How to Increase App Engagement and User Retention

12 Feb How to Increase App Engagement and User Retention

In first thought, we assume that user acquisition is the main metric to count any app’s success or failure. It can be true in some cases where if any app getting thousands of installs, it is more likely to have high quality and user-friendly – that is a successful app. But, think of some other scenario, with third-party ads and incentive campaigns, you can easily influence this matric. A trash app full of ads can have 100 thousands of installs with incentive campaigns. However, here, most of the users remove the app instantly or after one-time use. This is not a good sign of the user-friendly app.

Play store is one of the best sources for Android apps to get organic traffic. Google and Apple app store has their own algorithm to rank apps. It depends on some factors like installs, user reviews and more importantly retention rate and user engagement. They both companies own the Android and iOS respectively. And they have better tracking implemented to identify how much time user stay on the app and how much time he/she spending app.

Or just removing the app after one-time use. This all affects the app ranking and if you think you can just influence the app ranking by giving a huge number of app installs, you are wrong. You will need highly engaged users opening your app frequently and keeping your app for a long time.

Let’s see some points on how you can improve the user engagement with higher retention rate.

1. Easy onboarding:

Providing an easy onboarding experience can help you reduce abandonment rates. Just imagine, you installed one interesting app. On the first screen, you need to fill a form of 10-12 fields. You hate it right? People don’t like this type of complex signup forms or confusing functions. People bounce back. You lose.

Instead, you can use social media login and by just single tap fetch all required info. From the social account. That will save the user time and users will not need to type each detail in fields. Effective onboarding has shown in an increase of user lifetime value by up to 500%.

> Do not overload users with information filling.
> In games give instruction when needed (level wise) instead of all-at-start.

2. Push notifications

Push notification is the best way to get users on the app again increasing engagement. Especially with e-commerce apps and games where re-targeting of users is very important, push notification will work best. You will get high CTR to compare to any other re-targeting channel. Push notification is shown 88% high engagement in compare to the who do not use it. It works.

3. Personalization is the key!

People like personalized experience even in apps and it is an important aspect of a compelling application. You can use the collected user data to provide more user-centric experience with appropriate data display and UI themes. Ok, displaying the user’s name on screens is not personalization. You can provide highly focused push notification that is based on user’s behavior.

Here you need to be careful while working with push notification. If you start sending irrelevant notification too frequently, it will impact negatively and you may lose a big number of users because of it.

4. Incentivization:

People love free stuff. Moreover, people likely more attracted to similar offers and incentives. You can use this point to bring users more frequently on your app. Mobile-specific rewards like shopping app’s app-only offers, Coupons, special promotions, and other offers will help drive more user engagement and hence drive conversions. This depends on the nature of app how you can incentivize your user base.

Except these discussed above, there are many other ways you can increase the engagement of users in your app/game. Positive change in engagement will give you more room to increase the revenue. But this all starts with happy users. Try above ways and provide a better application to your loyal users.