Five types of app churn you should welcome and allow

by App My Site DIY App Builder

Why should you allow app churn?

Not every person in your user base will remain entrenched in your ecosystem forever. There will be some people who will leave your app for any number of reasons.

Your natural instinct is to stop these people from leaving. It is indeed important to have mechanisms in place to regulate app churn. Since it is very easy to make your own app with an online app builder, the next big challenge is enhancing retention and reducing churn.

However, you should not regulate app churn at every turn. It is fine to let some users leave your app provided the reason behind the churn is valid.

This piece covers five types of app churn you should welcome on your app.

#1 - Losing short-term users

Some users download your app solely for the purpose of extracting some short-term value.

For instance, if you run a sales campaign on your WooCommerce app, some users will only download it to get great deals.

Once the sales campaign is over, you will see some amount of churn amongst your new users. This is typically because these customers were only interested in getting good deals in a given time period.

Every business that deploys a sales campaign understands this reality. Some new customers will stop coming back to the app once the discounts go away.

You should welcome this app churn because you had a very small chance of converting them into permanent customers.

Furthermore, such customers leaving will help you get a clearer picture on who your real long-term customers are.

#2 - Losing with bad-fit app users

Let’s say you have a cab-booking app. You have a small segment in your user base who rarely use your app to book cabs.

Losing such app users to churn is not necessarily a bad thing. Firstly, they don’t provide enough value to your app business in general. Secondly, you will have to spend marketing dollars on engaging with these dormant users.

You can thus afford to let these customers go and spend more time engaging with active users.

These users, who don’t generally use your app, are often referred to as bad-fit customers. Such customers don’t really match the services your app offers and you can afford to let them go.

#3 - Losing customers to sister apps

It is possible you have many apps in the same niche that offer overlapping services. It is not exactly a loss if one of your users choose one of your sister platforms and leaves your app.

Let’s take an example and assume that a certain segment of your WooCommerce app users leave your app and start buying products directly from your website.

Is this really a loss? Your customers are simply choosing to interact with you on a different platform that they’re more comfortable with.

It is thus wise to allow app churn when your customers are moving to a sister app. There is no net loss to your business in these cases.

You can even streamline access to your sister platforms to make your users feel that they are part of an ecosystem.

#4 - Losing users due to seasonal shifts

Some niche apps are based entirely on seasonal shifts. Let’s assume you are a wedding planner in India and start an app to promote your services.

Since most weddings in India happen during the winters, you app downloads will spike in the months of November and December.

This opportunity comes at a cost. You will most likely start losing app users in the summer months. You can deploy mechanisms and expand your business to counter this churn.

However, many users will leave simply because they don’t need your services on an immediate basis.

There is always an opportunity cost when you become part of a business which varies with each season. You will make a lot of money if you sell umbrellas in July and ice cream in May. However, losing customers during this season should not come as a surprise.

You should allow these customers to leave and look for a different opportunity every time a season turns.

#5 - Losing users after a period of unfettered growth

If you have a robust marketing team, you will have some periods of fantastic growth in engagement and downloads.

These bursts of growth may come for a number of reasons. Maybe you ran a PR campaign and happened to be featured in a big publication.

In these cases, you will get a lot of immediate attention and downloads. However, it is impossible to maintain such a high level of growth. You will thus start losing app users after a certain period of time.

There is no need to panic when this drop-off begins to happen. The spike in visibility will help you reach a brand new set of users. Some new users will like your app and some others will not.

This form of churn is expected. You should thus anticipate this drop-off and allow it to happen to finally arrive at a new normal.

In conclusion

Launching your very own app is very easy now. You can leverage a free Android or iOS app maker like AppMySite to get started.

Working on app retention and churn is the big challenge now. This piece covers five distinct types of app churn you should allow on your mobile app.

This doesn’t mean you should stop regularing app churn. However, it is wise to allow some kind of app churn to happen. This helps you identify the specific segment of your user base that will stay on your app for a long time.