6 Strategies for sustainable app growth: Case studies of 13 fast-scaling apps
Growth isn’t the end goal—it’s the starting point.
Most app teams dream of hitting their first major growth curve. The downloads, the initial buzz—it’s exhilarating. But sustaining that growth? Monetizing it effectively? And, crucially, retaining users amidst fierce competition? That’s where the real, harder work begins.
At Pushwoosh, we’ve had a front-row seat to what actually works across diverse industries like gaming, fintech, news & media, and e-commerce. In this post, we’ll share real app growth strategies used by Pushwoosh customers to not only acquire the first 10,000 users but, more importantly, retain them, maximize revenue, and build lasting loyalty at scale.
Strategy 1: Growth through high-quality user acquisition
User acquisition is the foundation of growth for any app, especially for those just launching or bravely entering new markets. Think about it: without a robust initial audience, what would we nurture, monetize, or retain? Exactly!
Populating your app with high-quality users is essential, and your app growth strategy should always combine smart paid and organic acquisition across all major channels.
Organic user acquisition: App store optimization
ASO isn’t just a one-time task; it’s a continuous process of enhancing your app’s discoverability within app stores and, crucially, increasing its conversion rate from a mere impression to a full install. It’s your app’s organic lifeline in a sea of competition!
By implementing a clever ASO strategy that involves metadata optimization, building comprehensive keyword banks, and showcasing strong converting screenshots, your app will naturally rank higher in search results. This directly boosts your app’s discoverability, drives more organic traffic to your app store listing, and increases the number of downloads without ongoing ad spend. That’s efficiency!
Paid user acquisition: Reaching & retargeting the right audience
While organic growth is vital, paid UA is essential to ensure your app reaches and engages with the right audience at scale, especially for established players looking to maintain momentum or target specific demographics. These campaigns don’t just push traffic to your app store listing; they can also be strategically used to re-target existing users who have already downloaded your app but haven’t completed a desired action, such as a purchase or registration. Smart, right?
Paid user acquisition campaigns may seem easy to execute, but in reality, they require a lot of strategizing and continuous testing to ensure the highest ROAS and the best use of your marketing budget.
Remember than any effective app growth strategy will leverage paid UA and ASO in combination to help maintain sustainable mobile app growth.
Megan Dean
Sustainable growth is a team sport. When teams operate in silos, your funnel leaks.
To succeed, organic, paid, retention, and product teams must work in sync toward a common goal. Product-led growth mechanics, supported by strong acquisition and engagement strategies, are most effective when built on cross-functional collaboration.
When the top of the funnel is consistent, with creatives, messaging, and positioning aligned across paid and organic channels, it naturally improves conversion rates and reduces CAC by eliminating friction. Your users shouldn’t feel like different teams are behind each stage of their journey.
Thomas le Hardy
Getting early subscribers & push opt-ins
Beyond initial downloads, building a direct line of communication with your users is crucial from day one. This proactive approach ensures you can engage them effectively even after the initial acquisition push.
Nail your positioning and value early: Clearly communicate what your app offers and why it’s essential for the user. Highlight the immediate benefits they’ll gain.
Promote opt-ins as part of the experience: Don’t just ask for opt-ins; explain the clear benefits of push notifications – whether it’s timely news updates, exclusive offers, transaction alerts, or personalized content recommendations. Frame them as an integral, valuable part of the app service.
Capture and convert interest across platforms: Use web push, email sign-ups, and targeted in-app prompts to capture interest from the moment a user interacts with your brand, long before they even download the app. This creates a funnel for future engagement.
The problem: Without a robust post-acquisition strategy, even the highest quality users can quickly churn, turning valuable installs into lost opportunities. This is where the power of personalized engagement becomes indispensable for a sustained app growth strategy.
Acquisition is only part of the equation. You need to turn installs into meaningful post-install events. That’s where retention takes over. Keeping users engaged and converting them is always more cost-efficient than trying to win them back later.
And at the core of it all? Data. Understood insights must be shared across teams to refine strategies, improve performance, and drive long-term value.
Thomas le Hardy
Strategy 2: Growth through personalized engagement
Once users are acquired, the focus shifts to engaging them in meaningful ways that build loyalty and keep them coming back.
Generic messaging simply doesn’t cut it for large, diverse audiences. This is where hyper-personalization shines, turning every interaction into a relevant, valuable experience.
