Increase conversions in apps with visitor's habits

On websites visitors can visit once and never come back. On apps you want to avoid this - maybe your app will get removed from the users phone and you'll lose them forever. You want to keep the visitor coming back to the app and create a steady routine (which might eventually lead to a conversion).

How do you build routines for your in-app visitors?

Imagine your phone buzzing. You instantly want to know who is messaging you (trigger + craving). After that you automatically unlock your phone, without thinking even (routine). You find out who called you (reward).

Summarized: creating a habit looks like this:

Trigger: this might be an alert or message;

Routine: visitor follows a certain pattern in app;

Reward: your visitor feels rewarded in some way by using your app - often this leads to a dopamine release

Experimenting and A/B-testing in apps for habits

In average A/B-testing tests take about one to four weeks. You might use this for apps too, but if you want to build a routine it's good to realize that this might take visitors longer.

On average it takes someone 66 days to form a habit, says the study of Phillippa Lally (2010). They asked participants of the study to form the habit of walking. For some participants this was very easy, for others it took much longer.

This is very useful information when improving apps and app conversions. I've noticed that some behavior in apps might change or be impacted after two months of running certain A/B-tests.

Testing in app is usually serverside testing, which has it's own pros and cons. One pro is that you can run tests over a longer period, which is great for measuring if a change impacts a habit.

Let me know if you need help with it!

This content is part of a talk I gave for Experiment Nation: Change the routine of visitors with A/B-tests (serverside) watch it on YouTube.