In this episode, we dive into the elusive goal of achieving a 10% Day 365 retention rate in mobile apps. With so few apps reaching this milestone, I’ll outline the three proven paths to boost long-term retention: harnessing daily habits, fostering social connections, and delivering deep content. Tune in to discover how these strategies can drive not only retention but also LTV and ROAS, helping your app stand out in a competitive market.

A day 365 retention of 10 percent is the gold standard. Very, very few apps make it to this number because it’s so hard to retain users. There are three paths to get to a 10 percent day 365 retention. And even if you’re not close to 10 percent day 365, hopefully, you can learn from these three paths to improve the retention, LTV, and ROAS of your own apps.

Number one, capitalize on a daily habit. Example: a CrossFit game that I worked on, and another example would be a sleep-tracking app. Because both of these lean into an ingrained daily behavior, they tend not to require a ton of product features in order to retain users, as they already align with what a user is already doing.

The second path to 10 percent D365 retention is social connection. By helping users make social connections and have social interactions within the app, it’s [00:01:00] possible to retain users far, far better, as you can imagine from social apps like Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram. This is something I saw up close with the game Words with Friends, which had incredible D365 retention because users had a natural incentive to come back to play against other players.

And other PVP games have very similar mechanics. The third path is content depth. This is the path that games like Candy Crush typically take. These are games or apps that have so much content that users keep coming in, playing, and engaging every single day. This path can be the hardest to pull off because not only do you have to have content, but you also have to ensure a clean progression from level one to 50 to 100 to 500.

So these are the three paths you can take to improve your day 365 retention. Less than 1 percent of apps make it to 10 percent D365, but you can ask yourself, if you’re looking to improve your retention and long-term LTV, these three questions: Could I lean into an existing daily habit? Could I enable social connection? Could I increase and improve the content depth of my apps?

BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

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Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!