Make your application sticky as a glue

The following guidelines will help you make your product stickier.

The survival of a business cannot be solely dependent on new customers. A progressive web app or application can help you to engage and connect with your customers consistently. Having a sticky app and making healthy relationships with your customers will help your business succeed.

Based on app retention data shared by Andrew Chen, the average app loses 77% of its daily active users (DAUs) within three days. The number rises to 90% within 30 days. More than 95% of DAUs disappear or less than 5% remain engaged after 90 days.

After 90 days, the best apps maintain a 50%+ retention rate, quickly becoming part of the user’s daily routine. In order to achieve this, developers have to make their app as sticky as possible, i.e. keep users returning.

In other words, there are several ways to make your product more sticky and increase customer retention. It’s time to change the ending today and let’s get started.

Onboarding

A well-designed onboarding process is one of the most effective ways to help a user get the most out of the product faster. Onboarding helps reduce the steep learning curves associated with low retention.

Your education process should be short and informative so that your customers will be knowledgeable about your offerings. The purpose of increasing user engagement can be defeated by a boring, time-consuming onboarding process.

A good onboarding that is clear, stress-free, and delightful can not only improve your app’s stickiness but can also boost your LTV (Lifetime Value) and retention rates, making it a long-term investment that’s well worth the effort and constant optimization.

Your app might lose users forever if it has an issue during onboarding. Focus on reliability during this stage.

Gamification

Using gamification is a great way to create loyalty within an app’s userbase. Gamification describes the process of inserting gameplay elements into non-gaming settings to engage users more. Although Gamification engages users, motivates them, and retains them, it is not supposed to make the activity into a game. As a result, full-fledged non-entertaining games cannot be categorized under Gamification. They are referred to as “Serious Games”. The concept of gamification does not entail adding a game to a non-game environment as well.

This diagram illustrates how gamification can be integrated into a game, rather than being a single component:

By incorporating fun features such as leaderboards and badges into existing systems, designers can make users enjoy using them more. In a gamified context, users complete tasks and challenges to reach the top of a leaderboard or complete a project. For example, a simple yet effective way to ensure users who download your app and then complete the sign-up process is by saying: “Almost there; Just 3 steps to go…” Great job, you just finished 100% of your profile.” And for completing a specific task give them points or badges to celebrate that achievement.

Gamification has several technics. Here is another famous one:

Trigger -> Action -> Reward -> Investment
Nir Eyal’s “Hook Model” — a framework for creating habit-forming products — is shown here.

“Triggers” can be external (email, social media post, etc.) or internal (need for social acceptance, self-realization).
An “action” is what we do in order to obtain a reward. In order to encourage users to act, it must be simple and psychologically motivating.
It is critical that “rewards” are variable. Our dopamine levels tend to increase when we encounter unpredictable experiences.
“Investment” is time, effort, and money spent looking for rewards through triggers. As a result of these investments, future rewards are even more satisfying.

Social Media

Boost your app’s popularity through social media. Also by being active in social media users will get used to seeing you and it will be an open door to be connected with them and have a better understanding of their needs. By actively engaging with users through social platforms, you can leverage social approval.
But having high-quality, consistent, and proactively delivered content into your account is more important than only being on some social media channels without any interactions.

You should remind your users of any changes or updates to your app. Send well-timed emails, notifications, or messages that contain new content related to your app. For example, You just published a new report, so let them know. It might be interesting for them.

Push Notifications

Life can be challenging for people. Everyone has something on their mind. Due to that busy life, people won't think about your app unless they need to work with it, regardless of how big a fan of your content they are. They’ll forget to check out your app. This is where push notifications come into play.

Notifications can make all the difference when they are sent at the right time. It is possible to boost stickiness even further by sending personalized messages. Added bonus points for completing a ‘goal’ or ‘task’ on your app through your push notifications. Notifications that feature the actions you want your users to take can engage them like ordering food or tracking their diet or workout, etc.

Ease of Use and Loyalty

Your product may eventually need to be more complex and have extra features that not everybody uses right off the bat. However, at the very least it should serve its primary purpose extremely well. Say no to any feature that isn’t directly tied to improving your engagement metrics or increasing your daily active user count before you’ve even bounced.
Introducing features blindly into your product is a short-term strategy that leads to bloating and eventually making it unusable, explains Hiten Shah of Product Habits. If you want to design a product that is truly sticky, you cannot simply copy other products. You have to look at your own usage and metrics to discover what’s already working for you.

