How To Grow & Retain Your Mobile App Users With A Feedback Engine [7-Step Guide]

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Given how challenging it is to get people's’ attention, how do you build a scalable, repeatable process for attracting users?  


Rapid. User. Insights. 


Just one touchpoint with a customer can trans-form the long-term health of your mobile experience. Localytics found that apps that send in-app messages to users on their first visit (or session) see only 13% of those users abandon the app after one use. Whereas, 25% of users who were not shown the in-app message on their first session, don’t return. 


You have to keep audiences engaged at various touchpoints and throughout their life cycles. 


 Here are 7 point-by-point tips and examples to help you create a low-tech, customizable mobile app insights program of your own.

How Do You Build an App that Literally Hooks People?

Utilize Web Traffic from Mobile Devices to Drive Demand for your Mobile App

How To Grow & Retain Your Mobile App Users With A Feedback Engine [7-Step Guide]

Over 50% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. 


Your presence online is one cohesive experience, which means that you need to create a bridge between all devices that audiences use to access your app. Once you’re ready to launch your mobile app (or if you have one already and are looking to promote it), you can use a website overlay to target audiences coming from a mobile device. Within your announcement, list the benefits of your mobile app and have your call-to-action to download your mobile app. 


If you’re struggling with downloads, you can offer an incentive for downloading your app such as a Starbucks or an Amazon gift card. You can also encourage your users to share the app.

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Here's an example:

The idea is to equip audiences with resources that help them use your product or service to its fullest capability. Your mobile app is one part of the experience that your company creates.

Gather Key Insights During Onboarding

How To Grow & Retain Your Mobile App Users With A Feedback Engine [7-Step Guide]

After going through the legwork to get users to download your mobile app, use your onboarding moments wisely. Your users’ first interac-tions with your app is a prime time to gather key insights that will help you develop strategies to drive more users to your app in the future. 


Let’s start with the story of Lalamove


Lalamove is an Asian logistics company that specializes in intra-city deliveries. Founded in 2013, the company operates in more than 110 cities across Asia. This expansion has taken place in five years, since the company’s founding in Hong Kong. Lalamove’s technology connects hundreds of thousands of customers with tens of thousands of vehicles including motorcycles, vans, and trucks. 


Lalamove has been aggressively collecting insights to make sure that its customer acquisition channels are connecting the right audiences to its app. Lalamove uses many marketing channels and is a lean organization. Insights are crucial at onboarding. 


Lalamove runs a survey that is mandatory to take upon sign up, which helps the company better understand traffic drivers to its appli-cation. The company cross-references this information with customer lifetime value (LTV) data. 

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Through simple questions, tailored to specific audiences and interac-

tions, Lalamove is able to answer questions like: 

“Are users who found out about Lalamove through a friend more likely to stay a customer longer?”

The answers you receive from your mobile app users can vary dramatically from your desktop web visitors so it’s important to understand the dynamics of these users. 


These answers are golden for your marketing team to develop new strategies on outreach based on what is working. 

Use Gathered Insights to Personalize Experiences

How To Grow & Retain Your Mobile App Users With A Feedback Engine [7-Step Guide]

Through key insights you’ve gathered in onboarding (Step #2), and through demographic and behavioral characteristics of the user, you should be able to better refine your mobile app experiences to the needs of each person you onboard.


The data that you collect during onboarding will enable you to do things like: 

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The key to getting started with personalization is by having a baseline understanding of who your web visitors are and why they have come to your website. 


Based on this data, you can begin to develop buyer personas and why they’ve chosen to spend time visiting your website.

The answers you receive from your mobile app users can vary dramatically from your desktop web visitors so it’s important to understand the dynamics of these users. 


These answers are golden for your marketing team to develop new strategies on outreach based on what is working. 

Address the user with their name upon signing in. 


Customize the background image based on the city they’re signing in from. 


Offer content that is relevant to what they’ve searched on your website like information on a feature or a help article. 

Create Push Notifications that Delight, Rather than Annoy Audiences

How To Grow & Retain Your Mobile App Users With A Feedback Engine [7-Step Guide]

Push notifications have the potential to drive users away. One research study found that 71% of app uninstalls are because of push notifications. Another study found that more than half of app users find push notifications annoying. 


But push notifications are also found to be effective—they have been known to boost app engagement by 88%. So how do you make a push notification valuable, rather than distracting, to your audiences? From a strategic standpoint, you’re walking a fine line in terms of making an experiences valuable vs. annoying. There are a few parameters that can help make your push notifications more useful:

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If you’re looking for an interesting example, take a look at the Curiosity app (or read about it here). Curiosity is a media content app that aggregates interesting content from a variety of trustworthy sources on the Internet. 


