How can I keep customers engaged with my app?

So, you’ve finally launched your app after months of research and hard work, congratulations! Your ASO has been successful, and you’ve had a lot of customer downloads, but you’re finding that customers are deleting it pretty soon after the initial download. If this has happened to you, you’re not alone. We recently wrote about the difference between app and web marketing, calling attention to the statistic that 80% of apps get deleted within three days of download. The fact is that unless customers feel that your app is something they want to keep going back to, that it’s adding value to their life, they are unlikely to let it keep taking up memory. So, what can you do?

Know your user

Research your customer base and create a customer persona. A customer persona is not the same as a target audience for marketing purposes, it’s used instead to think about the physical person who will be using your app so that you can give them a great user experience. For example, if your users are not likely to be tech-savvy, then bombarding them with options and features is not likely to go down well. The customer persona is also useful when you are developing new features as it helps you to develop a framework for manual testing services, again with a positive user experience in mind. If you don’t give your customers a good user experience, then they won’t want to keep using your app.

Make sure your app is genuinely useful

Give your customers a reason to keep your app on their phone. If you are selling a product that people won’t often be purchasing, what else can you offer them that will keep them engaged? One strategy is gamification, which capitalizes on the human need to compete to keep users going back to your app. It also encourages users to challenge their friends outside of the app, which is a potential for more downloads and is an opportunity for you to do creative advertising.

Another strategy is to keep publishing new content and to use push notifications to tell users when you do. Push notifications have open rates that max out at 90%, compared to email open rates, which are down at 25-30%, so you are likely to get your users to pay attention if you’ve already got them to download the app. For this strategy to be effective, the content must be of good quality and of relevance to your users. It can be advantageous to enlist the services of a digital marketing agency like clickintelligence.co to research and generate the right kind of content to engage your users. Recruiting an agency also gives you the additional advantage of more time to spend on the aspects of your business that you are truly passionate about.

Create a community and listen to them 

Once your app has been downloaded, you have a user base, so use them. Ask them what they like about your app and what they don’t, and then use that feedback. If users are reporting a bug, then make it a priority to fix it. If they really like a feature, then make sure that you are maximizing that feature’s potential. Ask your customers if there are any features they would like to see.