You can narrow down your users’ chances of losing them to the competition if you add tangible and unique value to their lives. Your end-users can be loyal if you build a rapport and provide value to them. This will not only keep people coming back but make them less likely to switch to a competitor’s app.

It is crucial to understand your users. By doing so, you will gain their trust, which will eventually lead to loyalty. The user experience of your app will be rich and enjoyable if you provide a clean design, intuitive navigation, and a rich user experience.

Personalized content

Personalized content will help keep it relevant to your end-users. As an example, Spotify uses strategies like Discover Weekly to do this very well. Based on what the user listened to recently, it creates a personalized playlist for each user. Provide individualized content that will be helpful and relevant to your users. Trust will be established with content that is objective and non-sales-oriented.
In another example, if you seeking a new job on LinkedIn, it will send you new positions every day and remind you to apply early.

However, you can quickly lose loyalty. Keeping Spotify in mind, we all know it has an insanely high retention rate. However, how would people react if their app crashed constantly? Even their most loyal users would begin to question their loyalty to the brand if it kept happening.

Utility and Usefulness

In order to create an app that is extremely sticky, you need to analyze successful experiences and break them down into their components. It’s imperative to identify your “power users” first, who have the highest LTV, engagement, and longevity in the app. The next step is to determine what keeps your power users coming back, by understanding how they use your app.
It is helpful to understand what features your power users are most likely to engage with, as well as what their typical user journey is. It is possible to predict future levels of spending and engagement by looking at the activities of current power users.

Consider these insights as you plan your app development, identify new features that need to be added, and determine which existing features need to be highlighted to new users.

Emotional Connection

Maintain a relationship with your customers. Marketing can be used to build relationships. Customers can connect with a company’s stories through e-mails, videos, blogs, and even commercials and advertisements.

Based on these figures from Build Fire, there are 2.2 million apps available in the Apple App Store and 2.8 million in the Google Play Store. Taking that into account, how can you stay ahead of your competitors? By establishing a real emotional bond with your users, you can go beyond the formal business-customer relationship. Engage them through social media, tell them your story, demonstrate transparency, and share their background. Having a strong relationship increases your chances of retaining your customers and getting them back.

Take advantage of your user’s nostalgic sense, fondness for home, or sense of duty to family. The user will keep coming back to your app if it makes them feel joy and reinforces positive self-images.

Discounts and Rewards

The importance of rewards for attracting users to an app cannot be overstated. The benefits of these programs are that they encourage loyalty and reduce the odds of a user switching to another website. In addition to motivating users to purchase items, interact with the community, and stay with your app for longer periods of time, rewards can encourage positive user behavior.

Action-reward combinations must be carefully considered. Generally, monetary incentives are not the only factor to consider. Answering questions on Quora, for example, does not provide any monetary rewards. They reward users with an online reputation and status as experts. A reward program will fail if users are rewarded for actions that are not natural.

It is inherently built-in to apps like Instagram and Snapchat that variable rewards are provided. As a result, they are highly addictive. Every time they are used, an image or video appears from a constantly changing stream. The expectation of finding something new and fear of missing out (FOMO) are powerful human emotions created by variable rewards. You must reward your users by providing them with updated content, features, information, and a positive social reputation by using your app regularly.

It is more difficult to build variable rewards for apps with less changeable content. You can earn variable rewards by watching Netflix content based on your viewing habits. As a result, users are compelled to see what’s new.

Let’s wrap this up

Making your app sticky can be achieved in a number of ways, but the most important thing is to ensure that your application is functional, reliable, and usable before you work on the secondary features.

My article discussed some techniques for increasing your application’s stickiness:

Onboarding: Minimize setup by relying on defaults, Keep it simple,
Gamification: Make it fun, use the Hook model
Social media: Achieve social approval.
Push notification: Create habits, and remind them to interact with your product
Ease of Use and Loyalty: Break down the barriers,
Personalized content: keep them hooked
Utility and Usefulness: Make sure you’re solving a frequent problem, Decrease the time-to-value,
Emotional Connection: Build relationships, tickle the nostalgia
Discounts and Rewards: Be humble and don’t let them even think about your competitors

It will help you reduce the churn rate, build a better connection with your customers, and increase your popularity.

Keep shining.✨