Mobile Re-engagement Tactics

LIFTOFF GUIDE TO
MOBILE RE-ENGAGEMENT
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Liftoff Guide to Mobile Re-Engagement 2
Introduction
As the mobile industry continues to grow, app marketers have
become more sophisticated in their approach to user acquisition and
the metrics they use to measure success. While installs were once an
indicator of an app’s success, marketers now rely on performance-
based metrics like app engagement and revenue to measure the
outcome of user acquisition campaigns.
The finish line is no longer the moment a user hits the download
button. Mobile marketers today are responsible for everything from
building awareness to long-term user retention. This shift has led to
marketers building out highly-relevant re-engagement campaigns
for users at all stages of the funnel in an effort to increase post-install
activity in their apps.
This guide provides an in-depth look at the re-engagement tactics app
marketers are using to build a bigger community of active users and
generate mobile revenue.
re-engagement

Re-engagement campaigns bring users back into your app and are
typically segmented by user activity. For example, a travel app may target
users who looked at a particular destination with a promotion offering
a discount on the trip if they book in the next few days. Whatever the
segment you’re targeting may be, re-engagement campaigns are run to
drive inactive users back to your app for a chance to monetize.
The primary methods of re-engaging users are:
Mobile Retargeting Ads
Push Notifications & Badges
Email
Each method has its own distinct set of pros and cons that will be covered
in this guide.
What is re-engagement

To generate revenue, mobile apps need active users. Having a great
app helps, but it isn’t always enough to get users active in your app
on a regular basis. User engagement is a problem that every mobile
marketer has face - most people carry anywhere from 40-70 apps on their
smartphone, but 43% of users use only four to six apps a day1
.
Even if your users love your app, there’s still a good chance that they aren’t
using it every day, which means you’re missing out on a chance to make
money for your app. Re-engagement campaigns help create meaningful
touchpoints with your users and provide them with reasons to open your
app more often.
App retention is another issue marketers can address with re-engagement.
According to mobile intelligence company, Quettro, the average app loses
more than 80% of its users within seven days of installation2
, while Statista
found that 25% of mobile users open an app just once. With app turnover
that high, marketers are turning to re-engagement to bring former users
back into the fold and keep current users onboard longer.
Why re-engage?

Additionally, re-engagement helps marketers keep costs per first action
(CPA) down, while increasing install-to-conversion rates. The Q3 2015
Liftoff App Engagement Index found that current costs to acquire a
registered app user can easily top $9, and the average cost of acquiring
a user that subscribes to a paid service is $193.61, but re-engagement is
a proven way to bring those down and stretch marketing budgets further.
Register Share Reserve Purchase Subscribe
$9.46
$16.01
$56.42
$67.16
$193.61
Mobile Cost per Action Index Q3 2015

Re-engagement methods and features
App marketers use several communication channels to re-engage their users,
including mobile ads, push notifications, email, and SMS messaging. Each
channel has its own set of pros and cons, but they all allow you to use deep
links and segment your audience for highly relevant messaging.
Deep links
Deep links allow you to direct users to a specific location in an application,
rather than the start screen. If a user who has since deleted your app clicks on
a deep link, they’ll be taken to the app store to re-install it. Deep links make
app usage more efficient and user friendly, improving app engagement and
increasing conversions by as much as 66%3
.
X
X Buy now

If an eCommerce app is running a campaign targeting users who abandoned
their shopping cart at checkout, it’s more efficient and user-friendly to link users
to their shopping cart from an ad. If you simply send users back to the app’s
home screen, you’re adding several additional steps to the checkout process.
To use deep links, your developer must first set up a mobile deep-linking
scheme and create Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) for locations in your
app to directly send users.
Popular examples of mobile deep linking:
Introducing users to a new feature in your app by sending a push
notification that takes users directly to that feature
Drawing attention to a price drop on a feature or service, linking users
directly to the purchase page
Targeting a single user through email or push notification who has abandoned
a shopping cart, taking them back to the cart to complete their purchase
Deep links

Segmenting your audience
Effective re-engagement campaigns are highly relevant to the users who are
targeted. With that in mind, marketers who excel at re-engagement keep track of
how their users are interacting (or NOT interacting) with their app, and use that data
to message users with promotions targeted to their activity.
No matter where a user falls in your funnel, there’s a reason to re-engage with them:
If a user deletes your app, you want them to re-install
If a user hasn’t use your app in a long time, you want them to be active again
If a user makes a purchase in your app, you want them to come back and make
more purchases
If a user researches a service or product in your app, but doesn’t purchase, you
want them to come back and complete the transaction
Even if a user actively uses your app on a regular basis, you’ll want to re-engage
them when new features or content become available
INACTIVE USER DELETED APPBROWSED, BUT HAVE
NOT PURCHASED
?
INSTALLED BUT NOT
REGISTERED

