4 methods to increase your app stickiness

The app development business is growing every day. If you decide to start your path in this business, you need to accept that there are many rivalries. Your product must be competitive and memorable to take place in the market and catch the user’s eye. User acquisition is essential when most apps are free, and it is not a problem to delete an app. That is how you get your first downloads and users. After getting the user's attention, the next task of your app is to keep that attention and the user in your app. You don’t want your app to be deleted from a users’ device after a day or two of using it. You want to have regular users that you could proudly call yours. You want the users to stick with your product. If so, the app’s stickiness can help you with this. 

What is app stickiness? 

So, what is app stickiness? Calling an app sticky, we usually mean it has users who engage with the product regularly. All in all, app stickiness is a metric that shows whether your users come back to your app regularly, how often they do it, and whether they perform any actions. It shows how memorable and valuable your app is for users. Generally, app stickiness determines whether users interact with your app and how often they do it. To improve your app's stickiness, you need to understand your users' behavior regarding what motivates them to come back and use your app to use your product. That will help you to increase your user stickiness. Customer stickiness is closely related to User engagement and Customer retention. And the app stickiness should be one of the critical metrics you check on regularly to reduce the churn rates because numbers of these metrics can change by the decisions you make across your app’s life. 

How is app stickiness calculated?

It is pretty easy to calculate the app’s stickiness. You need to divide the DAU (Daily Active User) by MAU (Monthly Active Users). The closer the result is to 1, the more daily users turn to your regular users. Apps with 20% are considered good, and apps that reach 50% and more are considered excellent. As a result, you have the total percentage of active users who return to your app from month to month and think your app is valuable. These users are your opportunity to monetize the app. 

Stickiness vs. Retention: Core differences 

There is a chance that now you can think that app stickiness and app retention are the same metrics, but this is not true. Stickiness focuses on transactional value in your product. App retention shows you the percentage of your customers who continue using your product month after month or year after year. Retention is the measure of people who tried the product and liked it. So they will return. Retention is often measured by looking at revenue retained from one period to another. In simple words, retention is about users returning to your app. Stickiness is about returning of their own volition. Stickiness helps reduce your dependency on tactics. 
 

Whatever the core value of your product, your best lever for growth is creating memorable moments when users recognize that value. Without such moments, retention will suffer, and it will be challenging to sustain growth. Mediocre companies are simply focused on growth. A great company focuses on sustainable development through engagement, persistence, and retention.

4 core methods to improve app stickiness

1. Seamless onboarding

The app stickiness and onboarding process are tightly intertwined. An optimized onboarding is a great way to help your user learn how to use your app. Your app should be able to guide your users on their first session. The process should be short, informative, simple, and straight to the point. Usually, the onboarding process is a series of screens shown to the user the first time they open your app to help them understand the interface and features. Use one screen per function, make the sign-up process easy for a user, and don’t ask for too much information from him in the first session. Try to make the acquaintance's experience pleasant and unobtrusive. The user doesn’t need to know about all of the features. 

2. Your app’s value

The onboarding process is completed, and the user is on his way to becoming your regular user or customer. Now it is time to show him the value of your app. How? Don’t waste his time. Show him what your app offers, limit the number of steps required to perform the main action, and avoid unnecessary complexity. Take a look at other successful apps. The best examples of showing the app’s value are the examples that offer value by just opening the app. 

3. Habit formation

You can form users’ habits to increase your app's retention and, at the same time, your app’s stickiness. To create the user’s habit, you need to encourage him to make an action by a cue and reward him afterward. App gamification can help you with it. Insert gameplay elements in non-gaming settings, and it will develop a lasting habit. You can add push notifications and personalized emails to this scheme to gain users’ interest. 

4. App personalization 

Even if you don't plan to integrate the gamification features in your app, you can add personalization to increase the stickiness. Personalization is a highly recommended method to increase engagement with your product and form a long-term relationship with your users. Personalized emails are one of many ways to add personalization to your app. Push notifications, GPS tracking, and suggested content can help you engage the users with your app and not lose their interest. Also, you can let your users personalize your app to make the personalization better.  

Conclusion

App stickiness and app retention are essential metrics, and you should look after them regularly. You need normal users who find the value in your app. You need to give your users a reason to return to your app, create an emotional connection with them, and turn them into your community. You should also analyze and track the data regularly. App stickiness is the primary way to keep your users in the app and monetize it, so if you want to increase the number of users and monetization, you need to increase stickiness. Once you know how much time your users spend in your app, you need to make sure their actions are valuable for your app and that they make a conversion. The meaning of conversion can be different. It can be an account creating, logging in, or searching for some product category. Define this conversion and measure the frequency of these conversions. You need user stickiness to increase the number of conversions. The four best methods to improve the app stickiness list is above. Give your users the best experience!