How to boost retention rates in 2024 with mobile retargeting
With economic uncertainty, increased competition and constantly-evolving privacy regulations, it’s harder than ever for app businesses to turn a profit
Our team at Remerge recently created a comprehensive guide to in-app retargeting, along with many other useful resources. We’ve condensed these materials into this article to bring you our top five tips to boost your app’s retention rates into 2024.
1. Prevent early churn to capitalize on a record year of in-app sales
Studies show that globally, 74% of app users drop off one day after installing an app, with only 6% remaining active by the 30th day. This retention decline can drastically impact revenue, particularly if your mobile business relies on in-app purchases – which are set to hit a new industry record in 2024 by surpassing the $260bn.
On average, 1,798 new apps hit the play store every day and 1,118 make it onto the Apple store. This means the bar for retaining users is getting higher and your opportunity to tap into in-app purchase revenue could be getting smaller.
Retargeting will help you combat early churn – when a new user immediately uninstalls your app without completing an in-app action. The data speaks for itself: those exposed to retargeting ads within 30 days of installation typically generate 37% more revenue events than those who are not retargeted at all. The same study concluded that retargeted users have a 152% higher engagement rate overall.
2. Loyalty and reward programs shouldn’t be one-off campaigns
Unlike other platforms, the app environment enables many creative ways to incentivize the purchasing of goods, services and subscriptions. However, not all brands use them to their best advantage. Many mobile businesses rush into launching loyalty and reward programs, under the assumption that these initiatives will grow organically and help to retain loyal users. However, to achieve long-term retention, it’s just as important to maintain regular marketing touchpoints with customers through retargeting ads, in order to foster community building and brand recall.
During an episode of the Apptivate podcast on engagement and retention for top apps, Tara Kirkpatrick, a mobile trends analyst at Apptopia, said: “Earning a reward is, in itself, a rewarding experience for humans because we’re innately geared towards progress. If you can incentivize action and make that experience fun, or use a bit of scarcity so that the experience becomes a little bit more exciting, then that’s where you’re going to drive acquisition, activation, and then long-term engagement.”
3. Think about new in-app conversion goals – not just user acquisition
Acquiring new customers is more difficult when you’ve already captured a large chunk of your addressable market, or when your app is operating in an industry saturated by competitors. We also know that acquiring a user does not guarantee purchases. This is where in-app retargeting campaigns come in to help you achieve other goals and objectives.
Reports show that time spent on smartphones increased from 2019 to 2022 across all regions, from North America, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, to Africa and Asia-Pacific. As device usage increases, so will the volume of global ad engagements. Retargeting campaigns are a great way to capitalize on this and help you guide your users to the next stage of your sales funnel.
With this in mind, it’s important to avoid spending too much of your 2024 app marketing budget on user acquisition campaigns. A good chunk should be reserved for retargeting, so you can build loyalty and drive revenue from your existing user base. A few retargeting campaigns you could try include:
- Reminding users to complete a purchase if they have abandoned their shopping cart.
- Encouraging users to complete an account registration after installing an app.
- Encouraging users to sign up for a paid subscription after their free trial has ended.
- Getting mobile gamers to unlock a new character or new game level, generating engagement and loyalty for the game.
4. Stay up to date with privacy regulations and adjust your retargeting strategies for the rollout of Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative
New tools, technologies and regulations are establishing safer standards of data usage in the mobile advertising industry. The tracking of user data and the ability to target specific users on Android has traditionally been centered around unique device IDs, (known as the GAID), which Google aims to deprecate by 2024 to keep up with increasing demands for user privacy.
Together, with industry players such as Remerge, Google is working to build a privacy-safe advertising framework for Android called the Privacy Sandbox. This initiative will let advertisers run in-app retargeting campaigns much like before, only without the user’s personal data leaving their device and being sent to the advertisers. To prepare for this industry change, app-based businesses must stay informed about the latest developments and should consider working with mobile advertising partners who have the technical setup to run privacy-compliant campaigns.
To get the latest updates on how mobile advertising privacy is changing on both Android and iOS, be sure to check out Remerge’s Mobile Privacy Newsroom – a centralized resource for the most important privacy developments.
5. Scale and quality of inventory still matter when picking a demand side platform (DSP) as an advertising partner
When it comes to programmatic in-app advertising, app businesses need to work with a DSP. On behalf of the app business, the DSP bids on and buys in-app ad placements from a virtual marketplace. DSPs with high scale (the amount of potential ad placements they have access to via their supply network), will have a better chance of locating an app’s existing users, whom they can then show retargeting ads to.
It’s also worth picking a DSP that works with a diverse range of quality supply partners (SSPs). This allows the DSP to work with and optimize toward a significant volume of data points, such as your audience’s personal attributes, mobile operating system or the media type/format of an ad creative.
Summary
As the economy continues to struggle, retargeting remains a crucial way to help app businesses boost retention rates and bring in recurring revenue in 2024. A key approach is to address churn before it happens by retargeting users from day one of installation. It’s also important to use reward programs as part of a longer term strategy for brand loyalty – and to consider other re-engagement goals like account registration or checkout completion in order to move customers through your sales funnel.
However, to achieve this with retargeting, marketers must stay up to date with the latest privacy regulations and work with an experienced mobile advertising partner with the scale and sophistication to locate, reach and convert your users through in-app advertising.
Tips, benchmarks and best practices on all of these topics can be found in our comprehensive guide to in-app retargeting and our mobile privacy newsroom.