Did you know?

There are more than 3.5 million Android apps on the Google Play Store while there are more than 2.2 million iOS apps.

Considering these factors, it becomes quite evident why businesses are keen on increasing customer engagement through their mobile apps. When you develop an app with a great user experience that would attract users repeatedly, you can coax them to spend more hours on your application in the long run.

However, boosting app engagement is not easy; you may lack an idea regarding the best strategies for maintaining your users' interest.

In this post, we will discuss some effective strategies to increase user interaction with your app.

What is App Engagement?

App engagement is how many interactions there are between users and a mobile app. This indicates how much a user is involved with the features and content of the app. App engagement can include frequently opening the app, signing up, taking on tasks, writing reviews, or sharing things from the app with other people.

Engagement is usually a good sign in an app, meaning users are happy with the app. This generally contributes to their continued use of the app and, by extension, greater loyalty to it. So, the more engaged the users are, the more they will likely come back.

How to Increase Mobile App Engagement?

Here are the effective tips to engage Mobile App Customers.

1. Ensures a seamless onboarding experience

The very first encounter of using an app determines whether the user will stay longer or leave as soon as possible, thus raising the bounce rate of the app. Not all users will love the struggle of trying to figure out how an app is to be used if there is no guidance whatsoever. Don't ask them to waste so much time trying to understand the basics.

Offer a customised onboarding experience helping users get easily started. This can be done by guiding them through the entire app's features and proper usage of them so they can start enjoying the app right away. The smoothness of the onboarding experience has a positive impact on the feelings of the users, making them comfortable and confident.

2. Understand customer trends and actions

The ability to understand the trends and behaviors of customers gives businesses a better chance to serve customers more effectively through targeted campaigns. Companies can obtain important information about the customers' interests, their behavior when using the app, and what makes them decide, based on data gathered from their website or app. This allows businesses to meet the needs and preferences of their target audience by managing offerings and marketing strategies. This improves customer satisfaction and engagement.

3. Use Push notifications wisely.

Many companies resort to push notifications to remind customers that the app exists and to take particular actions: offering some special discount, announcing a new update, or offering the newest products or collections. Push notifications are what keeps the users engaged and bring them back to the app. This makes it such a reliable tool for retention boosting and driving user activity.

Ensure that the notifications you send to customers are relevant and targeted to the customers. Thus, Push notifications are one of the best ways to keep visitors informed about the items left in the cart.

4. Add gamified experiences to the app.

Using gamification will encourage users to interact more with your application. Gamification is the awarding of points, badges, or other motivators to make the experience interesting and fun. Starting in the early 2000s, this has been the key to successful ways of getting users to focus on mobile applications.

Gamification keeps users on the app for longer because it introduces elements of competition. Each user can compare their progress with friends or direct competitors or strive to beat a score on leaderboards. This feeling of pride and competition ensures that people keep coming back and interacting more frequently with the app.

5. Building better relationships with the use of in-app messages

Research finds that through in-app messages, retention can go up to 3.5 times the rate of push notifications, where companies can benefit from it to update users with new features or updates coming to the app, so they do not fall apart.

To make in-app messaging even more effective, businesses can segment their users based on factors like interests, behavior, gender, age, and more. Personalizing the messages for each user can create a much more relevant and engaging experience that will make the end-users feel valued and more likely to continue using the app.

6. Removing friction from the sign-up process

The first impression of an app becomes very crucial here. A complicated and time-consuming sign-up process can be frustrating for a user, forcing them not to return to your app. Too many fields asked for at the beginning of signing up can overwhelm users and contribute to higher abandonment rates.

Keep the sign-up form short and simple in order to ensure that the user experience is pleasant. Making it quick and easy increases the likelihood of a user completing the process and returning to your app regularly. Smooth sign-up experiences encourage repeated visits and long-term engagement.

7. Using emails to get the users back on social media

If you keep engaging with them even when they are not on your mobile app, it is a great idea to retarget them through social media and email. For instance, when you launch new features of your app, use these channels to let the users know about popular updates or new products, asking them back to return and try out the latest things in the app.

Emails are perhaps a free way to bring users back to your app. Additionally, to make this function more potent, include clear Call-to-Actions in your email. Thus, when clicking on a CTA, the user would be re-routed to exactly the part of the app or website where he/she can take action, thus making the process seamless and urging them to engage more.

8. Provides a personalized experience

Mobile app development companies that focus on delivering more personalized experiences for their customers can increase engagement from users up to 20%. Personalization can include dispatching personalized push notifications, the delivery of customized in-app messages, and targeted product and service recommendations.

Personalized content will lead to a significant increase in customer retention rates since customers feel that they are being treated individually and valued. In fact, this personalized approach may activate satisfied customers into positive brand ambassadors who will share their experiences with others and help expand the scope of the app's user base.

9. Using deep linking to boost app engagement

Deep linking is also a good strategy if you want to retarget existing customers and re-engage with them. It involves sending a link to a user's email or notification that takes the user directly into the app to a specific landing page. Therefore, when users click on the link, they are instantly directed to the relevant content or feature and not just the app's homepage.

Customized notifications that guide users to exactly where they need to go make it easier for the users to take the desired action. Deep linking thus enhances the user experience and drives higher engagement by improving the seamlessness and targeting of interaction.

10. Run contests/ offer promotions.

The other effective way to encourage the engagement of a mobile app is by offering contests and giveaways. Many companies have adapted this strategy to continue bringing and keeping customers engaged over time.

For instance, Google Pay usually runs contests and games to make users want to come back to the app daily. Examples of such contests motivate users to make quick payments to friends, creating both a fun and rewarding experience. A business can attract more user interactions and retention by offering exciting prizes or incentives, which encourage users to regularly engage with an application.

Conclusion

Market conditions change quickly, hence app engagement strategies are likely to evolve with time to meet new consumer expectations through keeping customers' needs at the forefront.

One way of achieving this is through collecting feedback from users and analyzing behavioural data and KPIs. These insights will guide your apps' development, improve user experience, and produce content that is more relevant to your users. Therefore, you can be able to make informed decisions capable of fostering deeper and more meaningful interaction by understanding how users are interacting with your application.

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