Make your users return on install day

You can read this week's full post on my blog www.alexandremacmillan.com

One of the best – and perhaps most overlooked – ways to improve day 1 retention is to design meaningful and compelling callbacks to get your users to return on install day (day 0). You should have at least one callback 2-4 hours after install and having another callback 11-12 hours after install is also a good idea. In order to achieve that with the greatest success possible, you should design an end to your first session. After all, your first session must end at some point in order for users to come back play a second one. Usually, the ideal duration for your first session is going to be between 12 and 18 minutes long. My post this week goes into 3 reasons that justify this

1) Day 1 is already long-term. The vast majority (usually between 80 and 90%) of installs retained day 1 have returned to the game at least once day 0. If this is something you haven’t looked at before I strongly suggest you do. Trying to get users to come back to play a second session day 0 is a tangible, intermediate, and designable outcome that can in turn help you improve your retention day 1 (and beyond).

2) In order to have users return to the app day 0, they must have left it at some point. If you look at the percentage of users who return to your game for a second session from the perspective of the duration of the first session, then you see the longer the first session the higher the return rate. However, usually, the return rate plateaus after 18-20 minutes. In other words, users who play 35 minutes on their first session are not much more likely to return than users who play 18 minutes in their first session. Designing an end to your first session can help you set up a meaningful and relevant appointment mechanism that will succeed in making your users come back for a second session on install day.

3) Very consistently, users return to the app for their second session within hours. It’s safe to bet that 50% of users returning to play a second session in your game will have done so within 4 hours of install. Now, if users return for a second session within a similar time frame – regardless of the genre or specifics of the game – then this probably reflects a constant grounded in the way users interact with mobile entertainment. With that in mind, you will be more successful trying to cater to users' natural tendencies – rather than expect your mobile game will make users change their schedule. Designing the first callback between 2 and 4 hours of install will increase your chances at being successful at getting users to come back to your mobile game because it matches a natural tendency of your userbase.

 Full post here