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Using Email Marketing to Re-engage Your App Users
You spent weeks painstakingly constructing your app, releasing it, and promoting it online, and you managed to gather a decent number of users and customers in the meantime. Well done! You’ve already achieved something which every app developer strives to do.
However, you’ve started to notice that a handful of your app users have dropped off the radar; that is, they’ve stopped paying any interest to the fruits of your labor and your app is lying dormant on their screens.
This isn’t anything uncommon. In fact, we’ve all experienced the rush of excitement that comes with downloading a new app, and the thrill we get from exploring its capabilities and functions. However, it doesn’t take long for that enthusiasm to fade, and there are many, many reasons why it might disappear altogether.
Re-engage your app users through email marketing
Perhaps the app was downloaded for a specific purpose which no longer seems relevant. Maybe another app has come along that works better. It’s possible that you simply forgot the app existed.
You’ll be glad to hear this situation is both common and perfectly fixable; we’ve just got to put ourselves in the user’s shoes and then take practical steps to rectify the issue. And email marketing is here to help.
Before long, your users will be flooding back to you and remember what it was they loved about your app in the first place.
In this week’s blog post, we’re going to take a closer look at this problem and examine why this happens as well as what we can do about it. Read on to discover our top tips for re-engaging app users through email marketing.
Gather and analyze user data for proactive next steps
Before we even start taking action to try and re-engage our users, we’ve got to step back and take a look at the bigger picture. In order for us to decide on a plan of action, it’s really important that we consider why our users forgot about our app in the first place.
In order to do this, we’ll have to gather as much data as we can about our users and analyze the information we find in order to find answers to some preliminary questions:
- Has a new app come on the market that does something similar to yours?
- Is there a fault or bug in your app that you didn’t know about, but might become apparent on re-appraisal?
- Is there any way you can poll your customers or reach out to people via tech forums and chat groups to get some honest opinions?
- How have your initial converts reviewed and rated your product online?
These are all questions you need to ask yourself in order to gather as much data as possible before taking the next necessary steps to re-engage your app users through email marketing.
Segment your “problem groups”
Ask anyone who knows anything about effective email marketing and the first thing they’ll tell you is that you can’t treat your mailing list as one homogenous group. Email marketing campaigns—and especially ones trying to solve problem as we are in this situation—need to be tailored as much as possible to the individual.
Obviously, you’re not going to have the time or resources to email each user individually. However, in order to get the best possible response from your email marketing, you should split your mailing list into different segments based on their engagement level with your app, each of which can be approached in a different way.
Once you’ve managed to identify why people have stopped using your app, you should set up a few different email marketing approaches, custom-made to address those reasons. By personalizing your communication as much as you possibly can, you can draw out a better response from your customers.
Provide valuable information about features and steps your users have forgotten
Everyone appreciates a friendly reminder, especially when it comes to things that are actually really important. When you design your emails for each of your ‘problem segments,’ you’d do well to make the first of these a friendly reminder email. Identify the users who have taken action on your app but haven’t completed them as well as those users who haven’t finished their registration.
For example, there may well be a group of app users who loaded their virtual shopping cart with items, but who exited the app before completing the transaction. These are exactly the kinds of people you should be targeting with an email marketing message; let them know that they have forgotten about their cart and their items are still waiting to be purchased. By doing so, you’ll reignite a desire for the items they wanted and you’ll have a great chance of re-engaging those customers.
The same sort of email can be sent to those users who started creating a premium profile but bailed before completing the process, as well as other similar actions that need finishing.
Provide encouragement and incentives
We all need a little encouragement from time to time. Your users are no different: Dangle a treat in front of them, a sweet-tasting reason to come back into the fold, and there’s no doubt they’ll return to your app with a smile on their faces.
The incentives you provide in your email marketing will depend primarily on the nature and content of your app, but popular (and highly effective) approaches include:
- Offer users a discount code
- Provide points which could be exchanged for a discount or credits
- Offer them something they want (but are unlikely to be able to afford)
- Invite them to a “secret room” as members of an elite group
Remember, your incentives have to work for both of you: They have to provide a reason for the user to return to the app and continue using it while simultaneously ensuring that you end up with a sale or another positive result.
Above all, make sure you communicate the benefit to the user clearly in your email marketing, letting each user feel like you’ve addressed them personally.
Image Source: Mess Apps
Launch interactive games with useful prizes and awards
It’s worth thinking outside the box when it comes to re-engaging your app users. We’ve seen great examples of email marketing campaigns for user re-engagement which have invited people to partake in games—usually simple text-pic style games—which offer useful prizes, awards, or discounts for participation.
App users love games and challenges and sometimes, the mere presence of something new on your app is enough to get them clicking again. Give it a try, and see if it works for you!
Wrap up
There you have it: Five suggestions for your email marketing messages, each of which will help you plan and enact a strategy for re-engaging users who have lost interest in your app. By taking these steps and considering what would work with you as an app user—and not you as an app developer—you should be able to hit the right notes with your customers and see engagement levels rise once more.
