High demands on mobile apps are increasing very fast especially in the era of smartphones that we use every day and almost every hour. According to Buildfire , there are more than 3.2 billion smartphone users all over the world. And if we assume that an average person uses 10 apps, countless of hours are being spent on app usages. It’s a strong fact that we hold on, but on the other hand, it's challenging to figure out how to be one of those 10 apps people use every day.

App engagement is a hard catch. User acquisition campaigns can succeed eventually because you get what you paid for. But on the engagement side, you never know when a user will give up on you and move on with other apps.

App engagement is a general term of metrics that represents the user interaction in the app. The session lengths, daily active users, abandonment rates are very important metrics of app engagement and that’s not even all of it to measure it. It’s important to analyze and review all these metrics because more engagement in the app means more growth, more revenue.

Important Metrics

  • Daily & Monthly Active Users: It refers to how many users in the app continue using your app. The numbers are usually provided daily or monthly.
  • Avr. Session Length: This metric shows that how long a user spends time in the app, it measures one user’s time duration of opening and closing the app.
  • Retention Rate: It gives the percentage of users who return to use your app more than once.
  • Churn Rate: This metric stands for the ratio of the users you lost to the total user count. If you have a 10% churn rate, that means you lost 10 users from 100.
  • Abandonment Rate: This rate refers to the what is the percentage of users who left your app after using it one time.

8 Effective Ways to Increase Engagement Rate

1. Push notifications

Reminding users that you are standing right there is important but doing it without boring them is the most important issue. Push notifications are a great way to interact with users if they already gave the permissions to reach them out. Timing and frequency are crucial when it comes to sending push notifications. First, give some amount of time to users to get to know your app and understand how it works. After you can start sending reminders, limited offers, or awards. Make sure that you are not bothering your users to make them keep your app on their smartphones.

2. Impeccable user experience

Providing a smooth user experience for your users is one efficient strategy to enhance mobile app engagement. But what affects a good design?

Some strategies on UX can be different among the designers because each of them has their fantastic, extraordinary perspectives to make the UX best for users. This is why understanding user behavior and applying the mental models are important factors. It helps to build an app that meets users' expectations. Focusing on a well-designed UX/UI will provide more benefits than acquiring new users.

3. Target the right users

It is inevitable to miss out on the ideal audience on a platform with millions of members. Spend some time researching your target market. If you've defined precise goals for your app, this will be much easier. The primary attention, however, should be on users who have abandoned the app or are inactive.

App owners are encouraged to employ mobile analytics to attract the correct audience. This is due to the fact that it identifies all users that visit your platform. The great thing about it is that it also shows where the most and least traffic is coming from.

4. Easy & Not boring onboarding

Most users give up on using an app in the onboarding phase. To catch users’ attention and make them understand your app’s efficiency, create a simple onboarding. Don’t confuse them with lots of features or special offers that they even don’t know why to have. A smooth onboarding experience helps to simply explain how your app works and what are the benefits of using it. You can include the subscription details as well, but try to make it catchy.

5. Make sharing easy

People love to share with their friends, on social media or different platforms. Make the content sharable within your app. Let people talk about your app with their friends and increase Word of Mouth acquisitions too. Social media is a very powerful platform today and make it drive engagement in your app.

6. Personalize the app content

Personalized content or offers make the brands more preferable by the users. Spotify has played on this strategy many times and drove users' engagement into their app. It made people share the playlist specially created for themselves and most of them use the app for the right music pool suggested to them. Personalization is a key factor when it comes to responding to users’ demands or solving their problems more accurately. It may be challenging to apply this strategy in games but even personalized offers can make a difference.

7. Feedback & Customer Support

Getting feedback from your users means that you listen to them as the app publisher. Whether you do it in the app or via the reviews, always hear what the users say and implement the features if that makes sense. A mobile app is not a faultless product so getting regular feedback from users will also help you to discover bugs and glitches in the app. Providing customer support is also another important factor to keep your users and help when they face a problem.

8. Gamification

If you see that something is not working right with the app engagement, then you can use gamification. You don’t have to use gamification if you published your app recently. Measure what’s not working and then you can create gamification strategies for your app. Gamification is basically to include game design elements into non-gaming apps. It boosts user engagement, helps to gain loyalty, and builds the same curiosity as the games. You can create several innovative strategies like including badges, points, stickers, app coins, or some levels to set up a gamification flow in your app.