What a personalized user guidance process means for your mobile app

Statistics on app downloads and app usage bear this out, Leanplum states that 20% of users will opt out of an app within 30 seconds, and if there are no barriers to opting out at the beginning of the app. It's not easy to keep customers. We've found that the average customer churn rate is 71%, 90%, and 96% within 24 hours, one month, and three months of an app download, respectively.

As we learned, today's user lead generation process has been revolutionized. Because it's easier to download than it is to leave a customer behind, the real user-bootstrapping step should start with activating the app. It's from this moment that customers really discover the core value of the app and start sharing personal information. How do you engage customers at all steps? In simpler terms, the answer is: always keep the bootstrapping clean, smooth and personalized.

Ensure that user-guided steps don't turn people away

Generally, when using a new app for the first time, users are required to enter some specified information. Things like address, credit card number, order information, or other information needed for the app to work as intended.

Unfortunately, these types of multiple process steps increase the risk of user churn. Users may feel depressed, bored or confused by the tedious steps, and each additional process may cause them to leave. This means that the lesser the number of steps in the app user guidance process, the better.

It's especially important for app developers to carefully consider the questions they ask new users: what questions are absolutely necessary? What questions can be asked later? With each step that is reduced, more users complete the entire user orientation process.

Even more, your app doesn't require immediate registration. For example, is it possible to wait until the user has experienced the basic features of your app before registering? This is something worth considering. Also, you need to consider the interactivity of the user guidance steps. Is it more efficient to just show the user an example tutorial? Or is it more feasible to let them explore your app on their own and get answers? To find out what's more efficient, you can also run an A/B test on this.

Creating a diverse experience

At the heart of creating a great user guided experience is this: ensuring personalization. Users are more inclined to continue using the app if they feel that all the steps have been created specifically for them, and for this reason, you can go for the simple approach of recommending your customers by name in all the steps. However, there is also a more elaborate (and ultimately rewarding) approach that allows you to customize a set of user guidance steps for each individual.

If you're asking questions with the goal of properly guiding customers to a customized pathway, the user-guided experience will be increasingly varied. Asking users what they need and then asking a few simple questions to delve further will tell you what they need and bring the appropriate help.

Another important way to create a varied experience is to gamify the steps. Introducing a "pass" or "score" progress bar will not only help new users know if they are using the app correctly, but it will also create a fun experience that will increase user stickiness.

Deferred Deep Link

The most effective way to create a diverse user-led experience is to find out what they want and then cut straight to it. This practice of leading users directly to the appropriate page in your app based on their previous behavior is called deferred deep link.

Deferred deep link sends data to the user in advance before they download the app. In this way, when the user installs and completes the guided steps, they will be redirected to the previously viewed content. When customers open the appropriate content in the app, up to 1.8 times as many new users sign up, up to 1.9 times as many customers are retained, and up to twice as many are engaged compared to before.

To summarize

When properly guiding app users through all the steps, it's difficult to balance the intensity of the guidance - in other words: either too much help or too little. Whether users feel like they're being lectured to or ignored, they'll lose interest in the app, and the end result is the same: you'll lose an app user and a potential customer.

With the help of creating a personalized user guide step that gives users a unique experience that directly meets their needs, it can help app developers minimize user churn. Deferred deep links are a particularly logical and effective way to personalize, as they redirect users directly to the in-app page they want to see. If you would like to learn more about TurboLink's deep linking services, please contact us.