While successfully launching an app is the first step towards its continued popularity and profitability, the really tricky part of the process can be actually increasing users’ engagement with the app. Correctly designing and developing certain critical focus areas of the app and incorporating a few key app trends can ease this process significantly.
Peak engagement rates for your app means that your users are finding value in it, increasing your chances of promoting brand visibility and maximizing your ROI.
Evaluating User Engagement Levels
Tracking your user’s daily activity in the app, along with keeping a record of a few specific app features that consistently achieve the highest click rates, can help you align your app with user behavior and expectations, ultimately enhancing the user experience. It also allows marketing teams to target the right customers.
Here’s a glimpse of the various metrics that can help you determine the level of user engagement in your app.
The Steps for Better App Engagement
Once you have determined the present level of user engagement, you can set a benchmark for comparing the improvement required and ultimately achieved. For achieving maximum engagement levels, here are a few focus areas that you absolutely must get right, along with some proven app trends that you can consider incorporating.
App Onboarding
Focusing on the user’s overall experience from the get-go fetches positive results in terms of user engagement. If the onboarding process in your app is not seamless, a large share of users will abandon it immediately. You must provide your users with a smooth sign-up experience, thereby ensuring user retention, rather than targeting a high number of downloads.
App Utility
Although simplifying the onboarding experience plays a pivotal role in customer retention, ensuring the app’s overall usefulness to existing customers ultimately remains the benchmark for app engagement.
Your app should be aimed at improving some aspect of the user’s life, by serving a primary utility, for example, maybe mobile banking or hailing rides. Shoehorning a lot of features within an app, that does not contribute towards that utility, will only result in users losing interest. You must judiciously include in-app features, ensuring that all of them work in concert towards the ultimate utility of your app.
Push Notifications
Increasing the app’s interactivity with its users is another way to enhance user engagement. With push notifications, you can continue to engage with your users; achieving click-through rates seven times that of email, and also bringing the app’s benefits to their notice.
Moreover, personalized push notifications come with the extra advantage of sending the most appropriate messages at the right time to the users. Sending push notifications based on user location (geo-targeting) reminds the users of the app’s benefits and features that could be useful for specific needs.
Personalized Experiences
Being an integral part of developing quality mobile apps, content personalization has been a game-changer for engaging individual app users with their own tailored experiences.
From small things like displaying the user’s name in on-screen instructions, messages, feedback, and push notifications to providing shortcuts and solutions on a need-basis, aligned with location or other information, personalized experiences can go a long way to increase user engagement.
In-App Experience
Arguably, the most crucial part of achieving high user engagement is a seamless in-app experience. And to ensure that, the user should not be confused by inconsistencies in the user interface and the app’s functionality.
Besides ensuring the overall consistency of your app’s UI & functionality, you could also think about including a short training on them, for the benefit of the user.
Cross-Channel Experience
Providing a consistent overall experience to users, with the app serving as a part of the whole, not only helps with user engagement but also reinforces your brand image.
When interlinking your other channels like your company website with the app, maintaining consistency in terms of branding and ‘look & feel’, can establish a sense of familiarity and smooth transition. This helps in ensuring high engagement across all your channels, besides that of your app.
Two-Way Communication
Regardless of how great your app is, your customers are bound to find some gripes with it that they would like to be improved.
Giving a platform to your customers for providing feedback, not only helps improve brand loyalty by making the customer feel that their inputs matter, but also enables you to strengthen your app’s offerings. Moreover, it reduces the possibility for your users to post negative reviews publicly, and thus, ensures that your brand image remains unscathed.
Gamification
Gamification is a great way of ensuring that not only do your users engage with your app for its utility, but also for an intrinsic motivation to use it. Applying game mechanics to non-game processes, gamification has been proven to captivate large user segments, and in turn, increase profits. With gamification, the process of engaging with your app is transformed into a fun game for the user. The user is motivated to spend more time and money in your app, and also to draw in more users through positive word-of-mouth. Besides customer retention and acquisition, both of which increase business revenues, gamification also provides another channel for two-way communication and tracking customer feedback.
Take a look at the benchmarks set by the “Top 10 Trending Apps of 2021‘”, which have earned them their positions, in terms of user engagement.
Some Closing Thoughts
The final piece to the puzzle of maximizing user engagement is hooking in the right kind of users with the correct engagement model.
When app developers implement a broad engagement model without any particular goal in mind, a lot of crucial resources can end up being wasted on certain user segments which are not worth the same in ROI as others.
To get the most out of your user-engagement model, you must truly understand your customer base and properly segment it.
Having launched multiple successful apps for leading global brands, Josh software specializes in the development and enhancement of apps with supreme user engagement levels.
Our years of industry experience and understanding of modern consumer expectations make us the right partner for all your app development requirements.
Reach out to us to have your app’s engagement level accurately analyzed and get expert consultation for taking it to its peak.
Achieve unparalleled user engagement and ROI with mobile apps developed by Josh Software.
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