Five Key Practices For Retaining Your Mobile Customers

You know your mobile app is the most valuable channel for engaging your customers. You also know it’s not cheap to acquire those customers. But if you want a long-term relationship with them, you need to commit to this as a core part of your strategy and support it with a few critical practices.

1. Capture Feedback – Analytics is not enough. You need to give your customers ways to tell you what’s wrong with your app, ideally before they shout it in ALL CAPS in a 1-star review in the app store. Personally respond to critical feedback in the app store and prioritize fixing issues that your customers surface. 

2. Release Regularly – You need to push a new release of your app at least once a month. This is your best way to respond to user feedback, fix broken things, and introduce new features. A consistent, long-running history of regular releases in the app store sends a strong signal to your customers that you care. 

3. Meet Expectations – There is a baseline of good user experience patterns and practices for mobile apps and you should get these right. For example, for numeric inputs like phone number, provide the numeric keyboard. While many patterns are shared across Android and iOS, the differences matter to users so don’t just design for iOS and slap it onto your Android app. 

4. Remember Why – Don’t lose sight of the main value proposition that brought customers to your mobile app to begin with. That value proposition is the hero of your story and should never be crowded out by lesser features and marketing content that is more about you than it is the needs of your customer. 

5. Spice it Up – Disrupt the normal programming with delightful things. It could be as simple as an icon refresh, but even a cosmetic update can be enough to show customers that you still care and that they are using an app that is always evolving.