Audience Exclusion
Audience exclusion prevents users from seeing promotions for products
or services they’ve just purchased from an app. This eliminates wasted
ad spend for the marketer, and improves the user experience by not
serving an irrelevant ad. Proper re-engagement campaigns require
a dynamic process to blacklist users from your campaigns after they
have already performed the desired action. There are instances where
marketers may want to promote the same product to their users at a
later date, such as a travel app promoting a deal on flights to Las Vegas
a few months after a user booked a trip there, or an eCommerce app
promoting tickets to a user’s favorite band next time they’re in town.
Every app is different, it’s up to marketers to determine how to best
segment and re-engage their audience in a way that improves user
experience and drives mobile revenue for the app.
eWish

Mobile Retargeting Ads
Mobile retargeting ads are similar in format to a user acquisition
campaign, but focus on driving users back into an app to complete
an action, rather than an initial install. One of the reasons mobile
retargeting is such an effective form of re-engagement is that because
they utilize advertising units, there’s space for compelling images,
video, and animation. Retargeting also gives advertisers the ability to
display ads when users are actively engaged with other apps on their
mobile device, giving it a distinct advantage over more passive tools
like email.
Most importantly, mobile retargeting has proven to drive results.
Because retargeting focuses on users that have already expressed
interest in your app, marketers have increased post-install conversions
by as much as 60%, while decreasing CPAs by 40% when running
retargeting campaigns on new installs. The performance increase has
led to several marketers including mobile retargeting as a piece of
their user acquisition campaigns, rather than a separate entity.
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Mobile retargeting also has a huge advantage when it comes to users
that have uninstalled your app. In fact, as long as the user has not
opted out of standard ad tracking, you can re-engage someone who
has done nothing more than download and open your app once. This
makes retargeting the most effective way to reach any segment of your
audience.
Using Mobile Retargeting to Re-engage Users
TopTravel is a is a one-stop travel booking app, allowing users to
reserve flights, cruises, trains, hotels, and rental cars on their phone
or tablet. Because their users don’t frequently book major vacations,
TopTravel often sees long periods of inactivity, even from their most
valuable users.
To get their users more engaged, TopTravel started running mobile
retargeting campaigns to users who haven’t opened the app in more
than 60 days. By featuring special promotions on popular weekend
getaway destinations, TopTravel knew they could increase app activity
even during non-peak travel parts of the year.

How Retargeting Works
In order for an ad network to perform a retargeting campaign, you must
first share your data on which users it should be targeting. Every app
user you have (unless they have opted out of advertising) has either an
IDFA or an Android Advertising ID that identifies the user and allows the
network to target them when seen in another app on their device.
This is all your users – the top of the funnel. Platforms like Liftoff will start
to segment your users based on ideal characteristics: users that have a
high potential for performing a desired action in your app, whether it’s
purchase, register, subscribe, or other. Once these targets have been
identified, the IDs of these users are passed back to the mobile ad
networks so only those users are served ads.
This allows you to pinpoint only the most desirable users and convert
them at the lowest price. Once a user has converted, they can be
removed from the campaign via audience exclusion to ensure that
additional advertising budget is not spent on them.
For optimal campaign performance, it’s recommended that marketers
send all postbacks to their partners. This ensures that your partners are
continually re-engaging new users with the most up-to-date activity data.
TopTravel News App TopTravel
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Your App Your UserYour Ad

Retargeting Ad Creative
It’s important to remember that your retargeting campaign targets users
who have experienced your app already. Creative messaging should
focus on something new about your app that will encourage users to
come back to it.
This doesn’t always mean promoting new features. In many cases,
retargeting campaigns are based on eCommerce activity. While gaming
apps tend to use in-app-purchases, most non-gaming apps are more
likely to generate revenue from actions like reservations, product
purchases, or subscriptions. With these revenue streams, retargeting
messages that highlight sales or special promotions like free shipping
are likely to attract new attention to the app.
As with app-install campaigns, it’s important to constantly test ad creative
to improve engagement. Whether running a campaign to entice return
customers or propel a user to their first conversion, testing will help
you narrow down the best creative to use for users at any stage of the
funnel.
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Frequency Capping
There is no industry standard for how many retargeting ads it takes to
re-engage a user. Some marketers feel that over-saturating users with
retargeting ads may cause them to feel “stalked” across the mobile
landscape, while others believe that increasing retargeting campaigns
will only make your brand more memorable and increase engagement
opportunities.
The answer is that both can be true, and every marketer needs to
A/B test their own campaigns. Setup one campaign that has a low
frequency of impressions as your control (three to five impressions),
and one or more campaigns with higher numbers of impressions. (It
is important that these campaigns run simultaneously with all other
variables, such as targeting and creative, being held consistent). Results
of these campaigns will determine at what point continuing to target an
uninterested user is simply a waste of advertising budget.