GB News: Real-time push notifications as a core service for audience retention
Challenge: Grow as a new player in an established, competitive market and retain audience.
Solution: Highly targeted news delivery based on user preferences and behavior. Push notifications synchronized with live TV discussions quickly became an essential, anticipated component of GB News’ offering, actively keeping users opening the app for the latest, most relevant updates.
Outcome: Audience growth to 1.2M push subscribers with a strong 72.2% mobile push opt-in rate, demonstrating sustained engagement and a competitive advantage in the crowded media space.
Takeaway: Push isn’t just a promo tool—for media apps, it can be the product itself! When seamlessly integrated into editorial workflows and hyper-personalized, they become a primary driver for audience retention and overall business success.
Learn from GB News’ success:
SPORT 1: Driving in-app engagement for traffic monetization
Challenge: Maximize traffic to the app and repeatedly attract sports enthusiasts to increase user engagement and revenue, critical for their in-app advertising model.
Solution: A robust, cross-channel user engagement strategy encompassing live updates, editorials, and in-app messaging. The key was collecting user preferences during onboarding and using them to tailor communications — for example, sending winter sports news only to those interested.
Outcome: 5 million app opens per month and push notification CTRs of up to 8%, which is 2–3x higher than the median benchmark for news apps. This sustained engagement of a multimillion audience directly resulted in higher revenue.
Takeaway: For apps monetized by advertising, maximizing app opens and engagement is paramount. A personalized messaging strategy featuring diverse and relevant content can dramatically increase user retention and drive significant revenue growth.
Telepizza: Immediate revenue with geo-relevant app offers
Challenge: A fast-food giant needed to drive immediate sales and capitalize on the customer proximity.
Solution: Geo-targeted offers delivered via Pushwoosh, ensuring promotions reached customers when they were most likely to convert.
Outcome: The combination of the perfect time and place ensured a 4–7% conversion rate and impressive revenue generation: $2400–$2600 earned from a single push notification.
Takeaway: Precision pays! Segment your audience by location, behavior, or immediate need to deliver contextual offers that move customers to action, directly boosting your bottom line.
Strategy 3: Monetize the post-growth audience
Acquisition costs money. The real ROI comes from effectively monetizing your existing user base. This isn’t just about driving initial sales; it’s about cultivating repeat purchases, upsells, and cross-sells through smart, targeted engagement.
Bladestorm: Increased ARPU through repeated app messaging
Challenge: Scale app growth efficiently and monetize the user base, even as the market for new users became limited and retargeting costs grew.
Solution: Strategic use of Pushwoosh to drive engagement that led to monetization.
Outcome: Significant increases in key metrics in just eight months: MAU +16.62% and ARPU +4.58%, demonstrating how smart messaging can directly impact profitability.
The app maintained consistently high push notification CTRs, reaching up to 28.21% (with an average of 5.6%). Notably, their iOS push notification opt-in rate soared to 97.9%, demonstrating remarkable user acceptance fueled by consistent, relevant communication.
Takeaway: Growth ≠ acquisition. It’s profoundly about the value you extract from your engaged audience. Targeted engagement, particularly for high-value segments, directly increases revenue and ARPU.
HungryNaki: Increase sales through personalized campaigns
Challenge: Transform explosive growth into sustainable scaling. Monetize an acquired audience through sales and upselling/cross-selling.
Solution: Automated onboarding, engagement, and conversion-to-purchase campaigns.
Messages used dynamic personalization, like the last viewed menu item or cart addition, ensuring relevance and effectiveness.
Unlimited in-app messaging guided users through their lifecycle, capitalizing on in-app presence to encourage actions like app ratings after a successful order.
Outcome: A significant boost in monetary metrics: order volume, average order value (AOV), and customer lifetime value (CLV). They surged in just six months, following the increase in DAU x10 and MAU x2.6.
Takeaway: Personalized offers, delivered at the right moment and context, transform messages from noise into valuable calls to action that boost your bottom line and encourage deep customer loyalty. This is how you convert growth into consistent, measurable revenue.
AvaTrade: Retained fintech audience with omnichannel engagement
Challenge: A pioneering online broker with over 1 million returning customers worldwide across 30 website subdomains and three mobile apps had to effectively engage and convert its vast, multi-platform audience, delivering a consistent, personalized experience across every touchpoint.
