posted by Bryn Adler
FollowThe first big hurdle on the way to mobile app success is gaining users. We all want more prospects, customers, clients and fans to download and run our apps, but what about what comes after that? Apps aren’t built for a set-it-and-forget it mentality – they need to be optimized, marketed and utilized to be successful.
Boosting usage is essential to retaining users and keeping your app top of mind. But even that is not enough. Usage is also the key to realizing conversions and making your app profitable, ensuring that you see a return on your investment. There are a number of ways to increase app usage, but here, we’ve outlined seven best practices that are proven to engage users.
Launching an app is a huge feat, but no matter how diligently you research and prepare to create the best experience possible, there is always going to be room for improvement. Natural bottlenecks that surface in the UI inhibit users from fully experiencing your app, and can often lead to early drop offs. Much like with web design, using analytics to understand sticking points will allow you to create a much more fluid, engaging process, boosting usage and key metrics like session length and time in app.
Tips and tricks:
While organic users are highly valuable, most apps rely heavily on ad campaigns to increase downloads, gain new users, and create awareness. More users means more usage, but only if you move past empty metrics like downloads and identify how engaged those users are over time. Use acquisition management to track the users from paid ads via different sources, and determine the paid channels with the best ROI so that you can concentrate your acquisition efforts on those areas.
Tips and tricks:
Your funnels are what lead users to conversions, effectively assigning a value (or even profit) to their usage. Screen flow analytics track exits by screen, flow between screens, and total occurrences of visits to screens, visualizing the typical visitor interactions in your app. You can use these two in tandem by analyzing the screen flow of your defined funnels to see when, where and why users are dropping out of a certain funnel.
With this information in hand, it’s easier to see which funnels could use improvement to lead to better conversions, and what processes users are naturally following in your app. Optimizing to create better funnels and prevent drop offs will increase usage over time and improve conversion rate.
Tips and tricks:
Your brand should be actively running marketing to gain new users and expand reach, but what about marketing to current users? Improving app usage is similar to boosting web usage: you should use marketing tactics to keep your audience engaged. App marketing uses communication based on behavior to drive loyalty and retention. In running app marketing campaigns like in-app messaging, push notifications, and A/B testing, you can retain that engagement crucial to usage. Within your analytics, you can use audience segmentation to determine audience attributes and create targeted, personalized campaigns that those users will be most interested in.
Tips and tricks:
All users want to feel valued by the brands they buy from and interact with. Offering rewards programs, customized offers, and mobile coupons specific to app users shows that you recognize and appreciate their loyalty, and want to encourage their app usage by providing targeted incentives. These offers can be run using in-app and push messaging, and can be tested for offer and content across different segments to see which ones are most successful.
Tips and tricks:
Positive sentiment shouldn’t be undervalued; engaged users are going to talk about your app on social media, share great experiences, and help your digital word-of-mouth. They are also more apt to share screens from within your app. Social sharing is particularly important for media apps, which rely on user interaction with content, reach and subscriptions – the more content is shared, the more eyes it will attract. Social isn’t just a channel for marketing your app, it’s a piece of the engagement process that should support increased usage.
Tips and tricks:
Ninety one percent of consumers say access to content any way they want is important (Forrester). Users don’t exist within a bubble – they like to research and interact with brands across mobile, web, email, social, and other channels, most notably before converting. Engaging your app users on every channel is a great way to drive traffic back to the app. The more engaged your users, prospects, and customers are in general, the more apt they are to interact with you, especially through a convenient, easy-to-use and personalized app.
Tips and tricks:
Some apps get all the buzz. The rest of us have to test, measure, and learn what works with our users, and users are as fickle as ever. Now, 22% of users only ever open an app once, so it’s your job to keep them interested. Starting today means that you can stay ahead of the curve and engage the users that your competitors are already losing.
By improving you app’s usage, you’re improving your return – it’s as simple as that!
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