How to boost customer engagement in the mobile app

The fight for mobile app user attention today is harder than ever before. There is at least one good reason for this: over the past five years the global mobile application market has been growing at an average of 14% per year. The number of active users in the main consumer markets experienced much slower growth. Therefore, the competition for user attention among companies is more and more intense.

In mobile marketing user attention is commonly referred to as customer engagement. This criteria measures the level of communication between the user and the mobile app. It shows whether or not your customers continue to use the application and take actions, and the company, as a result, gets helpful insights, tips and leads. Proper communication with users results not only in a sales increase, but can provide ideas for business and product development as well.

Metrics of mobile app engagement

The effectiveness of customer engagement has a direct impact on the corporate financials. Mainly this refers to the money spent in acquiring new customers. Today the cost of an app install on average is $4, on in-app purchases – $75, on subscriptions – $148. Accordingly, companies that can significantly reduce these rates profit more.

So if it is so important, how do you keep your customers engaged? There are several metrics that you should focus on a constant basis. 

• The number of active users – those who regularly use your application. This is the main criteria for analysis of engagement and this metric is also often referred to as MAU / DAU.
• Customer retention rate – the proportion of new customers who return to the app. This parameter demonstrates how successfully the brand is building user loyalty.
• Session duration – how much time, on average, users spend in the application. This indicator demonstrates user activity within the application and the willingness of a customer to take actions.
• Screen flow – this metric shows what users consume in the application. The deeper analysis of this parameter highlights which aspects of the app are of the top interest to users, and what annoys them.
• Customer lifetime value – predicting how much each customer will generate in cash over the entire period of its lifetime with the product. Basically, this is the financial side of customer engagement. 

The good news is that all of these metrics can be improved. 

Effective strategies to increase customer engagement

In addition to a non-stop improvement of the app as a product, one of the most effective ways to increase customer engagement is content marketing. It assumes the regular publication of content that is both useful and relevant to end users. The focus here is to be as much close to the customer as possible, and the expectation should be only long term.

The core mission of content marketing is to gain permanent trust and strengthen the relationship with the user. But it pays off: according to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing generates 3 times more leads than search engine ads and banners.

Today one of the important trends in content marketing is the embedded Stories. This allows a brand to create its own media and start communicating with users in the most native way – timely, personally and actionably. Communication through the Stories creates emotional connection with the customers, which results in better loyalty and trust. 

This is also proved by the statistics of Instagram Stories in 2020: 81% of all users of the social network (around a billion people) use it to search for commercial products and services, 90% of Instagram clients are subscribed to business accounts, 58% noted an increase in interest in the brand after seeing Stories.

Stories is a complex content tool that allows you to build engaging communication with users. Its inventory today is far more than just images, text messages and links. Now you can create an immersive experience within Stories by combining animation, video, interactive widgets, and multiple approaches to the narrative – from lifestyle content to personal offers. The existence of a SaaS solution makes it fast and easy to capitalize on Stories format without delay in contrast to a ‘build-in’ option .

The power of Stories

It is amazing how Stories made with InAppStory can anchor customer engagement. Advanced functionality and a variety of use cases available in one solution afford any company to customize the use of Stories to its specific needs and customer preferences. Stories allow to feature animation, video, text and interactive techniques seamlessly and in the most native way. You can also apply popular user reactions such as favorites, like/dislike and social sharing.

Push notifications is another well-known tool to get customers engaged with the content in Stories. This is critically important when competition for mobile customers is becoming extremely intense.  According to research, 25% of people do not return to an app after the first session, and 85% of the users mobile time account for only five favorite apps.

Mobile app onboarding is the perfect tool for timely and actionable messages with wide coverage. It's also an effective visual to welcome new users and guide them through the app. Targeting and personalization settings allow to address users as individuals. And the analytical module enables to track performance of the campaigns and adjust them quickly based on real customer feedback.

All the above combined together help to build the emotional relationships with the customers and trust. Stories blend together the latest technology and the content legacy to create innovations in marketing. In order to survive or even succeed, companies need to learn and adopt fast how to create actionable and personalized content and deliver it in the most efficient and native way for their customers. 
 

Three pillars of effective content marketing include proper media strategy, actionable content plan and non-stop performance based adjustments. While discussing marketing initiatives next time just keep in mind that the effectiveness of content marketing in 2020 was assessed as “very high” by about 60% of market participants. And 98% of respondents believe that content marketing pays all of the costs. 

Embedding Stories together with a proper content strategy, is an amazing bundle to increase customer engagement, loyalty and to generate sales. The InAppStory platform is an ideal SaaS solution where you can find it both.

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