The best thing you can do is turn your app into a habit. This means you need to get users to use it many times, not just to download it! According to Marc Parrish, Advisor at Appboy, 50% of all the people who download your app are going to leave it within the first month, and half of those people are only going to fire it up once. Here are the five tips that will guide you to engage your users with your app:

1. Engagement is not just about long-term relationship.

Users tend to prefer apps that will help them accomplish a task. Therefore, app engagement is more about helping a user accomplish a task and feel a sense of pride and ownership after having done so.

Often, to prevent app clutter on their phone, many users prefer not to download an app and simply browse that information instead. So in order to drive users to engage with your app (and actually download it), the app needs to provide a much better experience than the browser and fulfill a truly unique need.

2. People don’t look for apps; apps need to find people.

You should be able to give your users an experience, not just an app! The best experience you create, the more users will talk about your app; and users discover apps when they come up in conversation with friends or when they see them using it. So, what you have to do is satisfy users in order to make them generate a positive word of mouth.

5 tips for app engagement

2015

3. Focus on one feature.

The design of the application, that is, the user experience and the look and feel, should focus on that one feature that is the core of your app idea.

4. Make a personalized distribution

Have a focused approach when you distribute your app. You don’t design an app that is suitable for everyone, so don’t mass distribute it.

5. Make offline accessibility integral to the app design.

It happens that users may not have network coverage or the data rate may be too slow to download content from your app. For those times, build it in a way that the user has something to do in the app without necessarily having to be connected to have a great experience.

2015