Mobile App Development
6 Proven Strategies to Increase Mobile App Engagement and User Retention
Today, mobile applications are the hottest means to get
connected to the Internet for modern-day, tech-savvy customers. The ease of
usage offered by handheld devices makes them immensely popular among digital
customers for connecting to the internet through different mobile apps. While
the increasing demand of mobile apps among customers might be good news for you
as a mobile
app development firm, it can also become a challenge.
As the number of apps increases further, it might get
difficult for you to engage and retain mobile users. Why? The reason is simple:
with millions of apps present on the play store, it takes seconds for users to
delete poorly performing apps that deliver minimum value, from their
smartphone. To save your app from getting uninstalled, it’s important to make
them entertaining and valuable for improved app engagement and user retention.
Mobile app engagement and user retention are two main
metrics that businesses from retail & ecommerce, banking, healthcare and other sectors can use to get genuine insights about the success of an
application. High engagement and retention equal to the app success whereas low
app engagement and retention are a recipe for failure.
So, before we move on to the strategies to boost mobile
app engagement and user retention, let's first understand:
What is App Engagement Exactly?
App engagement: It is directly related to the set of
metrics that measures user interaction with a mobile app. Put it simply - app
engagement tactics give a reason to app visitors to keep coming back to your
mobile app, or open your app and perform the desired actions you want.
User Retention: This is a highly subjective term. As
per the industry benchmark, it refers to the percentage of app users who return
back to your app within three months, after they install it. To make it more
specific and quantifiable, it can be defined as the number of users that
returns to your app at least once in 30 days, after installation.
Note: Every brand has set its own benchmark to
measure user retention rate, which depends upon the nature or type of the app
they built.
Also Read: Top
5 Tools for Cross-Platform Mobile App Development
Common App Engagement metrics include:
Active Users: It refers to the number of users who open your app at a particular time (session/day/month). This metric is further subdivided into:
App Retention Rate: As an app developer, this metric provides you with an idea about the percentage of users who keep coming back to your app after they install it for a certain period of time.
Churn Rate: This metric simply denotes the percentage of users that your app is unable to retain.
Session Length: This simply tells you about the time a particular user spent on your app, every time they open it.
The Challenge: App Engagement & User Retention
Achieving higher mobile app engagement and user retention is
a difficult task today, even for the top mobile app development companies.
According to last year statistics, only 32 per cent of users returned to a
mobile app after they installed it globally. And, what’s more, interesting is
that 25 percent of the users stopped the usage of a mobile app after one
use.
The above stats clearly indicate that retaining mobile app
users is getting harder for app developers in today’s challenging market,
especially with people having a lot of app choices.
How to Solve it?
Follow the below-given tactics or strategies to improve app
engagement and user retention or your mobile app. It will also help your
enterprise achieve the desired results or get the ROI you expect from your
investment in mobile app development services.
Learn More: Watch
Out for These 5 Android App Development Trends in 2020
Top Ways to Increase App Engagement & User Retention
Simplify App Onboarding Process
As an iOS or Android app
development agency, make sure you deliver an excellent app onboarding
experience for higher user engagement. The poor onboarding experience can leave
a negative impact on your app engagement efforts. Simplified app onboarding
experiences increases the lifetime of an app of up to 60 per cent. To make sure
a user doesn’t abandon the app during registration, it’s important you allow
them to enter the app smoothly. Wondering how? Follow the steps below:
- Reduce registration steps for users while they sign-up
- Minimize the total number of information fields.
- Get user information through innovative ways ( for eg. use
buttons, icons, images for capturing user data)
- Most importantly, keep it simple &
straightforward.
Send Relevant Push notifications
Push notifications are one of the powerful techniques to
grab app user attention and engage them. But, stay aware - if you use this in a
wrongful way, it can become the reason for your app deletion from a user’s
phone. Wondering how often you should send push notifications? Well, you must
try to provide value through push notifications to keep users engaged. How?
Think about personalization and value-service while crafting your
personalization strategy. Follow the below strategies for grabbing your apps’
user attention and improve retention rate:
- Send relevant push notifications only to your app audience.
(Don’t spam, deliver notifications that provide value to users)
- Send location-based notifications (If your app works with
GPS functionality)
- Deliver highly target push notifications
Example:
You can send a push notification via your food delivery app to customers as soon as they enter one of your partner restaurants for a quick meal.
Follow the Old School Marketing Trick - Send Emails to Engage
Another interesting tactic that you can use to engage with
your app audience is by sending them classic, old-school emails. Even though
this channel might seem old-fashioned to you today, it carries a significant
value for your brand as you can send personal greetings and your company
information. All big brands - from retail to banking to food businesses - use email
marketing to greet customers when they onboard their mobile app. Sending timely
reminders about products, services or other important issues via email is also
common for brands.
Here are some tips that you can
follow to boost app engagement via email:
- Introduce a new feature or product update via email.
- Provide tips or suggestions to explore the unused feature of
your mobile app
- Notify them about the discounts or freebies available on
your app.
- Greet customers on important dates such as birthdays and
anniversaries
- Notify customers about the upcoming product events
Think About Your App Personalization
Note this - when you will place personalization at the core
of your app engagement strategy, your app engagement metric will automatically
improve. Remember smartphones have been designed, keeping the idea of
delivering private messages to users. So, it’s important you communicate with
every app user on a personal level. Being a mobile app developer, think
about the user journey, clearly define KPIs and learn how users want to engage
with your app. As an app owner, it’s important to partner a reliable mobile
development company to deliver our personalized messages through in-app or
push alerts.
Use In-App Analytics Tools for Deeper Customer Insights
As an app developer, remember that every app is
unique with a different set of engagement KPIs. If you want to take your app
engagement efforts to the next level, you must learn about mobile app
analytics. With mobile app tracking tools (e.g., Localytics, Good Analytics,
Mixpanel, etc.), you can gather invaluable insights about the app elements that
attract the users most. You can also use this data information to know your
customers better such as who are the users of your app, You can also categorize
them into age, gender, nationality and frequency of app usage, and track their
usage pattern.
Choose Advertising to Connect with App Audience
With the help of reputable app developers, you can use
different forms of digital advertising to improve user engagement for your
mobile app. Display ads related to app discounts, rewards, etc. on different
channels (e.g. social media, search engines, etc.) to connect with your
audience. Investing in search ads helps you connect with potential customers
who are looking for services, similar to the ones offered by you.
Wrapping Up…!
Hope you enjoyed the above list of measures that are useful
to boost app engagement & user retention for your mobile app. Remember that
one-time sale is not the key to your app success, you have to attract, retain
and deliver value to your customers for long-term to increase app
engagement.
By partnering a reliable Android and iOS development
company like A3logics- you can craft a robust app engagement strategy to
retain and engage customers like never before.
Contact us
today to know more about how we can contribute to your Mobile App
Success.
Common FAQ
What is App Retention?
App retention simply refers to the percentage of people who
actively users your mobile app in a given period of time
How to drive an App Engagement?
Use a combination of tactics: simplified customer
on-boarding, active engagement like push notifications, personalized app
experience, etc. to drive app engagement and retain customers.
How do I Increase Adoption of my Mobile App?
For increasing your mobile app adoption, apply strategies
like social sharing in communities about your app, provide selective in-app
offers to build customer loyalty, request customer feedback, run effective
campaigns, and deliver personalized app experiences to users.
According to the article, push notifications are a great way to increase mobile app engagement. They can help to keep users coming back to an app by notifying them of new content or updates. In order to be effective, however, push notifications need to be well-timed and relevant to users. Additionally, they should only be used sparingly in order to avoid becoming annoying.