Moving app users through the customer lifecycle is an exercise in marketing artistry—crafting engaging experiences that delight, inspire and engage no matter where the customer happens to be along the path of usership.

But the mobile app customer is a fickle friend, constantly requiring encouragement in order to engage with your mobile app consistently. Many mobile professionals experience a mixed bag of success with their mobile applications, delighting some, disappointing others, and never even getting a chance to put their message in front of a large majority of users.

If you’re a mobile app stakeholder, you’re likely familiar with a plethora of haunting statistics mercilessly beleaguering the mobile app market, including:

• 5,000,000 million apps are available for download in the top two app stores (Google Play and the Apple App Store)
• 80% of app users churn within the first 90 days after downloading an app.

These stats can make app milestones like discovery, acquisition, retention and advocacy seem like hopeless pursuits.

However, when properly designed, applied and measured, the customer journey need not be a linear path to an eventual dropping-off point, but rather a recurring cycle with no end, full of continuously delighted customers.

Effectively acquiring and onboarding new users, engaging them with relevant, personalized content and optimizing those experiences through data analysis and iterative testing are what drive users from start to finish—or rather, from one beginning to the next. And it all stems from focusing on metrics that really matter.

Chetan Prasad, Mobile Product Manager at Adobe, recently said:

“Marketers trying to capture a mobile app user’s screen—and mind—play in a highly competitive world. To win, marketers must carefully look at and coordinate all aspects of how they acquire users, understand their behavior, engage over time, and optimize experiences that retain them as high-value users in the long run.”

Prasad will be presenting at the upcoming Mobile Analytics Summit, a free online event on June 22 for mobile practitioners seeking to expand their knowledge base surrounding the mobile app customer lifecycle and other best practices. To register for the event, visit the event portal.

About the Author

A former student and present enthusiast of the humanities, Jack Vawdrey uses his love of language to explore the role of marketing and analytics technology in business. Jack joined the ObservePoint marketing team in August 2016 and serves as Managing Editor. Adamant about automation, Jack writes to educate the analytics and marketing community about the role of tag auditing and data governance in the enterprise.

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