There are more than 3.5 million Android apps on the Google Play Store, nearly 2.2 million iOS apps on the Apple App Store, and around 480,000 apps on the Amazon Appstore.
It’s a challenge to stand out from the competition and generate app downloads. But user acquisition is just the beginning. How do you turn a first-time user into an enthusiastic fan?
An effective app marketing strategy involves user retention, the key to earning stellar reviews, growing your user base, and generating revenue from in-app purchases, e-commerce, or subscriptions. Let’s look at how to create and implement a mobile app engagement strategy to keep users coming back.
Why is it important to increase interaction with the application?
Application interaction refers to any interaction between a user and a mobile application development company.
Engaged mobile app users tend to spend more on your products and services. You can generate more data from them to inform product development and marketing strategy that delivers a personalized conversion experience across different touchpoints.
For example, engaged customers in the retail banking industry generate 37% more annual revenue than those who are not actively engaged with their banks. Meanwhile, brands that perform well in customer engagement are 2.2 times more likely to experience an increase in market share.
User engagement can take many forms, such as completing an onboarding tutorial, making an in-app purchase, or simply exploring an app’s content. You can use engagement metrics such as the ratio of daily active users (DAU) to monthly active users (MAU), length of user sessions, and frequency of opening your app to measure your stickiness.
8 App Engagement Strategies for Modern Brands
Keeping users engaged is no easy task. New competitors enter the market every day, while user expectations evolve rapidly. Additionally, you need to stay up to date with the latest technologies and regularly update your user interface (UI) to offer a modern app experience.
Here are the latest app interaction strategies to create a sticky user experience:
1. Design an efficient app onboarding flow
If new users don’t know how to use your app to achieve their goals, they won’t come back. Design an intuitive onboarding process to provide a positive first impression while reducing barriers for users to interact with your app and benefit from its features.
2. Use push notifications strategically
Push notifications allow you to provide useful information, share updates, and stay top of mind even when users don’t have your app open. Personalized push notifications can help reduce your abandonment rate from 25% to 19% .
In addition to sharing updates and new content, you can also use push notifications to provide a personalized experience, such as promoting deals on products customers recently viewed, offering discounts on users’ birthdays, re-engaging inactive users, or driving traffic to a nearby place. Store.
3. Encourage users to try your features
Users may not have the opportunity to explore all the functionalities of your application immediately. Highlighting a few of them in your app store description, welcome screens, and onboarding sequence can help you entice users to stay and try key features.
Use in-app messaging to provide brief contextual tips to guide users through various features, encourage them to perform specific actions, or view features they haven’t used before without filling the UI with instructional text.
4. Send personalized messages within the app
In-app messaging and personalized marketing campaigns for individual users based on profile or behavioral data show 61% to 74% app retention rate in 28 days compared to 49% retention rate achieved by generic messaging.
Personalized in-app messaging helps you engage with users when they interact with your app’s content and features, allowing you to deliver relevant and timely experiences (e.g. product recommendations) to increase retention and conversions.
5. Gamify the app experience
You can increase engagement by having users compete against themselves, their connections, and other app users. The gamification of the app helps users stay consistent with exercise, saving money, interactive learning, etc. When they achieve results with your app, they are more likely to come back and tell others.
Create an attractive leaderboard with graphs and charts to help users visualize their progress, highlight recent achievements, and encourage them to explore the app’s features. When the user has completed a challenge or achieved a goal, encourage them to share the achievement with their social network.
6. Build relationships with two-way communication
In-app messaging allows you to provide real-time support whenever and wherever customers need it to troubleshoot issues, answer questions, address concerns, and complete transactions. Timely interactions can minimize frustrating experiences that can prevent users from returning to your app.
You can also proactively communicate via in-app chat to build relationships through one-on-one conversations, direct users to relevant features or content, and gather feedback to inform the mobile app development company of new features.
7. Utilize social media and emails to increase interaction
Retargeting on social media and email are good ways to interact with consumers outside of your app. Sending them a series of onboarding emails, for instance, can motivate them to use your most well-liked services and keep your brand front and center by interacting with them on social media.
Send offers and information that are specifically tailored to people who are most likely to leave using data analytics to bring them back on your list. Emails can also be used to draw attention to particular features depending on user behavior or information from profiles.
Include a call to action (CTA) in your emails and use deep links to direct users to the most relevant section of the app (rather than the home screen) to eliminate as much friction as possible along the journey of the user.
8. Add a social component
Social interactions with other users are essential to keeping users engaged with an app. The in-app community can help you achieve a 2.7x boost in user retention. It’s no surprise that the social+ trend is gaining massive momentum in the form of social+ gaming , finance, payments , and more.
Provide an area within your app where users may engage in private discussions with friends or with other members of the community. Include chat, voice and video features to enrich the experience and implement content moderation capabilities to create a safe space while providing a brand experience.
App Engagement: It’s all about the user
The state of the market is always shifting, therefore your app engagement methods need to be flexible enough to meet the most recent expectations of your users while still prioritizing them.
Listening to your users, soliciting feedback, and analyzing behavioral data can give you timely insights to optimize the app experience, deliver relevant content, and create meaningful interactions.
For many applications, adding a social layer has proven to be a successful strategy since the community feature provides a long-term means of retaining users and raising engagement. One of the most efficient and scalable strategies for increasing engagement is to integrate native in-app messaging and chat capabilities with an easy-to-use community section and user experience.
Sendbird’s extensive integration allows you to easily add a chat and community section to your app without having to start from scratch. Get a free trial from us to see how we can help you improve app user engagement.
