The app world is becoming more and more competitive every day, making survival tough. In fact, did you know that more than three of every ten installed mobile apps globally end up being uninstalled? This is a frightening figure for any company that is serious about its mobile business. While a device’s storage space & type, poor app quality, and incentivized advertising are among the key reasons for this significant issue. Minimizing an app’s uninstall rate is a key factor for success in today’s mobile-first landscape.

On Android, the uninstall rate is 2x higher than on iOS, and 43 percent of gaming apps on Android devices are eventually uninstalled, compared to only 21 percent of shopping app. iOS users are a little more reliable, with 13 percent uninstalling gaming apps and nine percent removing shopping apps from their devices. A saturated app marketplace is creating problems for app marketers and developers competing for users.

The following tips are a good place to start for preventing the dreaded app uninstalls:

Build Yourself A Fantastic App: Needless to say, the best way to reduce an app’s uninstall rate is to have a truly great app that is always up to date. Though this may seem obvious, if your app doesn’t meet or exceed a user’s expectations, then all the marketing budget and data in the world won’t help it be successful. Key ingredients of a great app are performance (quick loading, no crashes), a great UI/UX that is simple and intuitive- especially while onboarding a new user, non-intrusive in-app ads that don’t affect the app’s performance, and ensuring the app fulfills the promise of what it’s supposed to deliver. If your app covers all these bases, half the battle is won.

Slice & Dice Uninstall Data to Gather Intelligence: When looking at your mobile growth stats and reports, decipher the data from uninstalls to understand which marketing channels, media sources, campaigns, publishers, regions and creatives delivered loyal users, and those that were responsible for customers dropping the app. Use this analysis to inform your marketing decisions and to re-allot your budgets accordingly. Make sure to always keep your return on investment (ROI) in consideration, as low quality app users that can be responsible for high uninstall rates have far lower price tags to acquire, but aren’t necessarily of real value. Additionally, a high uninstall rate will affect your app’s ranking in the app store – so use the data judiciously.

Plug the ‘Drop-off’ Point: Understand how far your users go before they disengage with the app. Pay extra attention to the relationship between usage at different stages in the app (e.g. in gaming: tutorial completion, registration, level 5 success, level 10 success, in-app purchase; in e-Commerce: category browsing, product details, add-to-cart and purchase). This will help to identify the exact point(s) where an active user becomes inactive.

Take corrective measures to encourage users to continue using the app by offering a special promotion, a discount, or exclusive content at the critical in-app stages. In some cases, if you see a significant drop after a certain stage in your funnel, you probably need to change something in the app itself.

Promote the App & Push it Across Channels: The best way to prevent uninstalls is to ensure users are constantly engaged right from the get-go. Besides building a great product/app that meets the user’s expectations, make sure that you use all the right marketing channels – push notifications, email, retargeting, and social media to keep the app top of mind and entice users to engage. Each marketing channel is important: Sending out a personalized push message increases the app’s retention chances while simultaneously reducing uninstall rates by 15 percent. Retargeting should also be a priority for marketers. However, it’s important to find the right marketing mix. Strong engagement in terms of promoting, measuring, testing and reinforcing activities are important for evaluating usage frequency and relevancy of the app.

Use the Power of Video Ads: Research has shown that video ads are highly-effective for acquiring loyal app users. A video ad clearly demonstrates what an app has to offer, and as such sets the right expectations and value proposition(s). This helps potential users better understand if the app is right for them and can minimize the chance an app won’t meet their expectations, leading to an uninstall.

Run Targeted Marketing Campaigns Based on Relevancy: For marketing campaigns, consider this example: Assume a shopping app has a user browsing running shoes priced above Rs.6000, who then adds a pair of shoes to their shopping cart. The item then sits in the cart but is not yet purchased. Rather than simply measuring this as an ‘add-to-cart’ event by an app user, app marketers need to measure add-to-cart events of users who viewed this particular category.

With this knowledge, marketers can re-engage with the potential customer as well as others that display similar interests or behavior but might not have followed-through with a purchase and present them a specific offer for running shoes, or even a deal on a collection of running apparel. The point being that when the content speaks to the user, action often follows. Granular measurement of in-app activities helps marketers understand what each user does in-app, segments them accordingly, and allows marketers to run highly targeted campaigns across email, push and other channels with content that is relevant and personal.

While the mobile app landscape may seem inundated, apps with high uninstall rates usually translate into a strong sense of user dissatisfaction. But there are a number of things app developers and marketers can do to be successful, so it’s really important to know when and why any users are uninstalling your app and make every effort to continuously provide real value to users and customers.

Granular measurement of in-app activities helps marketers understand what each user does in-app, segments them accordingly and allows marketers to run highly targeted campaigns