The website’s mission is to help people learn about topics that interest them in very short spurts of time. Right there, during onboarding, people pick what time of day, what day(s) of the week they’ll receive a push notification. The content is also tailored to their interests. Users are in complete control of the push notifications that they receive, what content they will see, and when they will receive a message from Curiosity.

Ensure that they meet a user’s need and are an integral part, rather an a promotional element, of an app’s core experience


Consider the location of your customers so that you're providing value at an important moment in time—if you’re a manufacturer or retailer of a product, you may consider sending location-triggered push notifications with coupons or offers that gets foot traffic in the door


Personalize push notifications around specific needs and interests


Give audiences an opportunity to share feedback and a clear path to adjusting the types and number of push notifications they receive

Build Incentive, Loyalty, and Reward Models that Drive More Users to Your App

How To Grow & Retain Your Mobile App Users With A Feedback Engine [7-Step Guide]

If applicable, give people a discount (example, an onboarding discount) in exchange for trying and spending time with your app. You can even include a refer-a-friend program. Introduce a loyalty program for repeat purchases. Whether your incentives are freemiums, interesting content or monetary rewards, try to understand what gives your target audience a reason to come back to your app. 


 Every audience is different and will find different incentives appealing. Use research to determine what these incentives should be for your buyer personas. 

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Here are a few examples of mobile apps that do a great job with freemium, monetary, and refer-a-friend incentives to try on your own:

Implement a Pulse Check throughout your User’s Lifecycle with Net Promoter Scores (NPS)

How To Grow & Retain Your Mobile App Users With A Feedback Engine [7-Step Guide]

Being able to quantify how people feel about your app will help deter-

mine where you need to make improvements, what value propositions 

to highlight in your messaging, and what tone of voice you should use to communicate. 


 NPS is an actionable metric, designed to capture sentiment in the form of one question: “on a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this product or service to a friend or colleague?” 


You can implement next steps based on the scores your users have given you. You can use these scores to build segments, based on how much enthusiasm people show for your company. Your app’s users will naturally fall into the following groups:

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Promoters. When a user has rated you a 9 or a 10, you can implement a next step to rate your app in the app store. This is a good way to maximize on your happy customers and build your customer rating. 


Detractors. Activating on your Detractors upon giving a score is key to improving your NPS in the future. When a detractor comes through, you can create an alert that is sent to your customer success Slack channel with a call to action to respond. 


 Passives. This is a great group to send to your product team to respond. Although they don’t hate your app, they’re not in love with it and so now is the perfect opportunity is to ask how to improve. 

Continue Conversations Across Multiple Devices

How To Grow & Retain Your Mobile App Users With A Feedback Engine [7-Step Guide]

The last thing you want to do is treat your mobile app as a silo part of your business. You want to make sure you connect the dots between mobile app to mobile web to desktop and vice versa to create a seam-less, integrated experience for your users. This will also help you personalize experiences and understand frictions points. 


If you see that a user has visited your mobile app and later visited your website via mobile device, ask why. Did something go wrong in your mobile app that they needed to visit your website? It could be that your mobile app is missing a core feature. 

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Create a Continuous Feedback Loop And Make Sure it's Awesome

As you build your mobile app user base, create a continuous feedback loop between your app and your users. Don’t wait to send a long form survey months aer they start using your app. Customize touch points throughout the user’s life cycle and reward users for their feedback.


What business questions should you study? Here is a list worth 

examining on an ongoing basis:

What friction points are arising, and why?


How are my most engaged user bases finding out about my app?


How can I create push notifications that re-engages, rather than creating a distraction?


Am I creating an opportunity for users to get to know my app and company, in the level of detail that they want, at every touchpoint?


Does my user experience add value rather than create extra obstacles?


Do my processes for collecting feedback pose a barrier?

One way that the Qualaroo team sees companies strengthening the mobile user experience is by integrating your feedback data with tools that your customer success, sales and marketing and product teams use so your entire organization understands what is happening on the mobile app side and prevents it from being a silo part of your business.


Qualaroo has mastered the mobile experience for in app feedback engines. 


Want to see surveys in action? Get access to over 20 proven surveys for mobile with out FREE Showcase App:

Want to talk to a feedback expert? Contact us today.

demo@qualaroo.com 1-888-449-3364