Push Notifications
Push notifications are the most popular way to communicate their existing
users, with some app marketers seeing engagement rates as high as
40%4
. These short messages are sent directly to users’ devices from the
app, often featuring a promotion or announcement of a new feature that
will get users back in the app. These are typically free or low cost for
marketers, depending on if you build your own push notification tool or
use a pre-built push platform such as Urban Airship, AppBoy or Kahuna.
On iOS devices, app badges (the little red circles with numbers that
appear above your app) serve to remind users that there is an in-app
notification waiting for them when they open the app. Both iOS and
Android notifications can also be found in the status bar or lock scree n,
depending on a user’s settings.
The biggest drawback to push notifications are the percentage of users
that can be reached when using them. According to push notification
service Kahuna, up to 60% of users opt out of push notifications5
, so while
they may be a very effective tool based on engagement rates, it’s not a
viable solution for reaching your entire user base.
Not now

Using Push Notifications to Re-engage Users
Navigator, a utility app that gives drivers the most time-efficient directions
from point A to point B, wanted to increase app engagement with
commuters who have the app installed but don’t need directions on a
regular basis.
To do this, Navigator began sending timely push notifications to users
when routes they regularly traveled were affected by road closures,
construction, or heavy traffic. Navigator’s push notifications alerted users
to the road conditions on major roadways near them and suggested an
alternate route.
In doing so, Navigator was able to greatly increase user engagement with
a segment of users who were previously inactive and maximize the app’s
value.

Email
Emailing users is an effective tactic when the message is too long or
complicated for other forms of communication, or for delivering multiple
messages at one time. Like push notifications, email is a popular way for
marketers to deliver promotions or announcements to their user base. Unlike
push notifications, promotions sent via email should be less time sensitive
than ones sent via push, because email is not typically read as quickly. For
example, 90% of people will read a text message within three minutes of
receiving it6
, while only 25% respond to emails within 30 minutes7
.
Using email to re-engage users is advantageous for mobile marketers
because of the sheer number of people who read email on their phones.
Sixty-seven percent of email is read on a mobile device8
, making it ideal
for using deep links to improve the user’s app experience and increase
engagement.
However, despite the number of people who read email on their mobile
device, marketing emails are still severely limited by reach. Mobile app
marketers see average email open rates of 20.22% and click rates of 2.26%9
,
so it’s hard to rely on email alone to drive your re-engagement efforts.
We missed you!
next purchase!
eCommerce App Email

For some apps, email marketing isn’t even possible because email
addresses aren’t collected upon signup. Marketers of those apps must
look to other re-engagement methods to grow their active user base.
Using Email to Re-engage Users
FoodMe is a food delivery app that allows users to order food from their
favorite local restaurants without making a phone call. To increase app
engagement, FoodMe sends a weekly email every Friday afternoon
featuring reviews of nearby restaurants with high ratings.
Utilizing deep links, FoodMe directed email readers directly to the
restaurant’s menu within the app when they clicked on the review, allowing
users to easily place an order. Knowing that Friday night was their most
popular night for delivery orders, FoodMe further increased app activity
with their email strategy.

Taking it further: How Liftoff
optimizes re-engagement
campaigns
Liftoff re-engagement campaigns are run similarly to app install
campaigns, except the users targeted have already downloaded and
opened the app. Armed with more user information than before, Liftoff
takes advantage of that data to serve ad impressions within related
apps, resulting in more post-install conversions. We also provide
full creative design and A/B testing services to continually improve
campaign performance over time.
Liftoff integrates with all major ad networks and real-time bidding (RTB)
exchanges, enabling us to place bids on individual ad impressions.
Since re-engagement campaigns already target a very specific and
likely to engage audience, it’s the most efficient way to drive additional
conversions.
Re-engagement can
increase conversion
rates by up to 60%
Conversion Rate
60%

Conclusion
There is nothing more frustrating than spending money to acquire a
user that stops using your app, but these missed opportunities are not
the end of the line. A well-planned, diverse re-engagement strategy
allows marketers to turn more of those missed opportunities into active
users by wisely using their data to bring users back into an app.
Fueling Mobile Growth.
Liftoff is a full-service mobile app marketing and retargeting platform
which uses post-install data to run true CPA-optimized mobile user
acquisition and retention campaigns. With Liftoff, campaigns are
optimized to drive specific actions beyond the install, to acquire users
who engage in more profitable post-install events like booking a
hotel, subscribing to a service or making a purchase.
info@liftoff.io @liftoffmobilewww.liftoff.io

Sources
1
http://www.emarketer.com/Article/
App-Marketers-Focus-on-Engagement-Retention/1013111
2
http://andrewchen.co/new-data-shows-why-losing-80-of-your-mobile-
users-is-normal-and-that-the-best-apps-do-much-better/
3
https://www.kahuna.com/blog/introducing-dynamic-deep-linking-
amplify-the-effectiveness-of-your-mobile-marketing-campaigns/
4
http://andrewchen.co/new-data-on-push-notification-ctrs-shows-the-
best-apps-perform-4x-better-than-the-worst-heres-why-guest-post/
5
http://andrewchen.co/why-people-are-turning-off-push/
6
http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/27/why-businesses-cant-ignore-sms-
hint-90-of-people-read-a-text-message-within-the-first-3-minutes/
7
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/
this-is-how-fast-you-should-reply-to-work-emails-2014-12-11
8
http://www.emailmonday.com/mobile-email-usage-statistics
9
http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benchmarks/

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