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Meta Description: The answer to all your questions about customer churn and high attrition rates lies in the information you can glean from your users’ behaviour. This is where a product analytics platform comes into play — to help improve your product’s customer retention and boost loyalty.
It’s not unusual for users to uninstall an app or leave a negative review if they didn’t have a great experience. But when your product’s the one on the receiving end of this, it might drive you to question — what’s wrong?
Picture this: your product is the best it can be right now, and thanks to your marketing team, you’re able to pull in new users at a high rate. This means you and your team have mastered the art of customer attraction — but what about customer retention?
There are several aspects in your customer journey that you need to consider when building your strategy. Gaining users (acquisition) is simply step one of digital customer journeys. From there, a product needs to nurture, understand, and support the user and their needs at every step. To do this correctly, the people building the app (e.g., your developers) need information, i.e., analytics about how users interact with the app, their pain points, new features they’d like, and more.
Why bother with customer retention anyway?
Before we tell you how to identify the problems in your customer journey strategy that are leading to the high number of uninstalls, let’s talk about why customer retention is important in the first place. HBR says, “[…] acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.”
Suppose you care more about your customer’s lifetime value (CLV) than the cost it takes to acquire them. Then, it’s even more essential that you focus on customer retention just as much as customer acquisition. Customer retention spells loyalty; in the long run, a loyal customer is always worth more than a new one.
Additionally, higher customer retention shows social proof. New users are more likely to install your app or check out your product when they see older users still love it. Aren’t we all more likely to download an app with hundreds of thousands of downloads and a 4-star rating over an app with 100M downloads and a 2-star rating? That’s social proof in action.
How to identify why your users are uninstalling your app
To find out the reason for the uninstalls, you must first understand what your users are doing within the app. Now, this doesn’t mean you have to invade their privacy — the goal here is to correctly use a product analytics service to find out pain points, bugs, and any other issues that are causing friction for your users.
Perhaps your app is a bit complicated to figure out even after a tutorial — a product analytics dashboard that targets user behaviour on an individual level can tell you exactly where the problem starts for the user.
Or maybe, your users don’t know how to use all the great features built into your product. Clear and valuable push notifications that measure engagement might be the solution you need to help them properly understand what you’re offering.
Solution: Product analytics to tell you what’s wrong
We could give many examples that might tell you why your users could be uninstalling your app. However, the best way is for you to explore user behaviour in granular detail by integrating an analytics platform.
Choosing the right analytics platform for your product will help you figure out your churn rate (the number of users who don’t engage with your product anymore), how many users are using the product to its full potential, and those who love the product enough to upgrade.
Another great advantage to incorporating an analytics platform (aside from the information it provides) is that you can stay on top of bugs, crashes, and other problems that can negatively impact user experience. When you monitor and track your product’s performance consistently, you’re more likely to catch a bug or a potential crash before it reaches your users.
As the adage goes, ‘Knowledge is power’ — it might be a stretch to think of an analytics platform as powerful, but few other things can truly make an impact on reducing customer attrition and boosting loyalty and retention.
P.S. If you’re curious about the features a robust analytics platform provider must have to help you reduce your churn rate, we can help you out. We can help gauge your product’s impact across mobile, desktop, and web. We’re more than happy to answer any questions you may have about improving customer retention and how we can help with that.