Solution: A seamless omnichannel engagement strategy delivering timely, relevant updates and prompts via app and web push notifications.
Outcome: A 12% boost in conversion to real account registration for “Anonymous” users and a 16% increase in registrations for educational webinars driven by push messages.
Based on more user data, AvaTrade personalized its content and achieved CTRs 9.4x higher than the industry benchmark for fintech apps.
Takeaway: Don’t let users churn due to your lack of data or channel limitations! Re-engage them via the most relevant channels with smart, personalized triggers to keep them active, informed, and truly engaged.
FIBA: Growth is seasonal — retention is evergreen
Challenge: Highly dependent on the sports season, FIBA needed to be the primary news source during events and, crucially, stay relevant off-season.
Solution: Geo-targeted news and curated content delivered through Pushwoosh, turning sporadic engagement into year-round loyalty.
Outcome: An incredible 700k fans engaged with 6M real-time push notifications during events. In the off-season, the app successfully retained basketball fans with push notifications, keeping CTRs up to 6.45%.
Takeaway: Personalized content isn’t just a feature; it’s a fundamental aspect of the service that builds deep loyalty and keeps your app top-of-mind.
Learn from FIBA’s success:
Strategy 4: Growth through retention & lifecycle messaging
Omada: Turned one-time users into loyal customers
Challenge: The #1 coupons & discounts platform in the GCC region struggled to retain a fluctuating audience installing the app for one-time incentives—and then disengaging.
Solution: Lifecycle messaging campaigns, including:
- Proactive onboarding flows to engage new users and encourage initial coupon usage;
- Targeted re-engagement campaigns for inactive users, nudging them back with relevant offers or reminders;
- Loyalty programs with personalized messages to encourage tier upgrades and reward earning;
- Responsive customer experience messaging to address both positive and negative user interactions.
Outcome: An impressive boost all across the lifecycle: a 67.4% conversion rate to the target action (coupon usage) after onboarding; a 4% increase in Day 30 user retention rate; and an extra 3.6% of users completing intent actions in loyalty campaigns.
Takeaway: Automated lifecycle messaging, powered by precise behavior-driven segmentation, is crucial for turning occasional users into loyal, high-value customers. It ensures continuous engagement and significantly boosts long-term app retention.
Beach Bum: Tripled the active audience through optimized engagement
Challenge: Grow user base and engagement across multiple game apps, specifically needing to re-engage dormant players, increase active player counts, and boost revenue from in-app purchases.
Solution: Personalized push notifications strategically grouped into retention and reactivation campaigns. Personalized message content was delivered in users’ local languages with a custom notification sound, with enticing offers targeted at power users and dormant players.
Outcome: A tremendous 3x DAU, MAU, and push subscribers across the apps.
Takeaway: Segment your audience by activity level, engagement patterns, or preference to maximize results.
Strategy 5: Product-led growth with built-in messaging
Ryde: Delivering excellent services via push
Challenge: Ensuring ongoing app usage and making the app an indispensable part of users’ daily lives.
Solution: Transactional pushes and service-oriented messaging that make push notifications an essential part of the “excellent service,” driving repeat usage and loyalty.
Outcome: Ryde among the top-5 iOS apps in Scandinavia + see metrics in the success story
Takeaway: If the message is useful, users don’t just tolerate it—they welcome it! Integrating messaging into the core product experience, especially for critical transactional alerts, builds immense trust and makes your app invaluable.
Learn from Ryde’s success:
Map Your City: Guiding users through value
Challenge: Ensuring ongoing app usage and making the app an indispensable part of users’ daily lives.
Solution: Messaging tied to key product actions (map publishing)
Outcome: Sustained engagement.
Takeaway: Growth happens when users get value at the right moment.
Learn from Map Your City’s success:
Strategy 6: Scaling reach with omnichannel messaging
While app push is undeniably powerful, a comprehensive app growth strategy often requires an omnichannel approach, expertly orchestrating communications across in-app messaging and emails to maximize both reach and engagement.
A fintech startup: Maximized reach via email
Challenge: Build and scale an email list
Strategy: Omnichannel orchestration across email and push (earned and owned channels)
Result: Grown from 1M to 8M subscribers
Takeaway: Email isn’t dead—it just needs orchestration. Integrating push notifications with your email strategy can significantly boost subscriber acquisition and engagement. It’s about making the channels work together!
