Overview
In this lesson, you'll learn how to define and re-engage dormant users. Create Audiences of dormant users and bring them back to your app using push and remarketing campaigns.
Why it matters
On average 58% of app users churn in the first 30 days after downloading an app. Over the first three months, 75% of app users will churn. App marketing tactics like push notifications, email marketing, and remarketing are critical to reengaging users with relevant, valuable content. You can use these tools to remind high-risk users why they downloaded your app in the first place, and to re-surface new and other useful content.
Think about re-engagement as a cascading funnel of tactics starting with push, following up with email, and tying it together with re-marketing. Approaching reengagement this way provides a variety of channels for users to engage with your offers, while minimizing cost. Executing these marketing campaigns with personalized messaging will increase your odds of having a successful re-engagement.
How-to guide
The following steps will walk you through how to strategically combine engagement channels to effectively re-engage dormant users.
Step 1: Define dormant users
The first step in re-engaging users is to define who you consider “dormant” or “inactive.” How you define dormant or inactive users depends largely on your business and what metrics you track internally; businesses that run on monthly subscriptions often label users dormant after 30 days of inactivity, whereas a weekly newspaper business may label users inactive after just seven days.
While defining inactive users ultimately differs business by business, many of our customers define dormant users in one of two ways:
- 30 days of inactivity. This is often a good definition for users who have been onboarded and become a regular user of your app. If someone goes from using your app a few times a week to less than once a month, it’s time to re-engage.
- 7 days of inactivity. For users who haven’t completed onboarding or are new to your app, you should re-engage them sooner. Our recent research suggests a strong negative correlation between the number of app Sessions (a basic unit of measurement for apps) and user churn. In other words, the more Sessions app users complete in the first 30 days after downloading an app, the less likely they are to become inactive, so get those push campaigns going!
Step 2: Create an Audience
Once you’ve defined dormancy, create an Audience of these users to apply to all your cross-channel marketing campaigns. Learn how to create an Audience here.
Step 3: Create a push campaign
Push messaging should be a go-to tool for prompting conversions as it surfaces up different offers, content and campaigns to the user. Consider offering one free week of an all-access subscription. Give users a taste of what access to the full app experience would be like - for free! They’ll be interested in the special (free) offer and might find more value out of complete access.
Step 4: Bring it home with Remarketing
Enlist Remarketing ads to reach high-risk users on the web or via social networks like Facebook. Remarketing is a great way to target users who have turned off push permissions or even uninstalled your app. Target users in the original audience who didn’t convert on either of the previous two offers. Consider offering one free month of the subscription service. Here’s where you pull out the big guns; Remarketing is the most costly of these marketing tactics, so we advise only spending the additional money to target “holdouts” with one big offer - a free month of your subscription service.
Step 5: Measure and optimize
As with all engagement campaigns, test, test, test! Measure the success of your engagement campaigns using control groups and A/B testing. Optimize based on these results to run even more successful omni-channel re-engagement campaigns.
Key takeaways
- To create the best relationships with your users, create cohesive, relevant and interesting cross-channel re-engagement experiences.
- Minimize cost by creating a drip campaign moving users through a funnel of push and re-marketing campaigns.