Building Customer Loyalty

You’ve spent months and months building your app, and used all of your marketing and social media powers to promote it and watch your download count steadily rise. You’re app is officially a success then, right? Of course not, but you already knew that.

By now you’ve probably seen the ‘formula for success’: downloads + loyalty = success.

Getting your download numbers up and building customer and user loyalty are both significant tasks in themselves, but today we’ll be focusing on the loyalty piece. So what’s the secret to building the devotion in your users so they’ll not only keep coming back, but will rave about your app to all of their friends?

Identify your loyal customers

Before you can start focusing on how to cater to your loyal users, you have to figure out who they are! Start off by taking a look at who your most active users are. See what aspects of your app they use the most; the time of day they’re most likely to log on; the day of week they are most active; the average amount of time they spend on your app each time they use it; you get the idea. Remember that these users might not always be what you thought your target audience would look like, but the fact of the matter is they have become your new target market.

Discover what makes them loyal

You now have a selection of users that are most active on your site, now you need to determine what they have in common so you can cater to them more and better target their peers. What are the characteristics of your frequent user? Do the majority of your users download your app in the evenings, or on weekends? Is there an optional feature that a high percentage of your frequent users take advantage of? Do most of your frequent users log into your app at night, or during the day? Start identifying some of these common habits, then set up automatic tracking of these characteristics–these characteristics make up the ideal loyal user for your app.

Where are your loyal users coming from?

Once you’ve got a loose definition of who you want to target, take it a step further and look into where these users are coming from–these are the advertising channels that (for now) will be most beneficial and profitable for you. Use what you’ve learned about your users’ habits to focus your advertising even more by increasing your efforts during ‘peak’ times, and by promoting some of the more popular features. Track what efforts you’ve made and see which ones continue to be successful and which ones fall a little short.

Once you have a better idea of when they’re using your app and what features they use most, you can start to better understand what makes them happy and what to do to improve their experience. Do most of your frequent users log on to your app late in the evenings? Create a night-mode for them to save their eyes while they use your app in bed. Do your customers seem to like the different backgrounds and color schemes that you offer? Try giving your most active users more backgrounds to choose from.

Never Stop Improving

As your app grows and changes, your target audience and loyal users will also shift and change–sometimes just slightly, sometimes more dramatically. Which means you can’t ever stop tracking, analyzing, tweaking and improving your marketing alongside your app, because the moment you do is the moment you’l lose your loyal customer base and will have to start the long uphill climb all over again. It’s not easy, and it’ll take a lot of work–but hey, that’s one of the many joys of building your own product, right?

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