Increasing user retention basically comes down to influencing the behavior of your users through habit creation.
One of the simplest (but not easy!) ways to increase the retention rate of your app is to help your user get into the habit of using your app regularly. If users are in the habit of returning, you need never again worry about your retention rate. Simple!
But, helping your user to develop a habit is not easy. Although common Internet wisdom says that it takes just 21 days to form a habit, a study published by Phillippa Lally in the European Journal of Social Psychology disagrees. She found that it takes, on average, 66 days for a habit to become automatic.
The dearth of this “all or nothing” idea is great news for you and your app. Even if a user doesn’t check your app every single day, habits can still be built and it’s totally possible for you to reverse engineer the behavior of your users.
There are three questions you need to ask yourself as you begin this process:
1. How relevant is the problem you are fixing for your user?
How important is it for him to get this problem under control? How much time, money, and energy must he invest in order to use your app? Is his need recurrent?
If you can honestly say that you’re solving an important, recurring problem, you have a better than average chance of helping your user develop a habit.
One quick and easy way to check just how important the problem you’re solving really is, is to solve just one part of