# Retention and Engagement During COVID-19: How to Increase, Sustain, and Win-Back DAU for Your App

- Link: https://phiture.com/mobilegrowthstack/retention-and-engagement-during-covid-19-how-to-increase-sustain-and-win-back-dau-for-your-app/
- Published: 2020-08-11T12:26:21+01:00
- Author: Saket Toshniwal

![retention and engagement covid19](https://phiture.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/
08/retention-and-engagement-covid19-min.png)

_Editor’s note: This is a guest post from [Saket Toshniwal](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sakettoshniwal/)
__. Saket is responsible for CRM, Growth, and Product Marketing at [LOVOO](https://www.lovoo.com/).
LOVOO is a social entertainment app with 120+ million users. He leads the team and
builds strategizes across all stages of our user journey, upscaling the interaction
with customers, and building a robust CRM ecosystem. Saket is also a thought leader,
speaker and consults companies to grow CRM smartly._

Are you tired of reading about COVID-related things? I hear you. It’s exhausting**_._**
It’s likely that you, your team, and your company have worked hard to make some 
immediate changes with the onset of COVID-19. It may feel like the pressure is slightly
easing. But I can confidently say that the real work is just about to begin**_._**

There has been a ton of work put into teams—product, engineering, CRM, and marketing
teams, in particular—to maximize value during COVID-19. 

And it’s exactly during these uncertain times when it’s important to remember the
fundamentals of retention.

Retention is about building and deepening the habits of your users and customers**.**
Users have motivation, cognitive and physical friction, and rewards that all play
a role in habit building. You can further divide retention into two categories: **
registration retention and activity retention**. Registration retention depends 
on how fast the user gets any value from your product/app.  But activity retention
is about usage, not revenue. 

During COVID, it’s likely **a drop in revenue retention** that’s setting off warning
bells. But revenue retention is an output of usage. It’s a lagging indicator. What
you should be focussing on is the leading indicator: activity retention. 

If your team is sitting around discussing ideas about how to improve retention, 
you’re asking the wrong question. Retention is an output. To move retention, you
need to focus on inputs. What you really should be asking is what is going on with
your core inputs:** activation, engagement, and resurrection. **

In this short article, I’d like to explore how these three core inputs are essential
to understanding your retention cycle as a whole. The idea is to use all three to
increase, sustain, and win-back DAU for your app. 

But first, I’d like to address a few questions you should probably be asking right
now. 

Table of Contents

 * [Three questions you should be asking not only during COVID-19, but always:](https://phiture.com/mobilegrowthstack/retention-and-engagement-during-covid-19-how-to-increase-sustain-and-win-back-dau-for-your-app/#three_questions_you_should_be_asking_not_only_during_covid-19_but_always)
 * [Core inputs](https://phiture.com/mobilegrowthstack/retention-and-engagement-during-covid-19-how-to-increase-sustain-and-win-back-dau-for-your-app/#core_inputs)
 * [What about your metrics?](https://phiture.com/mobilegrowthstack/retention-and-engagement-during-covid-19-how-to-increase-sustain-and-win-back-dau-for-your-app/#what_about_your_metrics)
 * [Preventing churn during COVID-19](https://phiture.com/mobilegrowthstack/retention-and-engagement-during-covid-19-how-to-increase-sustain-and-win-back-dau-for-your-app/#preventing_churn_during_covid-19)
 * [Key takeaways:](https://phiture.com/mobilegrowthstack/retention-and-engagement-during-covid-19-how-to-increase-sustain-and-win-back-dau-for-your-app/#key_takeaways)

## Three questions you should be asking not only during COVID-19, but always:

**How have the habits of my users/customer base changed? How might they change going
forward?**
 The core elements of your current and potential customers have probably
changed during COVID-19. Have habits been broken? Weakened? Strengthened? Why? It’s
likely that these changes have happened in the past couple of months. But the answers
to these questions are going to start changing, and they will constantly change 
at least until Q4 of 2021 (depending on which country your product operates.)

**How has usage of my customer base changed, or how is it changing?****
 
As a result
of these changing habits, the app usage behaviors of your current and potential 
customer base have probably changed, too—and they will continue to change. You really
need to understand _the why_ behind these changing habits. You can do that by looking
into metrics such as usage time, average sessions per day, activity by feature and
by cohorts of users (if you have a large user base).  If you’re an app where core-
business has been at a standstill during COVID-19 (the airline or travel industry,
for instance), you need to ask yourself: how can you increase the usage of the app
or consumption of content through the app during the pandemic? Even though your 
users may not fly, they can be inspired to read content around COVID-safe traveling
tips, for example. 

**As a result of #1 and #2, which input (activation, engagement, resurrection) should
I invest resources to improve?**
 Based on the first two questions, you should start
to get a sense of which inputs you’ll need to align resources toward in order to
build a proactive strategy. Activation, engagement, and resurrection have different
strategies to improve, and require different amounts of effort to drive them. I 
explore this in the next section.

But during COVID-19, most marketers have lowered their spending on user acquisition.
Thus, it’s even more important to activate and monetize your after install/registrations.
Try your best to monetize your new user on Day0 or Day1 of activation, and try to
get at least a given percentage of users to upgrade to a subscription free trial.
Remember that to give the user first value, get the push permissions, marketing 
permissions and send them the right content tutorial to read, understand, and act
on the content, in order to get and continue to get user value.  This has proven
to increase your DAU. 

## Core inputs

After you’ve asked a few fundamental questions about your users, it’s now time to
think about your inputs. Here’s where your trio (activation, engagement, and resurrection)
can really make a difference during COVID-19. 

