Say it Loud! I Resolve to Re-engage My Mobile Users

By Sam Szczesny-Dale | January 8, 2016

The holidays are over and a new year has begun. If you’re like most mobile marketers, you just wrapped up a huge push to acquire new users, many of whom unwrapped a shiny new mobile device and are ready to engage. And why wouldn’t you? With people installing more than 2x as many apps than usual, the holidays are a great time to spend big on app install campaigns.

But what to do with all of those holiday app installs? Some converted but most didn’t. Now is the time to double down on your holiday marketing spend and start converting those installs into high quality, active users. Easier said than done, right? Localytics recently found that 58% of app users churn within the first 30 days of downloading an app, while 75% churn within 90 days. Other sources report even higher churn rates.

Creating a strategy to re-engage with your users is key to reducing churn and increasing engagement in your app. And the more focused you are in getting users to re-engage in high value events inside your app, the better.

On mobile, re-engagement strategies typically involve a mix of push notifications, retargeting ads and even the more traditional email. While push notifications and email each have their own advantages in driving app engagement, their impact is limited in that a majority of app users opt-out of receiving notifications or don’t bother to read email.

Mobile retargeting ads, on the other hand, are the only sure fire way to guarantee that you can reconnect with your mobile users, even if they deleted your app from their phone. Plus re-engagement ads can be customized based upon where a user dropped off in your funnel, making them incredibly effective in driving engagement.

What really stands out about mobile retargeting is just how efficient it is. Based on internal research of 60+ mobile retargeting campaigns across a wide spectrum of app categories, we found that post-install conversion rates increased as much as 60% by adding retargeting. We also found that the average cost-per-first-action decreased by 40%.

Kick off 2016 by giving yourself the greatest gift of all, a re-engagement strategy geared toward turning your holiday installs into an engaged and loyal user base.