Retargeting uninstalls?

Active installs of an average app are about 20%, what to do to re-engage the other 80% that uninstalled?
I would like to know if there is a way or an SDK, or a tool that would let me re-target those who once had used my app?
And if there isn’t, wouldn’t it be a perfect business opportunity to get into something like this?

I thought of collecting emails of every download, but that would be down right nasty and will back-fire in the long run.

Interesting topic!

it would be also important to discuss about the users who got the app install but don’t use it anymore. For instance, in one of my games i got only 25% less installs than when the game was giving 8x money that is giving now. Do you have any experience with notifications?

Notifications work (all top games use them for a reason), but you need to find a balance on how often you present them, so you don’t annoy the players and lose them forever. We show them every 2-4 days, randomly.

As for collecting emails, it may be considered spammy by Google. Not to mention it will trigger an alarm bell when you ask for this permission on install. Anyway you will need some sort of notification that this particular user uninstalled your app - which you don’t get.

Just an idea:

Given the fact that you have at least 2 apps, say A and B.

A user got both apps installed.
Everytime app A is opened, you can check if App B is still installed, if not, give him a notification that, when the user reinstalls and uses app B again, he can earn something (e.g in-game cash).

In my opinion it’s not worth it. Rather go for new fresh users, instead of trying to reengage the old.

Can you attribute what engagement levels are with and without notifications?

Looking at our old analytics, I see an increase of ~25% in DAU for the update that introduced notifications. Not all of the increase may be related to notifications, as we made some other changes as well, but they still work. I haven’t seen a spike in uninstall rate nor negative reviews as well.

Game related push notifications also give short periods of boost in AU - ie. for times when you see a low number of online players.

That is essentially exactly the workaround I will get into right now:

One way I figured out how to re-engage users is with facebooks mobile app engagement ads. What you can essentially do is collect user ids, email or phone numbers of all your installs, then run campaigns on facebook for a “custom audience”. It doesnt matter if they have your app or not, you will be able to target them anyway. But there are two drawbacks to that:

  1. They have to use facebook
  2. They have to be on their mobile phone

What I would love, and pay handsomely for, is a way to re-target mobile users across entire internet, similar to what adroll does for e-commerce.

Its cheaper to re-target a user than the acquire new one, its even more cheaper to retain one.