Re-engagement is a marketing strategy aimed at serving ads to existing users who have already shown their interest through a previous engagement. Re-engagement can also refer to the practice of retaining those users who have uninstalled the app, or those who have not opened it within a specific timeframe. Targeting those users for re-engagement will also extend their LTV (Lifetime Value).
What is user acquisition re-engagement?
Mobile marketers used to focus on user acquisition to achieve their goals. However, retention seems to be a very important growth metric, especially because marketers aim at increasing retention through the re-engagement strategy. Indeed, the goal of this process is to remind current users of the app they have forsaken. Therefore, it is different from acquisition, which exclusively aims to acquire new users who have never installed your app before, even if re-engagement and user acquisition are complementary growth strategies.
Some of the most common re-engagement tactics include ads, push notifications, and emails to users. All these practices revolve around the presentation of targeted marketing messages to keep more loyal users. For an app developer, the most important thing is avoiding users to uninstall their app.
Dynamic product ads (DPAs) are a great example of retargeting and re-engagement, especially for all the e-commerce apps which use DPAs to re-engage users who had added some products to their cart without making the purchase. The main goal of this re-engagement strategy must be preventing the cart’s abandonment while boosting ROAS.
However, mobile app re-engagement is different from web re-engagement: the former usually brings users into the app to complete an in-app action, while the latter will rather focus on bringing users to the mobile website through personalized ads and campaigns.
Why is it important?
Users who stop using your app constitute a waste of money for your user acquisition campaign and a decrease in revenue. Furthermore, app downloads continue to increase but many of them have their days numbered: indeed, half of those apps will be uninstalled within 30 days. Users may stop using an app or uninstall it for a variety of reasons, but it may not always be because of the app itself or because they no longer want to use it. Therefore, it is also important to periodically work on user acquisition re-engagement campaigns which target users who have already shown interest in the app and could be acquired more easily or could achieve a high LTV.
Hence, if you re-engage the inactive users, you will be able to see a significant rise in some KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your product without spending additional time or money. Different companies are responsible for the re-engagement of apps, such as Google’s App campaigns for Engagement tool, which helps marketers with the re-engagement of their users.
Since marketers who use their ad spend to re-engage users tend to achieve a higher ROI, re-engagement is an effective practice for all verticals. For this reason, re-engaging lapsed users seems to help improve your user retention rates while increasing LTV. That’s because one way to increase LTV is by keeping your users active. Similarly, re-engagement can also offer you the possibility of keeping more paying users active with your app, thus increasing your ARPU (Average Revenue per Paying User).
What do you need to know about user acquisition re-engagement?
- Re-engagement is an important marketing strategy used to encourage inactive users and customers to resume their activity with a specific app or website;
- Re-engagement and user acquisition have different goals but similar growth strategies;
- Ads, push notifications, and emails are some of the most common strategies used for the re-engagement;
- With user acquisition re-engagement, mobile marketers can increase LTV while boosting their ROI.