Bantoa: International expansion made possible with user retention
Challenge: A thriving fashion community app set to enter international markets and retain new global audiences.
Solution: Utilizing Pushwoosh to personalize experiences for diverse international users, focusing on retention strategies to build a global community.
Outcome: Grew into an international community of highly engaged fashion influencers and aficionados over five years.
Takeaway: Strategic, multi-step messaging journeys, delivered across the right channels and localized for diverse audiences, are absolutely crucial for retaining users, significantly increasing their lifetime value, and confidently expanding your market reach globally.
Build a strategic foundation for sustainable app growth
You’ve grasped the crucial pillars of app growth; now, how do you put them into action? Let’s outline the core foundational elements of your app marketing strategy, whether you’re launching a new app in your portfolio or scaling an already thriving one.
Define your KPIs — strictly
It’s vital to measure your app performance using metrics that are genuinely relevant to your app and can be easily tracked.
Are you focusing on retention rates, LTV, ARPU, or conversion funnels? Make sure your KPIs reflect your profit-driven goals.
Understand your audience — deeply
Identify segments, conduct surveys, and dive into analytics to gain a clear picture of your audience and direct your mobile app marketing strategy.
This insight helps you create content that truly resonates and design an app that meets their needs, addressing pain points and motivations for a more valuable experience.
Assess your competition — wisely
Analyze your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. What are they doing well? Where are their gaps that your app can fill?
Identify your app’s competitive advantage. Where can your app differentiate?
The result of competitive research should be an actionable plan meant to accelerate your app’s growth trajectory and build a robust, sustainable model for long-term success.
Monetize your app — intelligently
Converting users into recurring revenue is a top priority, but it requires strategic execution.
Consider various monetization models; some app categories suit specific models better (e.g., subscriptions for content-focused apps like news or fitness; in-app advertising/purchases for gaming).
Always define your monetization strategy early to ensure your growth efforts translate into lasting profitability.
Execute your app growth strategy with the right tools
Remarkable app growth isn’t magic; it’s the result of strategic vision and flawless execution. To make it happen, you need the right tools.
Pushwoosh is designed to centralize your customer engagement and retention efforts in one place. Complex omnichannel campaigns? Actionable analytics? It’s all there, ready to use out of the box without overburdening your internal development team. See for yourself!
FAQ on app growth
What is an app growth strategy?
An app growth strategy is a comprehensive, dynamic blueprint designed to consistently boost your app’s user base, elevate engagement, enhance retention, and ultimately, maximize its monetization and lifetime value.
Think of it as your app’s roadmap to sustainable success, guiding every step from initial user acquisition to ongoing user lifecycle management, often powered by smart, data-driven personalization.
How do you retain mobile app users?
The key to app user retention is delivering continuous value through personalized experiences.
Highly effective retention tactics include carefully crafted onboarding sequences, proactive re-engagement campaigns for those users who might be drifting away, relevant in-app messaging, and push notifications that serve a purpose (like critical alerts or personalized updates). And, of course, exclusive offers precisely based on individual user behavior and preferences are always a win!
Which channels are most effective for mobile app growth?
Sustained app growth truly flourishes on owned, rather than paid, channels: push notifications, in-app messages, email, SMS, and WhatsApp messages. They are exceptionally effective for re-engaging users, driving crucial conversions, and building deep, lasting loyalty.
The absolute best strategy, in our experience, is an omnichannel approach that expertly orchestrates messages across all these channels, yielding consistently superior results.
What channels work best for app user engagement?
Push notifications and in-app messages are incredibly powerful due to their immediacy and directness. They meet your users where they are, right in the moment!
Email provides a valuable channel for more detailed communications and complex journeys.
Web push can re-engage a share of users on their desktop devices.
The golden rule? Use a thoughtful mix of these channels, precisely tailored to individual user preferences and behavior, to ensure continuous, relevant engagement that truly resonates.
What is product-led growth in mobile apps?
Product-led growth in mobile apps is a powerful, forward-thinking strategy where the app itself intrinsically drives user acquisition, retention, and expansion.
It’s achieved by making the product inherently valuable and intuitive, with messaging (think essential transactional pushes or helpful in-app guides) seamlessly integrated into the core experience.
This strategic integration guides users towards realizing that value and encourages ongoing usage without the need for heavy sales or marketing efforts. It’s about letting your product lead the way!
