5 Re-Engagement Strategies That Will Make Your App Shine
--
We’ve already talked about how to properly develop your app, which platform will be the best for you, how to engage users, how to improve your app UX and many others mobile development related topics. Now it’s time to talk about an equally important subject that reveals a topic of a proper user re-engagement? Keeping your users engaged is not an easy thing. Most of the apps, which have been downloaded, end up being neglected by users after the first use. It’s time to shift our attention to user re-engagement that will allow us to get the highest value possible out of our customer base as well as acquiring new users. Remember that you can consider your users really valuable only in case they open it more than three times after having downloaded it. Here we may see the true importance of re-engagement campaigns. Nevertheless, we need to understand the difference between two terms that are often being misinterpreted. They are retargeting and re-engagement.
Retargeting allows companies to expand their user base by promoting a new application to people who have already used their applications. Usually, this can be made by focusing on users who are similar to your existing active users. This strategy is much more effective rather than looking for users blindly.
Re-engagement can be considered as all those marketing techniques that will allow you to determine those people who have downloaded an app but currently are not engaging with it. The main goal of re-engagement is to remember people about your app as well as inspiring them to use it more frequently. It’s this point that will be discussed in this episode. Let’s look at the best re-engagement practices.
Push Notifications
Push notifications are alerts or messages generated by the app to notify a user of an event or other activity without the necessity to open the app. This is a permission-based form of a marketing strategy. That’s probably one of the most effective and well-known strategies.
Consider it as a simple, text-based notification or a friendly reminder that will encourage user to return in your app. Nevertheless, push-notification have some details that need to should be taken into account.
First of all, there’s a necessity to take into account the right time and the right message. Bear in mind the fact that this marketing strategy is all about precision. Put yourself in the place of your users. Usually, we have a few dozen various apps in our phone. Imagine how all of these notifications and alerts can quickly become overwhelming. Have you noticed that those apps with the most frequent push notifications are usually the first to be silenced and, after all, forgotten. Such situations happen in case the push-notifications turn out to be irrelevant and superfluous. That’s why your message should be meaningful enough as well as be written by a person. People don’t like to bombarded with worthless information written by a bot.
Don’t forget to ask permission first. Usually, people are open to relevant and useful information. But they need to understand that they actually can control it. So, make sure that your push-notifications are valuable and at the same time they can be easily turned off (in case user find them unnecessary).
Paid Search
Paid search is another form of re-engagement strategy, which will allow to have your ads featured in the search results of specified keys queries. According to this technique, re-engaged ads are placed at the top of the search results. The thing is all these re-engagement tools appear only in case users have already installed the app. Here’s an example of a paid search.
Here are some tips that will help create a proper paid search. First of all, make sure that you’ve properly found the right keywords. Do some research and ensure that you’ve got it right. The second tip is to provide a link to a relevant screen. In case you have deep linking enabled in your app, ascertain that it sends your users to a relevant screen. According to the example above, the user is looking for cars in Bristol. That’s why sending the user in Bristol to a list of cars in London wouldn’t be helpful for a user at all. It’s Bristol where user want to find used cars.
Deep Linking
From the technological perspective, the framework that mobile applications are built upon differs from the HTML framework of websites on the internet. As a result, we need to understand that initially there was no ability to link from a page to any other page. That’s the feature that we take for granted on the web. To be precise, deep linking is a technology that allows apps to become interconnected that is similar to what we can do on the World Wide Web. With this technology, apps will be able to provide a much better user experience.
Deep linking allows a user to be directed straight to an app or somewhere inside the app via a URL. Nevertheless, this feature needs to be coded in the application beforehand. One of the most widespread ways of this technology’s usage, can be made through a mobile ad, such as a Twitter ad. That takes a user straight into the app. This strategy is much better rather than taking a user simply to the mobile app landing page. So, instead of sending your users to a home screen where they are forced to browse and search, the deep linking technology will help you send users directly to the most relevant screen in your app.
Paid Social
Paid social is another effective way of re-engagement marketing. Speaking about the aesthetics, our current native design became much better in terms of looking. That contributes to improving of re-engagement ads and other forms of advertising. Additionally, we can see significant improvements in technologies which the main goal is to target our existing users. For example, in Twitter and Facebook you can create lists of users who have already downloaded and used your app. Using their Mobile Advertiser ID, phone number, email address, user name or user ID you can send them re-engagement ads.
Here are a few cool tips that will help you make your paid social strategy even more effective. From time to time, try to experiment with the timing of your re-engagement campaigns as well as creative elements of your ads. This can be CTA (call-to-action), ad copy, images and so on. Having changed something, analyze the situation and your customers feedback. Try to understand what campaign characteristics turn out to be the most effective and focus on them.
You can also use your platform for the re-engagement campaign. To make it even more effective, use the platform that was responsible for driving the app install. Put simply, in case your users were originally acquired on Facebook, use this platform for re-engagement campaign. In such cases, there are much more chances that you will achieve success.
Besides, don’t forget about in-app retargeting. That will help you make your re-engagement strategy more effective as well as lower your organisational costs. “Mobile-specific” deals/rewards within the app make users desire to get free or discounted goods or services. Usually, most of the app users download an app in order to receive a special offer or a discount. That’s a really effective tip to get the bargain shoppers re-engaged.
Activity Messaging
Activity messaging is a triggered customer outreach that uses messaging channels like push notifications and email in order to notify users about actions carried out by their friends and others who use the same app or website. Speaking about users, activity messaging will inform them about their friends’ engagement in your app. On the other hand, activity messaging will help you provide users with additional reasons to return to your application.
This kind of re-engagement strategy will be the best choice for apps that have a social aspect. So, instead of waiting for your users to come back to the app on their own, you can create automated campaigns that lets your users know when their friends join, share something, or generally carry out some actions that can turn out to be of interest for them.
The Bottom Line
The main goal of re-engagement strategy is to make sure that users will return/re-install or re-open an app that has been downloaded by them some time ago. All the methods listed above should help you keep mobile markets’ app businesses alive. By reducing user acquisition costs, as well as keeping a user engaged, you’ll be able to increase both the in-app conversion, ROI, and LTV. Using such strategies as push notifications, paid search, deep linking, paid social, and activity messaging, you’ll be able to reach your current users, connect them with relevant content, and encourage them to interact with your app on a consistent basis. Hope, you’ve found something useful for you. Don’t forget about your claps and see you in the next episode.
