Batman's got the Joker; Superman has Lex Luthor; and mobile app owners have churn.

It's challenging to develop an app. It's hard designing and releasing an app. It's even harder to get users to download and activate. But the hardest part is keeping them engaged. This is why churn is your nemesis.

Worry not, brave mobile app owners. Churn is not invincible, and you can beat it in these 4 ways:

1. Beat Churn with Thrilling Onboarding

MarketingCharts shows that 58% of mobile app users will become inactive within the first 30 days, but that churn rates are significantly lower for users who log more sessions within the first few days.

The first way to ensure that your users stay is by creating a friendly onboarding experience that encourages them to come back often.

• DON'T aim to explain everything that your app can do during the first visit. No matter how wonderful every little feature is, the first visit is not the time to showcase them all. You get a limited amount of attention, and it's critical that you focus it well

• DO highlight your app's best features, those that users rave about on review sites

• DO present a friendly video tutorial or show a walkthrough carousel on the basic usage of your app, when necessary

By removing the complexities, reducing friction, and presenting an organized and user-friendly onboarding process, you significantly reduce the chance that a user will leave.

Remember that your goal for the first visit is a second visit.

2. Beat Churn with Personalized Content

When users return to your app, your goal changes; but likely not only in the way you might think.

Whatever the desired action you want users to take (make a purchase, play a game, invite a friend, etc.), your goal is now two-fold:

You want users not to churn so that they can take the desired action.

Therefore, you need to walk the fine line between being helpful and engaging your users and being annoying or frustrating them.

The fine line is comprised of the right customized message and offer presented at the right "mobile moment.

To create such engagement, you must properly:

1. Collect and store data about your users' preferences and past interaction with the app
2. Segment your users to be able to target them with banners, push notifications, in-app messages and other engagement features, at the right time

For example, if your app is an Amazonesque marketplace and a user visits after abandoning the shoe section on their last visit, display an in-app message with a coupon for a discount on shoes.

Targeting users with offers on products they want will make them trust your app. After all, you know what they are interested in and you give it to them - what's not to like? Conversely, if you offer shoe discounts to users who have never shopped for shoes, they're likely to find your ads bothersome.

Personalized content works to engage users in nearly every vertical - not only ecommerce.

You can see great examples of this in the music vertical - the Apple Music app offers music recommendations from experts based on users' personal listening habits. When music fans feel that the app understands them and offers them content that they are most likely to enjoy, they're more inclined to come back to the app often.

3. Beat Churn with Profiling

You've likely segmented your prospects into buyer personas to target them with the right message at the right time. In minimizing churn for your app, you need to develop a similar process of profiling your churned users.

A quality mobile analytics platform will log all of the data you need to begin your sleuthing.

For example, you may want to group users who churned within 30 seconds separately from those who churned after 2 days.

Study their behavior patterns and discern the psychology behind it. Once you understand who they are and the reason they left, you can begin devising strategies for optimizations that will get other users within that segment to stay longer and do more within your app.

4. Beat Churn with Requests

What if you could simply ask your dormant users to come back? Well...you can (and you should), so long as you were granted permission to send push notifications back when the users were active.

Invest in optimizing for the right moment to ask for permission for push notifications. Find a time within the user's journey when trust levels are high, because asking before they trust you may actually increase churn.

Then, if one of your users that opted in becomes dormant, you can push a notification that is based on the user's past behavior or preferences to get them logged back in and re-engaged.

Make new friends but keep the old

You spend resources getting new users for your app, but it's likely easier and less expensive to invest in keeping the users you already have. App engagement is as important as app acquisition (or...perhaps even more so). Show your users value. Gain their trust. Pay attention to their behaviors, analyze their meaning, and respond accordingly.