How Mobile Apps Are Boosting User Engagement
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Getting an app into your visitors’ hands is half the job; the other half is giving them reasons to open it again. User engagement — every interaction people have with your app — is what separates platforms that serve a destination from apps that are installed for a weekend and deleted at the airport. Here are the strategies that work:
6 Top Strategies for Boosting User Engagement via Apps
1. Get To Know Your Audience With the Onboarding Process
Onboarding is the process that allows new users to get acquainted with your mobile app and its main focus is user retention. This strategy is important, being the first interaction the user has with your app and it’s vital to give them a positive user experience.
The onboarding process should be straightforward and easy, having only a few steps that the user needs to go through. Including a call to action at the end of the onboarding process will help you boost engagement as well.
Don’t forget that this strategy gives you the possibility to gather data from the users, which you’ll eventually use to personalize and deliver targeted content.
2. Keep Your Audience Engaged via Push Notifications
Push notifications are messages sent directly to your users’ devices, and they are the most direct line a destination has to people who already chose to install its app. For them to work, they must be short, relevant and rare: a festival starting, a new route published, an event reminder. Personalization improves open rates; noise gets the app deleted — send what you would want to receive.
3. Improve Mobile App Engagement With Gamification
A great way to drive more engagement to your mobile app is to implement gamified features. This means adding dynamic and fun features to a regular app that stimulate users to engage with your app.
Gamification fosters a sense of achievement and motivates the users since the app lets them compete against each other and win different in-app rewards. Don’t make it too difficult from the start because people will lose interest. Try giving your users some extra points for signing up, or if they invite a friend.
Within your mobile app, gamification offers your audience a unique experience by making ordinary tasks fun and can increase newly registered business users by 600%.
4. Offer Exclusive Giveaways
Everybody loves special offers and giveaways and from time to time you should reward your most engaged users as well. Users will keep coming back to your app if they know that loyal members are rewarded.
One of the best ways to increase app engagement is to offer giveaways that encourage sharing and excite the users. The principle of giveaways is simple — give your users something valuable and receive engagement in return.
5. Make Lifelong Followers With Superior User Experience
User experience refers to how functional, easy to use, and accessible a mobile app is. Sometimes it might be something as simple as the fluidity of animation or navigability of the main menu. A user-friendly app helps you cater to your people’s specific demands and requirements, without clogging up your interface.
Custom apps enable you to create interfaces where users get the most out of your app with ease. Superior user experience is a priority since statistics have shown that 90% of users abandoned an app due to poor performance.
It’s vital to give your user the option to leave feedback which will strengthen user engagement in your app and build trust. Increase app engagement by constantly updating and optimizing the app, introducing new features, simplifying old ones, and continuing to personalize the user experience to its full extent.
6. Meet Your Users Across Channels
Cross-channel marketing is used to connect with users across any device and each digital channel, whether through email or social media marketing. In this way you can send personalized offers or relevant information on users’ preferred channels, increasing your conversion rate.
For example, you can track when the user has interacted with a text notification or opened an email and from there on, use that data to figure out patterns. If you notice the user adds items into the cart at night, send them an email reminder in the morning — they can research the chosen items on a desktop and get back to your app for the purchase.
Why Does Audience Engagement Matter?
People notice when an app is kept alive — fresh content, working features, answers that come — and they repay it with the only currency that matters for a destination platform: they keep using it, and they recommend the place it serves.
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