Free apps : Why engage users to interact with you

Your app represents the fastest, easiest, and most accessible way for your brand followers to interact with you and, most importantly, complete a task or engage with a service. Users are looking for an app that meets their expectations, and today, those expectations center on a streamlined and efficient experience. Ten seconds is an eternity to an app user. It can mean the difference between a one-time user and a loyal customer. Today, there’s a 60% chance that users who don’t return after seven days never will, and 20% of users only open an app once. The window for engagement is short.

You’ve spent time, money and resources to develop the perfect app. But if the first thing a user sees upon app open is an error, all of your dedicated work can go unnoticed. Similarly, if your app takes too long to load, your user could abandon it before even viewing the home screen. If within the first ten seconds of their experience your user cannot interact with the app because of a timeout or an issue, you’ve lost their trust.

While engagement is measured by how frequently users come back to your app, the metrics can vary. Engagement can meaure how often users open the app, duration of usage, number of screens used and conversion rate for events. Depending on your app’s goal, these metrics will tell you if your users consider your product indispensable. This will help you to quickly alter course or tweak certain features to adapt to customer demand.

There are many times when the user may not have network coverage or the data speeds may be too slow to download content on your app. For those times, build in such a way that the user has something to do in the app without necessarily having to be connected to get a good experience. For example, Instagram lets you browse through photographs, which are already in your stream even if you’re not connected.

Continuous engagement means the user sees value in your app and is most likely to recommend it to their network, in turn helping your app gain traction through word of mouth.
While each app is different, many of the most successful ones are service or profile-based, allowing users to save information, preferences and interests, and personalize their experience. Often, users who do download your app have already interacted with you on another channel and set up their profile elsewhere. But what about new app users who haven’t created an account? Or if you’re a mobile-first startup that has an app but no web presence? Many times, people on-the-go download the apps of brands that they find interesting to do a “test drive.” In these situations, you want to make it exceedingly simple for new users to register for an account and experience the best of what your app has to offer (plus, it allows you to save their data for additional insights down the road).

Fifty percent of people say the #1 reason they download apps are to receive discounts and special offers. If you have a segment of users who don’t use the app regularly, it could be a sign that they aren’t engaging because they’re missing the mobile-only exclusivity. Re-engaging them quickly can be as simple as creating a rewards-based program, or even implementing a one-time, mobile-only offer.