Now that you have customers using your app, the value is in engaging and retaining them.

Engagement– describes how active your customers are on the app.

Retention–is the percentage of your app’s users who return to the app time and time again.

It’s the combination of these two metrics that determines an app’s “stickiness” – how engaged and loyal users are to your app.

Converting users to loyal, long-term customers will help increase average lifetime value (LTV).

Push notifications have been shown to improve user retention anywhere from 56% to 180% . Users who have opted into receiving push notifications exhibit 88% higher app engagement than those who haven’t.

Sending push notifications has multiple benefits. It helps remind users that they’ve downloaded your app, which is important when you’re competing for valuable real estate on a user’s device. Implemented effectively, push notifications can also provide users with a compelling reason to return to the app (for example, a discount or promotion on a service/product in the Marketplace, a new Resource in the Marketplace, or information about an event.).

But you need to tread carefully; if you implement push notifications improperly and send users irrelevant messaging or notifications that users deem annoying, they will have the opposite effect. In fact, a staggering 78% of users will turn off push notifications if they’re unsatisfied with the messaging.

Here are a few Push Notification “rules” to keep in mind:

• Don’t spam customers;
• Don’t send irrelevant or too many push notifications;
• Don’t send push notifications at a time when your customers would be sleeping;

To drive engagement and retention you could offer users incentives to use your app. Perhaps you could run a competition that rewards the app user who shares the most photos from the app to social media in a certain month, using your competition hashtag.  You could provide app users with a unique discount code to use when purchasing from you.  You could invite them to a rewards program.

There are a number of ways that you could help app users to feel “special” and add value to their app experience.  The following are some examples:

• Offer a closed Facebook group for app users where they can ask questions, get access to team members, get special offers, etc.
• Give app users their own discount codes to get special discounts and early bird offers;
• Offer a weekly or monthly Q&A session with businesses or professionals that offer value add to your customers, through Facebook, a webinar platform or other mediums.

It’s essential to regularly update your Marketplace with new content to keep users interested and engaged.

It’s also important to monitor the monthly analytics report that our team will provide to you!  This information will tell you what’s working (and what’s not).