the Farm find success by creating the best apps we can for our clients, strategically marketing them to the right audience, and minding our metrics. What helps your company retain your app users?

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

From Gaming Apps to Enterprise Apps – Mobile Games Forum Seattle 2015

October 21, 2015
 
Dan Katcher

Source: @gamesforum
Such a pleasure to be out at the Mobile Games Forum in Seattle this week, joining a plethora of like-minded geeks who love gaming apps.  Sure, Rocket Farm is taking on more and more enterprise-level apps and teaming with large companies to build business apps for the market and for their employees, so why are we gushing about games?  Because games are fun.  And games are beautiful.  And games – to be successful – must be intuitive, and easy, and engaging, and viral.  And guess what: all of these attributes are things you’d really want in your app even if you are working on a serious enterprise-level sales team enablement tool or a new social network for the masses.
The lessons we learned today from these amazing game developers are perfectly applicable when it comes to developing our bread and butter: enterprise tools, lifestyle apps, utility apps, and other “serious” apps, and we want to share them with you. And what better place to start than the very first talk from Paul Brownlow of GameHouse / Blastworks, which makes the Slingo family of games.  Paul shared some of his key insights for making successful mobile games, and with each point I was struck (yes struck!) by just how amazingly applicable it was to developing non-gaming apps as well.

From Gaming Apps to Enterprise Apps

1) Share the metrics throughout your organization so everyone is focused on the same picture.  In gaming apps, KPIs tend to be user acquisition cost, life time value, daily active users, retention rate, and more.  Hmm, those all sound like the same things you’d want when you’re monitoring app adoption for an internal enterprise tool or a lifestyle app.  The advantage gained from having your whole organization focused on the metrics can’t be understated.  How can you determine success without first defining success as a quantitative level? You need to make sure you can measure it, and then figure out how to act on it.  Getting everyone involved in those metrics is crucial.
2) Use known mechanics.  In games, the riskiest part to develop is the core game play mechanics.  Why not take that risk out of the equation by copying a mechanic that is known to work!   Think Crossy Road to Frogger.   Candy Crush is most definitely not the first match-three puzzle game that’s ever existed.   What can we learn from that?  How many login / registration / user password recovery paths are there?  Just copy the successful ones.  What works for social networks like Facebook and Instagram will probably be a great starting point for you!
3) Simplify simplify simplify your experience and don’t optimize too early.  Cardinal rule of game design is to make it easy.  Easy to understand, easy to learn how to play, and so on.  Only when it’s simple and easy (and fun), do you start to optimize to increase sessions, engagement, etc. all on the way to optimizing player spend.  What’s true in games is true in other app based businesses.  Don’t optimize anything until the experience is simple and engagement and hitting the KPIs of session, retention and virality. Once you have traction, then optimize away.
4) Get users as cheap as you can, then keep them.  Enough said.  In games or outside of them, you have to think through innovative and creative ways of acquiring users and you have to work to retain them.  See step 3.
5) Play your own games. Seems obvious, but it’s great advice. How else would you know that they are fun?  Play with your own apps with every release at the conclusion of every sprint. Your entire team should be using and testing the app on a daily basis, on phones and tablets. QA starts on your home couch.
6) Know your player. Who’s the persona?  In game world, you are either designing for kids, for moms, for males age 20-40 (generally). Whoever it is, you have to start out by knowing your player. The Same thing is true in the app world, which is why we always start our design process with personas.
7) Think mobile first. We couldn’t agree more.
What other lessons are there in gaming apps that can be applied when designing enterprise apps? Let us know what you think!

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

3 Ways Apple’s 3D Touch Shakes Up Mobile Development

October 13, 2015
 
Ashley Rondeau
By now, you might already be enamored with Apple’s new 3D Touch technology that comes with the iPhone 6s. In short, the new smartphones can detect three levels of pressure, which has transformed the simple act of touching the screen into one of “depth” which allows for different actions for basically the same gesture.
iphone-410311_640Source: Apple
As app developers, we’re half “yay!” for new, innovative technology that keeps things interesting and offers fantastic new ways of interacting with a rectangular slate; and half “sigh” for all the changes we’ll see that shakes up the status quo. Of course, if we didn’t expect constant change, we wouldn’t be in the business of making awesome apps, so it’s more yay than sigh. But, just how will Apple’s new tech shake up our industry? Here are three ways we think 3D Touch will change our landscape.

1. Clicks just got more precious.

Arguably, the main feature of 3D Touch is “Peek and Pop,” with heavy emphasis on the Peek. Now, apps or links won’t launch on just any press. Rather, a light press will give users a preview (a peek) of the images or addresses, and deep pressing on a link will actually provide a preview image of the ensuing website.
So all of a sudden, users won’t actually need to click-and-go to get their content. After all, we can easily imagine many instances where all a user might need is a preview of a site to get everything he or she needs to know. Oh an Amazon link to a dress? *press* Nah, don’t like the color.
Is mobile about to see a drop in clicks? This could spell trouble for businesses that rely on steady traffic, not to mention the absolute headache this might cause for the desperate online marketers trying to track “peeks” instead of clicks. If URLs no longer need to be launched for consumers to get information, we expect to see click-through-rates take a tumble on mobile. Deep-linking might be more important than ever before.
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2. Google’s got some search competition.

