The engagement between mobile app and users does not depend just on first sight. Like in a marriage, this love needs to be maintained every day - or else, they will end up leaving you. Forgetting the importance of app engagement while planning your mobile app marketing strategy is a fatal mistake that will greatly harm your app’s worth.
User engagement is one of the main problems that face app designers: on average, 90% of users stop using an app within 6 months of having downloaded it. On a positive note, what you have may just be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, full of magic between your app and its users.
To improve your app engagement, you need to remind your users that your app exists right there on their smartphones, just waiting to entertain them or make their lives easier. The most popular tools to instantly communicate with them are push notifications and in-app messages.
These two types of communication can complement each other, as they are in no way mutually exclusive. For example, push notifications can be used to recover a user who has stopped using the application, and later in-app messages once he has logged in to put him on the path to conversion. Whatever we do, we have to be extremely careful to not become intrusive, especially with paid apps (where the users expects not to have to deal with advertising).
Do you think email marketing is a thing of the past? Well, you would be wrong! With the rise of mobile devices, this tool has become more useful than ever to keep in touch with users. Email marketing continues to be one of the most efficient channels in terms of lead generation, user retention and return on investment.
You can use your emails to keep your users up to date with your news and app’s updates, to build expectations and interest, and offer them discounts and special promotions.
If you want to use email marketing to promote your app, do not forget that it is essential that your creative elements be responsive and able to adapt to different device screens and systems.
In-app cross promotion can become a very useful tool for companies who have multiple apps with related users, or in other words, who have created a database based on certain topics or areas of interest. Long story short, it consists in exchanging promotion between different apps to direct users from one app to the other. Both apps and consumers can benefit from this technique - apps by being able to attract new users a low cost, and consumers by having the opportunity to discover other applications related to their interests.
At the moment, in-app cross promotion is very popular among gaming apps. The big companies in this sector usually have several apps and a very elaborate database, and use this strategy to retain users within as many of their apps as possible.
On the other hand, in-app cross promotion is a double-edged sword, as there is always a risk that users will find it intrusive or annoying. It is particularly advised against for cases in which the users has paid to use the app, as they generally expect an advertising-free experience in exchange. Showing cross-promotion message contradicts this expectation, and may result in losing the user.
Another highly recommended strategy to improve your apps retention is the use of coupons, discount codes and other incentives through ads on social media. It is a low cost way to reach out to existing users and gain their loyalty, as well as targeting new audiences.
Nowadays there are more than enough social networks who offer advertising solutions, but let’s focus on the three that are most likely to reach a large audience interested in apps: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
With over one billion active users, Facebook is the ideal place to find your app’s users and encourage them to return to it. What’s more, Facebook offers an ad format specially designed for precisely that: mobile app interaction ads. To make the most of these, pay special attention and use the segmentation option strategically, as well as the mobile platforms on which you want your ad to be shown.
Twitter is ideal for apps related to “the now” and to sports. Considering 80% of its users access it from a mobile device, it is a very interesting place to promote apps. It also offers some very unique advantages:
If you decide to go with Twitter Ads, you should also know there are artificial intelligence based solutions designed especially to ease the management of this platform and optimize the results.
This social network has taken a great leap over the last few years, becoming the second biggest one in the entire world. And yet, despite is allure, it is a platform relatively unexplored by advertisers: only 200,000 companies advertise themselves here, compared to Facebook’s 3 million. It is a very interesting place to reach out to a young, visual and artistic audience, and offers very interesting synergies with Facebook’s advertising.
Last but not least, no user retention strategy can be complete without planning how we are going to measure the results. If you’re looking to keep up the chemistry between app and user, these are the metrics you will need to be keeping an eye on: