Are you tired of pouring time and resources into developing a mobile app, only to have it fall short of user engagement? Look no further! In this blog, we'll provide you with 7 proven strategies to boost your app's engagement and keep your users coming back for more.

Here's a quick summary of strategies you can use to improve mobile app engagement.

1. Nail the onboarding flow
2. Use in-app messages
3. Driving users to adopt multiple features to increase the breadth of engagement
4. Drive users to engage more deeply with their primary use case to increase the depth of engagement
5. Use push notifications thoughtfully
6. Employ gamification
7. Provide incentives

Why is it necessary to increase app engagement?

Increasing app engagement is crucial for the success of an app as it can lead to higher retention rates, increased user satisfaction, positive word-of-mouth marketing, and reduced churn. Engaged users are more likely to recommend the app, stay loyal over time, and contribute to the app's revenue.

By improving user engagement, an app can impact important metrics such as customer retention, user lifetime value, and monthly recurring revenue, which are crucial for app growth and sustainability. Therefore, app engagement serves as a leading indicator of an app's overall success.

7 key strategies to increase your app engagement

Nail the onboarding flow

The onboarding process of an app is crucial for providing users with a seamless and hassle-free experience. It's essential to ensure that users can quickly comprehend the app's functionality and advantages for a good engagement.

To enhance the user onboarding experience, you can

• Personalize the onboarding flow
• Include gamification elements during onboarding
• Reduce time to value
• Use nudges to enable the users to take specific actions
• Provide social proof during the onboarding journey
• Permit to explore before signing up
• Use of onboarding checklist

Use in-app messages

In-app messages are effective in grabbing the user's attention and prompting them to take the necessary action or receive important updates. Below are situations where the use of in-app messages can enhance app engagement.

• Onboard new users: Google Pay provides an excellent example of this strategy by incorporating tooltips that educate new users on how to use two critical features - making payments to contacts via a search and scanning a QR code. By doing so, Google Pay ensures that users are aware of these features and can activate their accounts more quickly.

• Feature announcement: To introduce existing and new users to their new launch of Dineout, Swiggy released a PiP video to educate and nudge the user to explore.

Highlight features for discovery: Use of in-app blinkers in SonyLiv to highlight the “My List” feature and make the users adopt that to add their favourite movies and TV shows.

• Awareness about the available offers: To nudge more users to make that booking, MakeMyTrip shows them offers and coupons in real time.

Driving users to adopt multiple features to increase the breadth of engagement

You can try to enhance user engagement by encouraging them to extract value from multiple features of your app, which can also result in increased frequency of app usage.

For instance, Jar, a daily gold savings app, successfully introduced its GoldX feature to users by utilizing an in-app nudge called Spotlight, resulting in an impressive adoption rate of 80% among users.

Drive users to engage more deeply with their primary use case to increase the depth of engagement

Providing personalized experiences and communication within the app is essential for engaging users, delivering increased value, and eventually improving retention rates. By leveraging user preferences and behavior, targeted messages can be sent that include product recommendations, feature suggestions, deals, and important announcements. In-app nudges of various forms can be utilized to showcase these messages.

An excellent example of this is Jar, which utilized a tooltip on its FAQs screen to guide users to their Daily Savings page. Once a user understands how the Daily Savings work, Jar encourages them to spin with a tooltip, providing users with rewards for spinning, thereby increasing investment in the app and leading to higher future engagement.

Use push notifications thoughtfully

Push notifications are a valuable tool that enables you to share updates, provide helpful information, and maintain top-of-mind awareness with users, even when they aren't actively using your app. By leveraging personalized push notifications, it is possible to decrease the abandonment rate.

Apart from sharing updates and new content, personalized push notifications can also enhance the user experience by offering targeted promotions such as discounts on products that users recently viewed, special birthday offers, re-engaging inactive users, and driving traffic to nearby stores. For example, push notifications could also bring users back to eCommerce apps by reminding them of special offers or abandoned carts.

Employ gamification

Gamification is an effective strategy to increase engagement and keep the users hooked. By integrating game-like elements into the app, you can create a more interactive and enjoyable experience for your users.

To increase user engagement, consider implementing mini-games or challenges within the app. For instance, Snapchat users are known to maintain their streaks by using the app every day.

Another well-known example is how Duolingo uses gamification to enhance user engagement. The app encourages users to continue learning by incorporating various game elements, such as incentivized actions, streaks, leaderboards, daily quests, progress tracking, and achievement badges.

Provide incentives

To increase user engagement, it's important to offer exclusive rewards and deals to mobile app users. Mobile-exclusive rewards could include promo codes, free items, or unique capabilities.

By promoting these offers exclusively on the app, on social media, and through notifications, you can encourage users to engage with your app regularly. With a touch of personalization, these offers based on individual user preferences can further boost engagement.

For example, the Cred app has an exclusive section for rewards that leads to frequent engagement of users with the app. They can also play quizzes to win various other rewards too.

Try Plotline if you're looking to improve your app engagement one step further by using in-app messages

Plotline is an exclusive in-app engagement platform that lets you create and deploy customizable in-app messages that match your design theme to a targeted user cohort. We strongly believe that the next level of growth for consumer internet companies will be driven by real-time in-app user engagement.

Join us in our journey towards providing users with native app experiences and improving in-app engagement.