As soon as we heard about Peek and Pop, we thought Apple would be pushing their own services to the forefront. Sure enough, when you peek an address, it uses Apple Maps (even if you have Google Maps installed); and when you peek a link you peek it in Safari.
It makes sense, sure. Apple wants to make sure its new technology works and utilizing its own app ecosystem is the smart way to go. And we fully expect to be able to eventually Peek and Pop into more and more 3rd party apps, even from native Apple apps. But we’re not paranoid. Even readwrite.com picked up on this and mentioned what we’re thinking:
“The limitation here is people’s attention spans. As users gravitate towards a few familiar apps, and download fewer and fewer new ones over time, Pops and Peeks augur a future where they spend more time in their favored apps and only take the briefest of glances at other ones.”
Apple’s no dummy. And you can bet Google is very wary of native app to native app peeking and popping, and how that will affect traffic to its own apps and sites.

3. Navigation has just been solved… Sorry app home screens.

One of the toughest parts of app design is managing navigation. From long presses to hamburger menus to even creating separate stand-alone apps, developers have had to get creative to make app navigation easy and intuitive.
And then this comes along:
Facebook 3D Touch
Source: Engadget
Yes, simply using 3D Touch on the app icon itself on your home screen can now bring up a menu to jump you to exactly where you want to go. Sure, it’s limited, but it’s a pretty big game changer for us app developers. To put it another way, Apple just deemphasized the importance of your app’s home screen in one fell swoop.
Launching Facebook doesn’t necessarily have to take you to the feed anymore, as in the example above. As more and more apps follow suit, we’re going to see more fragmentation of how users enter the same app. This is fairly unprecedented in the mobile world and we think will be one of the bigger stories to follow in the coming months.
As always, Apple says “touch” and we say “how deep?”
What do you think about Apple’s new 3D touch technology? Sound off in the comments below!
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So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

4 Updates to Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) for App Developers

October 6, 2015
 
Ashley Rondeau

If you’re a fairly big Android fan like us (well, those of us on the team that aren’t total Apple fanboys), you’ve probably already downloaded the factory images for Android’s latest OS update rolling out starting yesterday: 6.0 dubbed Marshmallow. We’ve had a chance to play around with it and… it’s not bad! Some new features are cool (On Tap! Doze!), some are not (oh, vertical scroll on the app drawer…), and some are head scratchers (Adoptable Storage for SD cards? We guess Samsung Galaxy owners might care).
However, there are a few updates that will directly affect Android app developers. Let’s dive into 4 Marshmallow updates that you need to know about.

1. Google Now on Tap

Google Now has been Android’s answer to Apple’s Siri since the Jelly Bean era (2012), and it was great. Press a button or say “Ok Google” and you could use it to search by voice, or let it display relevant cards (to your location) on your Google Now screen. Now on Tap goes a step further and integrates 3rd party apps. It’s pretty fun playing with it, and gadgets.ndtv.com has a good description of how it’s used if you’re curious.
now_on_tap_ndtv_1The take away for developers is pretty big: now that Google Now, a ubiquitous Android feature that users frequent, supports 3rd party apps, you’ll want to make sure your app plays nicely with the ecosystem. Since Now on Tap can generate cards based on text and links within your app, it’s very important you’ve implemented app indexing if you already haven’t (and if you haven’t, what are you waiting for?). Also, since Google suggests apps to launch for various searches, you’ll want to position your app to appear in these cases.
Keep an eye out for more information on integrating with Now on Tap in the coming weeks. Google has stated that “developers will be able to take extra steps to mark up their apps and make them even more effective with the system.” Meanwhile, read up on “Assist API” to see the nuts and bolts of how it all works.

2. Google Voice for 3rd Parties

“Ok Google” has become a popular way of launching apps, but the latest Android can do more than just open your app. Now the updated Voice Interaction API allows your app to plug into the Google app that handles “Ok Google,” which enables two-way dialog.

tunein-interactionFor example, a user could say “Ok Google, play music with Spotify,” and the app could ask “What artist?” This is pretty big: your app can now talk back to the user, ask contextual questions, and become that much more useful. Sure it’s a little limited. From our research, it seems your app can only choose from a number of voice commands Google already offers, but this is definitely something to keep tabs on. As this new feature expands, voice commands could be the next major way users interact with your app.

3. On-demand Permissions

For the first time, users can deny or allow specific permissions an app asks for. Basically, they can check off whether your app can access Location, Storage, Camera, etc. Here’s a look at how a user can switch off whether an app can access the camera or not.

Android-6.0-Marshmallow-permission-managerThis is a great move by Google as they continue to give users more and more control over their privacy, but we app developers should think about what this change means. Now we can’t ask for a block of permissions at the get-go of a download. This will definitely affect the more nefarious app businesses out there, but even those on the up-and-up have to consider whether they really need certain permissions or at least be ready to explain exactly why they’re needed. Google suggests “updating apps and testing out the new API libraries…so that any issues and bugs can be ironed out,” so heed that warning and make sure your app’s permissions play nice with this new update.

4. Fingerprint API

 Sure, there aren’t any devices with both a fingerprint sensor and Marshmallow (only Nexus devices have the updated OS and sensor-equipped ones aren’t out yet), but that just gives app developers more time to build in this feature. Most likely, if your app already exists on iOS, you’re familiar with how this will work. This is just Google officially providing an API to unify how apps interact with the eventual sensors on their hardware. Basically, Google doesn’t want Samsung to muck up with their OEM solutions. Nothing earth-shattering, but it’s nice to see this finally come to Android.

Did we miss any new Marshmallow features that devs should keep an eye on? Sound off in the comments below!

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So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.