Adobe’s Digital Index “Mobile Benchmark Report” delivered some grim news for retailers and financial institutions:  After little more than a dozen app opens, consumers typically will abandon those apps.

What’s more, 26.7% of consumers will abandon a shopping app after one use and 25.2% will forget about a finance app after using it just once, the report finds. The data from the second quarter of 2015 is based on Adobe aggregated consumer data from more than 65 billion app launches across industries and regions, and website visitor behavior from more than 500 billion visits to more than 13,000 websites.

Nor are retailers and financial institutes the only kinds of companies that need to work harder to keep consumers interested in their apps.

According to the recent Millward Brown Digital study “The New Mobile Mantra,” 72% of consumers say they have deleted an app because they rarely use it and 40% because they found a better app to replace it. Millward Brown Digital is a mobile research and measurement firm. The August study surveyed 2,011 U.S. adults who own a smartphone.

Mobile Strategies 360 talked with a handful of app experts about how businesses can get consumers to interact with their app and keep using it.

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1. Make the app fast

If consumers have to wait more than eight seconds, the app is too slow, says Noah Glass, founder and CEO at Olo, a digital ordering vendor that created apps for fast food brands including Five Guys, Noodles and Company and Fazoli’s.

Glass recommends that the first page load within two seconds and that companies prioritize speed over a beautiful design and images.

“The more clicks that are involved, the more seconds that are involved, correlates directly with drop-off, with people abandoning their carts,” Glass says.

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Since apps are for loyal customers, Glass recommends cutting out a welcome page and an About Us page, since that will just add weight for information that loyal customers don’t need.

Having a fast, lightweight app will also free up space on a consumer’s smartphone. 51% of consumers said they have deleted an app because they needed to free up memory on their smartphones, according to the Millward Brown study.

2. Talk to consumers in app

While a consumer is in the app, businesses should continue to interact with him. One method of doing this is in-app messages. Those messages are opened five times more often than a push notification, or an alert that comes to the consumer’s lock screen, says Stephanie Capretto, strategy consultant at mobile technology firm Urban Airship. Urban Airship works with several brands on their mobile app engagement, including, The Walgreen Co., Virgin Atlantic, RedBox Automated Retail LLC, Airbnb Inc., Regal Entertainment Group and Alaska Air Group.

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Fashion flash-sale retailer Rue La La uses in-app messages to create an urgency about purchasing products, for example letting a shopper know she has a credit in her account or a free shipping offer is about to expire, says Arash Hadipanah, senior mobile product manager at Rue La La. RueLaLa.com generates 50% of its revenue and traffic from mobile devices, with a large majority of that coming from its app, Hadipanah says.

This personal touch that Rue La La puts on its message is key, Capretto says. The more tailored and targeted the messaging is to audience segments and individuals the higher the response rate, she says. Averaged across Urban Airships clients, highly targeted messages have 293% greater response rates than messages sent to all app consumers, she says.

3. Have a useful FAQ page and a smooth onboarding process

32% of consumers say they deleted an app because it wasn’t easy to use and 39% because of technical issues, according to the Millward Brown Digital study. Businesses should anticipate consumers’ questions and problems and provide a frequently asked questions page in app.

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Family and friend locations Life 360 app has fifty million active users, says Michelle Dysangco, head of customer support at Life360. The app, which helps friends and relatives track where they are through creating geofencing and GPS location, can get complicated for its user base of kids and parents, Dysangco says.

The help page is visited 163,000 times per month and the FAQ page has 156,000 monthly visits. However, only 8.5% of those visitors, or 13,000 consumers, report an issue, which is an option in the app. The fewer reported issues the better, Dysangco says, because that also correlates to the number of agents Life 360 has to staff in its help center.

“Self-help for us is very big,” she says.

Dysangco and five others will spend two hours a week going over the top reported problems and making sure the FAQ page addresses those issue, she says.

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Life 360 also offers a brief tutorial on how to use the app the first time a consumer opens it. Life 360 will give a brief introduction about what swiping left or right does, how to create a geofence, or a digital fence around a location, such as a house or school, and how to invite friends into the app, so consumers understand right away how to use the app.

“Our average user demographic is customers who are a little over 40 years old and they need a lot of help with on-boarding,” Dysangco says.

4. Give consumers a push

A push notification is an alert sent directly to the lock screen of a consumer’s smartphone, the screen she sees before entering a password or activating the phone’s features. Typically the user must choose to receive those notifications in an app. Push notifications are a great way to remind a consumer that she has the app on her smartphone, Urban Airship’s Capretto says.

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“This engagement tactic can alert the user outside of the app experience that content or offers are awaiting them inside the app,” Capretto says.

Rue La La has used push notifications to keep its consumers opening its app, Hadipanah says. If a Rue La La shopper has left in her cart a product that is about to sell out, the retailer will send a push notification reminder her that time is running out for her to purchase the item.

“Having a little reminder has actually increased conversion for us,” says Hadipanah, who declined to give specifics.

Averaged across Urban Airship’s retail clients, consumers who have opted in to push notifications open the app 40% more per month than consumers who have not opted in, and are 116% more likely not to abandon the app, Capretto says.

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Brands should be careful, however, about how many messages they send. 34% of consumers say they have deleted an app because the app send too many ads or alerts, according to the Millward Brown study.

5. Don’t panic if things go south

Even if a consumer hasn’t opened the app in a while, there’s still a chance to reach out to that individual who may have temporarily forgotten about the app.

If a consumer hasn’t opened the Rue La La app after 15 days, it will send a push notification  saying that Rue La La misses her and encouraging her to open the app.

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“We’ve seen good success with this type of push, and our plan is to test optimizing this for copy and time of day,” Hadipanah says.

 

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