One of the keys to any app’s success is a high number of daily active users (DAU) and monthly active users (MAU). To increase mobile app DAU and MAU, app owners and marketers need to implement certain strategies to drive engagement and increase user loyalty. If you’re not sure how to achieve this, there are many strategies you can use to increase MAU and DAU.
What Is an Active App User?
An active app user is an individual who regularly engages with a specific application, participating in its features and functions. This user demonstrates consistent interaction, contributing to the app's usage metrics and demonstrating its value and relevance.
The ideal active user will be highly engaged, which is generally considered a user who engages in a minimum of 10 sessions per month. However, defining an active user for an app will depend on your specific goals and what you personally consider an active user.
Generally, around 25% of users abandon an app after one use, making it important to do what you can to grab and hold users’ attention and keep them engaged.
Regardless of your definition of active users for an app, the following are some strategies you can implement to increase engagement and retain users.
Why is Active App User Important?
Active app users are important because they contribute to the success and growth of an app. The more active users an app has, the more engagement and revenue it can generate.
Active users can also provide valuable feedback and insights, which can help developers improve the app and add new features that meet the needs of their users. Additionally, having a large number of active users can increase the app's visibility and attract new users through word of mouth and positive reviews.
Ways to Increase Number of Active Users
1. Develop an Efficient Onboarding Process
2. Use Personalization to Speak Directly to Users
3. Connect With Users Through In-App Stories
4. Implement Gamification
5. Carefully Engineer Your Copy
6. Work to Re-engage Existing Users
7. Continue to Develop New Features to Refresh the App Experience
8. Perfect Your App's Performance
Develop an Efficient Onboarding Process
The very first experience that people have with your app will involve onboarding sequences, making it necessary to optimize this process. Without an efficient onboarding process, you won’t see as many active users of an app as people drop off before you have the chance to truly engage them.
From the start, you should lead users to complete actions that bring true value to them. Make sure every user understands your app’s various features and what they do. In the process, you’ll help ensure that your app “clicks” with users early on when first using it.
For instance, in a financial management app, you can ask first-time users about their current portfolio and financial goals, which can then help the app tailor a personalized plan based on the user’s unique needs. The user can then start benefiting from the app, encouraging them to commit to using it more frequently.
Use Personalization to Speak Directly to Users
In line with maintaining a helpful and personalized onboarding process, personalization, in general, is crucial for attracting and retaining active app users. Your app should offer an experience that’s unique to each user and makes it feel as though you’re connecting with them on a truly personal level. Using data about your users, you can provide them with relevant content based on their wants, needs, and interests.
Personalization doesn’t have to pertain specifically to the in-app experience, either. In addition to tailoring the experience around users, you can also send push notifications that address them by name, along with other personalized messaging.
Connect With Users Through In-App Stories
In an effort to incorporate personalization into the app experience, you can do so using personalized in-app stories. Stories can deliver different types of content to users to promote your products or services within the app. You can achieve various goals using different stories, with the ability to integrate images, videos, polls, emojis, and GIFs to connect with audiences, along with other types of engaging content.
Consider the fact that over 50% of people open a brand’s story, and over 85% actually view the story to completion. Stats like these show how effective these features can be when attempting to connect with users.
Using stories, you can push the most relevant product recommendations based on each user’s order history, create engaging summaries that construct a narrative around users’ engagement with your app, and much more. The possibilities are nearly endless when it comes to how you can use stories to drive engagement and increase DAU and MAU.
At Storyly, we offer a platform that enables you to create effective, personalized stories that truly resonate with audiences.
Implement Gamification
Turning the in-app experience into a game, even if the app isn’t a gaming app, can dramatically increase user engagement and loyalty. People are more likely to find an app continuously engaging if they’re rewarded in some way for their engagement. By simply offering in-app trophies for certain achievements after completing various actions, you can keep people coming back to your app for the same dopamine rush.
There are many ways to use gamification in an app, including offering loyalty cards, enabling users to collect items such as badges, competition with other users, offering unique rewards, and more. The more ways you can turn your app into a kind of game, the more you’ll encourage users to keep going for the next achievement.
Carefully Engineer Your Copy
The specific messaging you use in your app can mean the difference between engaged and disengaged users. Every piece of microcopy included in your app, from descriptions of features to call to action (CTA) buttons, will need to help ensure that users complete the desired action. Good copy will also increase in-app purchases, whether you’re attempting to sell more products in an eCommerce app or attempting to increase upgrades to paid accounts and subscriptions.
Some tips for optimizing your app’s copy include:
- Using conversational language that keeps things plain and simple for users. This means you’ll want to avoid complicated terminology while keeping sentences short and concise. Ultimately, your copy should sound as though your audiences wrote it themselves.
- In CTAs, use phrases and words that both create a sense of urgency and drive people to actually complete the designated action.
- Don’t hesitate to make your copy entertaining and truly fun to read, if this is appropriate for your brand. Obviously, some apps may want to maintain a more professional tone in their copy, but copy that’s as engaging as the app itself can further keep users active.
Work to Re-engage Existing Users
You also need to try to bring back existing users who may have stopped using your app or using it as frequently. There are a few different ways you can achieve this.
One way to appeal to existing users is to continue sending push notifications and deep links to users who still have your app installed. These push notifications can invite users to continue their app experience with a link included that takes them directly to the app.
Another method is to send personalized emails to users. This is ideal if users have uninstalled your app but are still on your contact list. Apps could include unique discounts and offers, including offers specifically intended for returning users, such as coupons.
Social media also remains an invaluable asset for marketing. If you can maintain a consistently engaging social media presence on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, you’ll be able to attract people following your pages along with new users. Offering users incentives for following your social media profiles will keep them aware of you if they continue to follow you after periods of not using your app. Eventually, you may remind those users to open your app again.
Continue to Develop New Features to Refresh the App Experience
Over time, if your app continues to offer the same experience, it may grow stale for users to the point where they search for something new. The fact is that your app will suffer if you don’t take some time to update the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI). While you don’t need to continually update the app, try to add a new feature that people respond around once per month. You can add everything from new visual elements and extension buttons to more extensive features that offer something fresh.
Do your research and figure out which feature is best to add based on trends in your niche and what your audience wants from apps like yours. You can even get some ideas from audiences through polls and surveys, which could build anticipation among existing users if they know you’re planning on changing things up.
Perfect Your App's Performance
One thing that can quickly reduce app engagement is an app that doesn’t function properly. Users want features that load quickly and work the way they should, and few things are more annoying than bugs that crash the app entirely. If you want to keep users satisfied with their experience, you must identify and eliminate any issues that may hinder UX. Additionally, continue to test your app on multiple platforms to ensure all users have the same enjoyable in-app experience, regardless of what devices and operating systems they use.
Increase Mobile App DAU and MAU With the Right Strategies
With the help of these and other strategies, you can increase the number of active users for an app and significantly boost loyalty. By integrating features such as in-app stories and offering a high-quality, personalized experience all around, you’ll be able to more effectively monetize your app and increase its longevity.
Storyly is among the best tools to use to supercharge your app with innovative and highly engaging in-app stories. For more information about what Storyly can do for your app and brand, contact us with any questions you might have about our platform.
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