Engagement Tips for Developing a Top Ten Mobile App

By: Anand Jain, Co-Founder, CleverTap

Phone has become an extremely personal device that comes in handy in more ways than one. Users download several apps on their smartphones that they use regularly for various tasks. If your app has been downloaded and installed in huge numbers next, your job is to ensure that the users are engaged with the app. Users choose those apps that offer a personalized UX over others, therefore apps need to pay keen attention towards user engagement and retention to gain ROI.

It is easier to sell to those users who are already engaged with your app as compared to onboarding new users and striking sales. Therefore businesses need to greatly engage and build a relationship with the users. Successfully engaging with the user needs some expert tricks like
1. Tracking your daily uninstalls
2. Tracking your app-launch to app-launch retention cohorts … for people who open your app, how often do they come back and open it again … is it every day for 50% of your users? Is it every week? Is it every month? and so on.

Backed with data like this you can work on an engagement strategy and use different methods to engage the user.

Push Notifications - Push notifications are short and relevant messages that pop-up on the mobile screen of a user. Personalized interaction with the user aiming at conversion works well. A user has completed the onboarding process, but hasn’t returned to the app or added items to cart but not completed the transaction, sending a push notification at this stage could aid conversion. Push-notifications can prove to be an effective tool of communication between apps and users if sent at the right mobile moment.

Personalized Marketing – Sending notifications without context would yield only partial or no benefits. Segmenting users using funnels or cohorts is an effective way to group them based on their demographics like age, sex, city, previous purchases, their stage in the user life-cycle and other factors can be helpful in personalized marketing. Personalized marketing can thus boost conversions greatly.

In-App Notifications – Notifications that are displayed to the user while he is still actively in your app are called in-app notifications. This engagement method has analytics in its core. In-app notifications are contextual messages delivered to the user while he is still in the mobile moment. These notifications can improve user engagement and ROI to a great extent.

Real-time Business Insights – Analytics and data science can provide real-time insights about the user and where he stands in his product lifecycle. Real-time updates about user activity can allow business to act on the mobile moment of the user. Relevant and real-time marketing engages the user better that non-contextual ad hock marketing.

Responsive Design – Build natively to provide a fantastic UX across all major platforms. A well designed app keeps the user engaged. Try to keep the app simple and user friendly to get maximum traction and engagement.

Onboarding – Users quickly loose interest in apps with a complex or time consuming onboarding process. A simple login or a login through any of the popular social media accounts is quick and efficient after which the user can spend time exploring and engaging with the app.

User Centric - In the haste to acquire new users businesses must not neglect the present active or inactive users. It is easier to engage and convert existing users than acquiring new ones and working towards converting them.

Different types of apps interact and engage with their users in different ways. Pick a method or approach that suits your kind business the most and improvise it with the help of user response to build a relationship with the user and boost the ROI of your app.