**Let’s start with activation.  **Making sure that your new users clearly understand
how your app is positioned during COVID times is one of the most fundamental steps
you can take right now. Start with the in-app onboarding flow: it should inform 
users to do the next steps to get first value not only as soon as possible, but 
as effectively as possible. One great example is by using the install to registration
notification. On Android, app developers don’t need additional push permissions.
From there, you can use push notifications for when users start the registration
but don’t complete it, increasing registration completion. 

Users can receive empathetic communication on how to best use your product during
the pandemic. If you are an e-commerce app, let them know that you can deliver products
in a sanitized-safe environment. This critical stage should be a cornerstone of 
your marketing approach during COVID-19.

**Next up is engagement. **Think about what engagement strategies really suit your
app. Push notifications, email marketing, SMS, retargeting, FB audiences and in-
app notifications can really help during this period. One of my favorite engagement
segments is users who were active prior to one day ago and performed a key event
in the app. When your user has done a key action in the app (or reached a certain
level of credits/points), it’s important to remind them to perform the repeat action
or reach the next level.  At LOVOO, we often send in-app messages based on triggers.
Such triggers are custom events such as  like_created, profile_visited, registration_completed,
stream_viewed etc, or custom attributes. 

You can send push notifications to bring those users back to the app. Daily surprise
gamification can really help: runstreaks, points, day streaks, levels are pivotal
here. Free credits when your user comes back daily helps engagement campaigns across
the board. Gamification can combine with feature releases, app updates, and lifecycle
marketing, too. 

**Finally, think about resurrection. **During COVID, you have to realize that if
the core value of the product may have been weakened, strengthened, or even replaced
by an alternative. List down the use cases that your users are coming back to the
app and the channel through which your users are coming back. Recognize that you
are now competing with a new set of alternatives solutions to the core value of 
the product.

Resurrected users consist of a given percentage of users at any given time. For 
smart resurrection tactics, you should build smart prevention and resurrection models
that take into account both resurrection and reactivation—I explain these further
in the last section of the piece.

All of these are for lapsed users who need to be reactivated. You should also consider
creating free promo codes, free credits—anything _free_, not to mention FOMO (fear
of missing out) strategies.  Community actions are also invaluable during this period.

## What about your metrics?

COVID-19 is prime time to establish the right kind of metrics to understand retention
as a whole. What you should be thinking about are those metrics that you probably
_haven’t_ tracked before. These include the following: 

 1.  a. **Percentage of daily active users who opened your app and did ****_not _****have
        any activity **in your **app. **Basically, a user performed two actions: they 
        opened your app, and closed your app. You’ll be surprised to learn that 5-30 percent
        of your daily active users would fall in this segment. 
     b. **Percentage of daily active users who did ****_not _****have any core engagement-
        actions in your app**. Define what the core engagement-actions in your app are
        and start measuring. If users perform core actions, only then can they receive
        value or trigger interactions. 
     c. **Percentage of users who performed a core action /engagement/interactivity in
        your app that are reachable via push notifications, email marketing, SMS, or other
        channels.  Do you have the valid pushable tokens for a given percentage of your
        users? What percentage of your user base is email_confirmed and email_subscribed?
        You should also be thinking about sending notifications to your different user
        sections at least several times a week. These are all important channels that 
        you should be including in your data analytics. **

## Preventing churn during COVID-19

With your inputs and your data now in place, the other big question during COVID-
19 has to do with the elephant in the room: churn rate. To have churn prevention
work smartly, best companies apply machine learning to identify and cluster at-risk
users by their absence of key actions, events taken in the app, frequency of use,
the time between sessions and behavioral change.  

Instead of discussing each model, let me give you some use-cases that you can apply:

 1. **Churn Prevention**. Preventing churn can be done in a few ways. Start by increasing
    the absolute number of power users in your app. You can then engage community users
    on app start and during sessions, or consider community member greetings (which
    can be automated). Free-trial to subscription and re-login on the same device within
    a certain amount of days (email log-in only) also help keep the user engaged. 
 2. **Churn Resurrection. **For churn resurrection, think about using a wide-array 
    of tactics. Free credits, upgrades based on user actions, and temporary app icon
    changes are a great start. More granular components also work: adding notification
    bubbles or asking users to change passwords are a simple but great way to re-engage.
    Lastly, think about all of your channels—email, SMS, and social media.  Sending
    email recommendations to new restaurants/people/community members around you—or
    even about a new product category launch—engages users while preventing churn. 
    If you’re a web and mobile app, don’t forget to convert web 8sers into app users
    for higher retention.

Remember that knowing your daily and weekly activity retention allows you to see
the full picture. You can then build campaign models _around_ users that churn, 
and find the right avenue for you. 

## Key takeaways:

 * Retention is an output. To move retention, you need to focus on inputs. What 
   you really should be asking is what is going on with your core inputs:** activation,
   engagement, and resurrection. **
 * Adapt your activation, engagement, and resurrection strategies to the current
   juncture. Run campaigns based on your data and see what works the best for your
   particular app. 
 * During the pandemic, think about metrics that you **_haven’t_** tracked before.
   These include: percentage of daily active users who opened your app and did _not
   _have any activity in your app and percentage of daily active users who did _not
   _have any core engagement-actions in your app.
 * Preventing churn is a combination of **churn prevention and churn resurrection**.
   Identify and cluster at-risk users by their absence of key actions, events taken
   in the app, frequency of use, the time between sessions and behavioral change.
 * Brands that have their marketing engagement on these four fundamentals will thrive
   post-COVID: being **tech-enabled, purpose-driven, community-driven and narrative-
   based.**