Series Growth Hacker? Marketing your app is not an extra task 5/6

Close the loop: retention and optimization

In the previous step, we saw that we must engineer the app or service growth to go viral. However, once we see growth, even a big one, it does not mean we are done. At this point, the question we should carefully answer is: “do the users actually stick?”. This is one of the most important metrics. When you look for investors they will surely ask how many users did you acquire and how many of them are actually active and returning to your service over time. Most of the time achieving users retention means repeating the previous steps of this series over and over, as fast as possible, using the information we collect at each iteration to improve. For more details we give the floor to the ‘The old way’ and ‘The new way’!
Series Growth Hacker? Marketing your app is not an extra task 4/6 - Retention et optimisation

The talk-show

MobileThinking: “A warm welcome to everybody! Today we explain to our audience terms like conversion rate, ‘churn’, and the impact of internal procedures on marketing decision. ‘The old way’ what can you tell us about this important step?

The old way’: “Oh churning, it is still a fascinating activity. In our milk company, we still produce butter by churning by hand milk and cream, so delicious, amazing!”

The new way’: “I can imagine! But here we are not talking about butter. We are talking about users that once acquired abandon or never re-use the service or app. The ‘churn rate’ is a very important metric that allows to understand if our app works and if our future changes or new features have a positive impact.”

MobileThinking: “Does it mean that we must be very conservative on how we evolve our app?

The new way’: “Yes and no, but we must do that intelligently. Yes, because we should be careful to not lose the core original users by denaturing our service. Adding or changing core features is hard and you must support it with data. For example, with an analysis on how your users use your platform. No, because, even if we reached product market fit, we most probably have a flaw, or several flaws in our service. We have to fix these flaws asap. And we have to do that using data that inform us on what to do. In both situations, our goal is always to find better and more profitable users. Users that use our service and keep using it."

MobileThinking: “But why, if we have a product that works, we do not simply put all our efforts, resources and money in sales and marketing?

The new way’: “To retain and convert users, arriving to our service via marketing campaigns, so that they become profitable users, we have to perfect the service itself. If the service does not fully work, we will acquire users, but lose them immediately. You can see that in the long term this is not a viable solution. We should invest in refining and improving the service itself to get the most out of the users that we are already driving to our service.”

MobileThinking: “Uhm can you give me some numbers to better grasp this concept?

The new way’ “Yes, very simple. If you can increase your customer retention by 5 percent you can impact your company profitability by 30%. I let you do the math yourselves.”

MobileThinking: “Ok, got it! Well thanks again to ‘The old way’ and ‘The new way’ for their illuminating contributions to this debate. We will meet them again for the last interview. For today's talk is all!
Design Sprint - Loyco & Piguet Galland
The major point to retain here is that once your mobile service or application is up and running, you acquired a certain number of dedicated users, and your are steadily growing, you can’t simply stop evolving and maintaining your product. You still have to invest to find out what are its weak points and to perfect it. At MobileThinking, we offer maintenance plans and we always help to conceive applications that can evolve over time. During the conception phases with our workshops or design Sprints we prepare you to be able to evolve your app. We perfected our development cycles to easily integrate and measure the impact of features and we apply the refinement cycle from the first day we start to develop your service.

Next week, in the last article of this series, we will wrap up everything we covered in these series of articles so stay tuned for the ultimate growth hacking summary!

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