Mobile applications are dominating the digital world by making things convenient and on-the-go for app users and businesses. Many businesses are investing in a mobile app development company to build high-quality mobile applications that will boost their business growth and revenue. However, by simply building and launching your mobile app in the market, you come only halfway to your business success. The rest of the battle starts after the app launch when you need to attract more users to your mobile app. Your app should also be loved by your users. Several surveys have revealed that many users tend to lose interest in the application in a short period and stop using it. If you want continued business success, then you need to increase your mobile app engagement and user retention rates. You need to constantly remind them to come back to your app and maintain user engagement. Push notifications prove to be beneficial in this case as this helps an application to retain existing users and acquire the lost interest. However, push notifications can also work wonders if they are used appropriately. Avoid sending irrelevant push notifications as this may annoy your users and they might lose trust in your service.
As a leading mobile app development company, we offer a complete suite of mobile app development services including mobile app marketing and mobile app maintenance services to keep your app in an optimal condition and increase app engagement and user retention rates.
Mobile app engagement and user retention are two metrics that give real insights into your app’s success. While lower app retention and engagement leads to the failure of your app, higher engagement and retention results in the opposite.
What is Engagement?
Engagement describes how active are your users on your application. According to Localytics, this metric describes highly engaged users as users that indulge in 11 or more app sessions every month.
What is Retention?
This metric indicates the percentage of users who return to the application within three months after their first session. According to Localytics, user retention is defined as a user that returns to the application at least 1x within a month.
Both these metrics reflect how engaged and loyal users are towards your mobile application. For businesses focusing primarily on user conversions and monetization, it is wise to invest in one of the top mobile app marketing companies for the effective implementation of strategies to keep users engaged and ensure repeat app usage.
Effective Ways to Increase Your Mobile App Engagement and User Retention
Understand Your Users
A mobile app development company or the maker knows the purpose and key attributes of the application. But, what’s the next plan? Once the user logins your app and take a look at all the content of your application, what are the key elements that will tempt the user to return to your app. 25% of the users stop using your app after their first use, so you need to know exactly what the other 75% of the users are looking for in your app.
You need to understand the app flow and design it accordingly to ensure that your users keep using your application.
Easy and Efficient Onboarding
Although it may seem simple, not all applications offer an easy and efficient onboarding process. The more difficult it is to get started with your app, the more likely your users will abandon your application. You need to make your onboarding process simple, yet intuitive.
Here’s how you can do it:
• Make your app onboarding process shorter by reducing the number of steps involved in creating an account or signing up and incorporate multiple registration options such as easy login with Facebook or Google.
• You can educate about the app features throughout the onboarding experience to familiarize the users with your app’s functionality. However, you must not overload your app users right from the beginning itself.
• Educate them through actions to reveal the main gestures in the app experience.
Monitor and Capture the TouchPoints
You must continuously monitor the active user’s activity and collect useful information like what are the options that are mostly used by your users. Gathering information of the users individually will help you learn about your users’ interests that you can use to add additional features and functionalities to your application.
Ecommerce applications are the biggest example of this feature as they use the carts and wishlists information to ping the users about the products. These frequent push notifications based on user interests attract the users to return to your app.
Use Push Notifications Appropriately
Offering a personalized brand interaction makes your users return to your app for 11 and more sessions. You should send push notifications to welcome your users or provide them with useful information as they progress through your app. Leading applications leverage this type of app interaction to shape user journey, by implementing thoughtful strategies to reach out to users.
You can provide useful retailer deals based on geographical location and app usage patterns for prompting app sessions. You can also interact with app users to re-engage ones who have abandoned the conversion funnel.
In-app Messages
Delivering app experience according to user’s needs and preferences will make your user continue using your application. Businesses using in-app messages for interacting with users will witness user retention of 61-74 percent within 28 days after receiving a message.
While in-app messages do not require instant action, they are important notifications to receive. These messages include alerts about app issues, version upgrades, and payment failures. However, not all messages you send will be relevant to all your users. Therefore, you must segment your audience to provide valuable information to your users.
For this, some applications use device features and functionalities like location to target specific audiences with messages as well as real-time updates and links to personalized content.
Run Loyalty Programs and Incentivize Users
If your business model lets you offer rewards or loyalty programs to your users, you can capitalize on the opportunity. Loyalty programs not only reward users to use the product but also make them feel special and valuable to your brand.
Applications that leverage in-app purchasing monetization models like QSR apps can benefit from time-based discounts, while freemium applications can reward users with app usage-based rewards in place of monetary discounts and offers.
Use Two-way Communication
Users prefer to build long-lasting relationships with brands and want to feel appreciated and valued. Therefore, you must encourage two-way communication to receive valuable feedback, solve customer queries and issues, and improve app functionality over time.
These messages help you address any issue before a negative is posted in the app store. This allows you to build trust and long-term relationships before it affects your app downloads. The proactive response will increase your mobile app engagement and user engagement rates, encourage positive reviews, and establish long-term brand loyalty.
Make Sure Your App is of High-quality and Functionality
Building a high-quality mobile app with proper functionality boosts engagement and retention rates. An application can be rarely without minor bugs post-launch, therefore, it is important to test the application thoroughly before delivering or launching to make sure there aren’t any major issues.
Being a professional mobile app development company, we offer round-the-clock mobile app maintenance services to ensure your app is free from bugs, has proper functionality, and is running optimally.
If an app crashes or has slow load times, it will affect all other metrics. Therefore, it is important to monitor front-end as well as back-end functionality to gain a better understanding of how well your app is performing.
Highlight the Benefit of Your App
Users often look for the benefit the app provides before they decide to download the app. Therefore, you need to describe how your app is addressing issues, pain points, or struggle the user is facing every day. Your message must be persuasive and demonstrate the long-term value of your application. This will increase the number of users that will engage over time.
Identify the Right Market Opportunity
All leading applications have one thing in common, they can build habit-forming behaviors by developing their app around the daily chores and emotions of users. Some successful brands like Uber, Instagram, or Spotify understand the pain point of their audience and add features in their app that address their daily needs, which ultimately increases their apps’ usability. Therefore, meeting the needs of your target audience will help significantly in increasing the usability of your app.
Final Thoughts
Whether it is a minimum viable product or a mature, fully-functional application, it continued iterations to keep it in optimal condition. You may opt for our mobile app maintenance services for regular performance monitoring and analytics of your app.
For your app’s success, your goal should not be only to increase the number of app downloads, but also to retain users to establish brand loyalty. Converting new users into loyal, long-term users will help increase average lifetime value and revenue for your application. To achieve this, you can invest in one of the reputed mobile app marketing companies for implementing effective strategies and making your app a great success.
Considering all the aforementioned methods, you can increase your mobile app engagement and user retention and make your app survive in the highly competitive world or applications. As a professional mobile app development company, we can help you launch and promote your app effectively and ethically and help you improve user engagement and retention rates.
FAQs
Can you assess and optimize my app’s performance?
Yes, of course. Our mobile app experts will assess your mobile app performance and optimize it accordingly to ensure optimal performance and functioning of your application. We will identify all the loopholes, fix them, and provide recommendations on areas of improvement.
Will you help me market my application?
Yes, as one of the trusted mobile app marketing companies, we can help you launch and market your application across various channels and help you reach a broader, targeted audience in less time.
I’ve got an app idea, where do I start?
You only need to share your app idea with us and one of our team members will get back to you shortly via email or phone. We will provide a no-obligation quote and look forward to hearing from you for a long-term partnership.
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