7 Steps To Engage And Retain Users

Every company’s resolution should aim at increasing user engagement on your mobile app. Loyal users stick around, engage, give valuable feedback, and appeal others through word-of-mouth marketing. A recent study suggested that users install more than 20 percent of apps once and abandoned thereafter. It’s very easy for your app to lose identity as users have more than 50 apps on their phone. Big brands like Instagram, McDonald’s, Starbucks, and many other brands got help from mobile app development. Mobile app helps them improve sales, boost loyalty, and enrich the overall customer experience. But a large part is still struggling to find an effective strategy.

Investing in an app is not enough as the app needs to fit in the company’s goal and brand loyalty. You need to understand your audience, good mobile strategy and pay attention to your user. Here is a brief understanding on how to grab the attention of your user and monetizing on the app in which you invest time and money.

Why Don’t People Remember About the Apps They Install?

People stop using apps because they simply forget about them. Keith Samuel, a web developer at EssayOnTime very beautifully explains what standards an app should meet to become a regular part of the user’s life: “You may develop the most usable and technically advanced app, but the retention rate won’t be high if the app is not fixated. You want to focus on a very particular audience and offer daily solutions. Plus, your app has to offer better solutions than the competitive apps in the store. Think of Remember the Milk; it’s an app that people use daily. It’s fast, simple and reliable, and you get so used to it that you can’t spend a day without it. Of course, some people will not remember about it, but the retention rates are surely higher for an app that’s this effective.”

Few key problems are-

• The App crashes more often

• Slow performance

• Too many adds

• Sign-up requirements

• Users find free options for the apps they are paying for

How to Retain Your App Users?

The goal is – make customers download your app. However, in order to do so, you need to do much work in order to retain and engage them further. Let’s see how you can attain that.

1. Ensure Great Performance

While doing mobile app development, your apps’ performance is the key factor in making and breaking your relationship with your users. Research shows that if new users face issues might never return ever. You need to ensure your app performance by assessing its load time. You should assurance conversion from browser to the buyer making sure that the experience is error and exception-free. Google will eventually push you back in SERPs if your load time and bounce rate dramatically increase. It’s strange that anything slower than two seconds will lead to a slow app in the app world.

Take your time to monitor your apps performance and behavior. However, you can achieve this by using tools and reports which are easily available online.

2. First Time User Experience (FTUE) is Critical

App developers face a challenge to make the first experience worthwhile for the users. The latest trend in the mobile app development however, provides a walk through or guided tour to introduce the app and demonstrate what the app has to offer. The focus of the app developer must be on the intuitive design and simplicity in the navigation. But, it is sometimes very hard to achieve it. Now-a-days, developers add overlay help screens to facilitate easy understanding of app’s interface and features.

3. Give them the right dose of notifications

Leanplum provided a report on mobile app development which showed that push notifications implementation strategy can boost the rates of retention by 20%. The report also showed another point to consider: personalized push notifications results in seven times higher retention rates.

Meanwhile, you don’t need to bug people with excessive notifications. You should give them the option of choice. Every user has different need and it’s better to let them choose the notifications they want to get. Some people who have the astrology app want to get daily updates on daily basis on the progress of their connections. Others consider such notifications as irrelevant.

4. Hit the Target with Custom Segments

You need to deliver customized, targeted, and rich content to your app users. You will set the parameter based on their in-app behaviors, time, context, demographics and preferences. Mobile app users not only improve user experience and engagement but also helps in monetize their apps with better ROI. App developers can follow these key points to focus better on segmentation.

• Use analytics to achieve dynamic, customized user segments and run campaigns.

• Compare engagement and analyze ROI by filtering analytics report.

• Identify high value users by tracking how your segments evolve over a period of time.

5. Be Smart with The Ads

We know that free app must feature ads but at least you can do is provide an ad-free first user experience. Users won’t mind the ads much if they realize the app on a go and how awesome it is. If you launch the app for the first time and a full-screen advertisement pop-up, they will not consider the approach as a warm welcome. Try to feature ads that are relevant and matter to your target audience.

6. Target Them With Special Offers

You have an E-Commerce website and with help of mobile app development, you want to offer an app for your customers. Shopping in mobile is very popular and an app will offer an easier experience for your users. Peter Rojas, co-founder of Engadget and Gizmodo, said: “I think the biggest change, and the one we’re already starting to see take shape, is that globally the majority of Internet usage will be done via a mobile device and for most people the mobile web will be their primary – if not their only – way of experiencing the Internet.”

7. Listen to Your Users

The most engagement strategy is to listen to your audience. You will always have a better chance to improve the app store rating and engagement when you listen to your users.

You can do this by sending Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to your audience. Users with a high NPS are the best “Promoters” who will recommend the app to your friend. Your strategy to expand user engagement now should be to use your promoters to improve your ratings.