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Reignite growth.
If your growth flywheel is stuck, here’s how you can fix it.
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Every growth team knows the playbook. Build a flywheel that runs on three core engines: acquisition to bring in new users, activation to convert them to value realization, and retention to keep them engaged long-term. Get all three humming in harmony, and you've got a self-sustaining growth machine.
For many apps, the flywheel gets stalled at that last critical point: retention.
Acquisition Without
Retention
Is Leakage
The numbers tell a sobering story. In gaming apps, 55% of users never return after their first session. For non-gaming apps, two-thirds disappear within three days of installation. And the attrition continues—after 30 days, nearly half (46%) of all newly acquired users, both paid and organic, have uninstalled the app entirely.
The majority of attrition occurs within the first 3 days…
Source: Moloco internal data (2025)
…contributing to high uninstall rates
30‑day uninstall rates across Gaming and Consumer apps, split by paid vs. organic
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User behavior
Remain
Uninstall
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Source: AppsFlyer, App Uninstall Report 2025. Analysis of install and uninstall trend of 2,000 Android apps.
All those users you worked so hard to aquire—optimizing ad creative, bidding on keywords, testing landing pages—drop off before they can ever experience your apps’ value.
The Ticking Clock
of
Inactivity
When it comes to inactivity, the clock ticks differently for different users. Non-payers who are inactive for just three days have a 35% chance of returning on their own. Paying users show more resilience, but even they hit that same critical threshold after six days of inactivity, with return rates dropping below one-third.
These inactivity windows (3+ days non-payers, 6+ days payers) represent the optimal moments for re-engagement—when you can capture users who would otherwise be lost and generate the strongest incremental returns.
Inactive users often don’t return organically
Source: Moloco Internal Data (May 2025 - June 2025), US Consumer Apps, Return within 45-day window, Inactivity defined as days since last recorded user interaction. Users with less than one event excluded from analysis.
The Ticking Clock
of
Inactivity
When it comes to inactivity, the clock ticks differently for different users. Non-payers who are inactive for just three days have a 35% chance of returning on their own. Paying users show more resilience, but even they hit that same critical threshold after six days of inactivity, with return rates dropping below one-third.
Inactive users often don’t return organically
Source: Moloco Internal Data (May 2025 - June 2025), US Consumer Apps, Return within 45-day window, Inactivity defined as days since last recorded user interaction. Users with less than one event excluded from analysis.
These inactivity windows (3+ days non-payers, 6+ days payers) represent the optimal moments for re-engagement—when you can capture users who would otherwise be lost and generate the strongest incremental returns.
Optimal re-engagement windows: 3+ days Inactivity for non-payers, 6+ days for payers
Return rate by days inactive, payers vs. non‑payers
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Source: Moloco internal Data (2025), Return within 45-day window. Paying user is defined as user who has made an in-app purchase.
Moloco’s AI found riders most likely to book again, so we re-engaged lapsed and low-frequency users without leaning on discounts. That helped us double total orders.
Read case study
Vu Thu Trang | Senior Performance Marketing Manager, Xanh SM
Re-engagement
Is
More Than Marketing: It's Asset Protection
The economics of re-engagement are compelling. Bringing back dormant users is significantly cheaper than acquiring new ones, and the stakes keep rising. Gaming RPD (Revenue per Download) is up six times since 2014, while non-gaming has nearly doubled (Sensor Tower). Every retained user is worth more than ever.
Looking at our aggregate data, the efficiency gap is dramatic. Re-engagement campaigns cost 4x less per action than user acquisition but generate 896% higher ROAS. The benefits extend beyond immediate returns - AppsFlyer reported an 85% uplift in week 12 retention rates for apps that run re-engagement campaigns compared to those that don't (AppsFlyer App Retention benchmarks 2025).
Re-engagement vs. UA campaigns
Source: Moloco internal data (2025), Aggregate comparison of UA and RE outcomes for gaming and non-gaming apps.
We wanted to validate these findings, so we analyzed apps running both UA and re-engagement campaigns simultaneously with the same optimization goals and target actions during the same period. In this apples-to-apples comparison, re-engagement delivered 74% lower CPA and 568% higher ROAS.
The RE + UA advantage: better ROAS, lower CPA
Meta-Analysis of UA and RE campaigns (matched objectives and time periods). RE campaign outcomes compared to UA
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Source: Moloco Internal data (2024-2025), Apps running UA and RE with the same objectives (event goal) over the same period in the US, UK, India, Argentina, Vietnam and Turkey. RE spend represented between 10-70% of the overall campaign budget.
So it’s no surprise why the most sophisticated growth teams are transforming their playbooks. They're continuing to invest in acquisition, while also protecting against churn.
Gaming tells this story well. Despite declining installs, lifetime value in gaming apps is climbing: Day-7 LTV is up 3%, Day-90 ARPPU is up 6% (Moloco State of Mobile Gaming 2025). Players aren't just staying, they're playing longer and across more sessions. Time spent is up. Session count is up. The players come – and they’re given reasons to keep coming back.
The bottom line: your inactive app users are an enormous untapped opportunity.
Your Cross-functional Playbook
Recognizing the opportunity is one thing, but marketing can't do this alone. Many of the companies investing in retention are making key shifts across their teams:
Your Re-Engagement Playbook
Once the organizational structure and technology stack are aligned, the re-engagement strategy itself has four core components.
Risk intelligence.
Understanding the potential drop points for your users means:
Understanding the potential drop points for your users means:
Using cross-app behavioral signals to predict which users are at risk of migrating to competitors.
Competitive monitoring to identify threats to your customers before they materialize.
Predictive churn modeling sophisticated enough to protect high-value users before you lose them—not after.
Reengagement that's proactive
not reactive, including:
not reactive, including:
Reaching at-risk users in relevant contexts before competitors do.
Timing protection campaigns around competitive threat windows—new game launches, seasonal shopping peaks, fitness motivation cycles.
Coordinating reengagement across channels, and focusing resources on your highest-value segments first.
Personalized user reengagement
strategy, including:
strategy, including:
Going beyond generic messages to dynamic creative and channel-specific messaging that reflect both the user's value and their specific risk profile.
Regularly A/B testing to maximize retention effectiveness. Small improvements in retention rates compound dramatically over time.
Reengagement measurement
that tells you what's actually working, including:
that tells you what's actually working, including:
Cross-channel attribution that measures protected asset value, not just clicks or installs.
Tracking competitive loss prevention as a core metric.
Measuring ROI as asset protection cost versus replacement acquisition cost. value segments first.
The Spinning Flywheel
The apps that are winning today aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest acquisition budgets, but ones that build retention into the flywheel from the beginning. When you shift to thinking of your users as valuable business assets that require protection, optimization, and strategic defense against competitive acquisition, you stand to win big.
See how re-engagement works.
