With the countless mobile apps in the market and higher expectations for user-friendly experience and interface, mobile app engagement is the key to converting curious and first-time users into long-term, active users. In addition, to achieve success with your mobile app, you need to engage with new users regularly and often.
Unfortunately, only a few users will stay with the app after installing it. After a month, the number of your app users may continue to drop, depending on the industry. To avoid that and to boost your mobile app engagement rate, continue reading to learn some of the strategies that can help you retain and attract users:
- Create A Consistent In-App Experience
Once your users have logged in, found your app helpful, and received personalized push notifications, creating a consistent experience within the app is crucial. A consistent in-app experience means that customers shouldn’t be confused with your app’s functionality and user interface as they use your app.
In fact, as part of your onboarding experience, your app should provide quick training on how to use it to increase app engagement and improve your customer’s experience. Consistency should also be applied to the whole customer journey for a seamless experience.
When rethinking the design of your app, make sure to develop an understanding of the user’s mental model. This way, whether your customers use the desktop or mobile version, you can be assured that they’ll have a consistent and positive experience.
- Onboard Like A Pro
Onboarding is the journey your users take from opening your app to becoming full-on customers. It often includes the way you design your welcome screen and how you explain your app’s functionality.
Well-thought and smart onboarding will be the key to building a successful mobile application. It allows you to engage with customers through your app without even noticing it.
- Optimize Your App’s Push Notifications
Push notifications are beneficial to continue interacting with your users and remind them of your app’s benefits. In fact, personalized push notifications with the right content at the right time can increase mobile app engagement. They even have a better click-through rate than emails.
If your app is a tool for users, push notifications must remind them that they can use the app whenever they need it. An excellent way to do this is to send push notifications based on the users’ locations. With geo-targeting, users will get a personalized experience and are more likely to engage with the app once they find that the message is helpful to them.
- Embrace Gamification
To keep your users interested while they use the app, consider embracing gamification, which offers users incentives to come back and stay longer. Such incentives can be provided in the form of the following:
- Fun Quiz – The use of a survey allows you to add creative fun to your mobile app by allowing users to tap on the right answers. Let them see how users responded to the quiz and take them to the product page when they’ve tapped on it.
- Social Rewards, Discounts, And Special Offers – Define your power users first to offer this. After that, show your appreciation for such features. You can give them rewards like discounts when they share your app to social media platforms and other people they know outside the app.
- Specially Limited-Time Offers – These are powerful ways to re-engage dormant users.
- Upgrade – Make an in-app notification message informing users of the new app’s availability. For every version upgrade, be sure to use onboarding to showcase essential changes in the app.
- Make Your App Free
To stay ahead of the competition and win on mobile, make your app free of charge. At present, most of the apps in the market can be downloaded for free. Don’t charge your users just to download your app if you want to increase mobile app engagement.
Then, introduce the paid add-ons, subscription plans, and some paid features when your users download and try your app. Just make sure to avoid forcing your paid add-ons or features on your users.
Moreover, ensure that your features or highlights give your users reasons to stay engaged on the app or continue using it. For instance, provide convenient features that would benefit them more, such as a QR and barcode scanner and security.
- Prioritize Compatibility
Another way to improve your mobile app engagement is to prioritize compatibility. Remember that not all people will wait for new apps to load for more than a few seconds or to recover after a crash. Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure that your mobile app is compatible with various devices.
Consider working with experienced mobile developers who have years of experience and expertise in building quality products to get the best results. See to it that they make the apps compatible with different operational platforms and multiple devices.
Conclusion
Mobile app engagement is essential to the success of your app. Without it, your app is useless. So, do your best to know what works well for your target audience by considering the above strategies in mind. Once you nail the right mobile app features for your audience, you can expect to boost your engagement metrics and user retention.