How To Engage Your App Users And Improve App Store Rank

How to engage with your mobile app users and rank higher in the App Store. 

Location can improve app engagement. Creating a valuable relationship with your app audience should be the upmost priority for app developers. There’s no quick fix to acquiring millions of users, ranking highly and generating huge income than creating a great, engaging and useful app. 

If you take a look at the best ranked apps at the moment you might notice a common trend. They understand the importance of micro-moments and implement a strategy which utilises these moments to engage with their users. These are the specific interactions within a mobile app that create high value for the app user. If you get them right these can be the difference between a user becoming your biggest ambassador or deleting your app moments after downloading it. Location is the perfect toolkit to engage with app users, keep them coming back for more and ensure that your app keeps on shooting up the App Store rankings. 

Since higher levels of engagement help your app to rank higher in the App Store (ranking is dependent upon activity and how quickly your app is deleted once it’s downloaded) you’d think that more publishers would spend more time figuring out how to reengage users. A huge twenty-five percent of apps are discarded after being used only once. It has never been more important to for mobile app publishers to encourage engagement, without this you won’t get new users, and you’ll quickly lose the ones you have already gained. Luckily, location might be the solution to both of these problems. 

Add context to your app experience

For a mobile app to engage users it must have a high value proposition. Increasingly, many developers overlook the fact that their app provides little benefit to the audience, or it does at the incorrect moment. As an example, let’s take a look at the push notification. 

Adding location to push notification strategy is a great example of reaching users in the right moment. Location technology allows you deliver a customised notification to your users based on their environment, location and behaviour. Interacting with your audience in this way is much more effective and engaging than sending push notifications blindly, without the insights provided by location tech.

This engagement helps you to rank higher in the App Store – ranking is dependent upon how often your app is engaged with and how quickly your app is deleted once it’s downloaded.  This is why it’s important to encourage engagement, without it, you won’t get new users. Location is pivotal to this engagement.

We know that nagging push notifications can have an adverse effect on app engagement. It’s important to ensure that your notifications are useful to the end user, rather than just encouraging them to open the app. Adding a location enabling SDK to your app can achieve this – by adding context to your notification delivery then you omit irrelevant communication and increase the value that your app provides to your users. They will thank you for this value by engaging more often with your app. 

This works by using highly precise location signals to trigger the delivery of notifications. For example, by segmenting the audience that receives the notification based on relevance. By understanding what your app user is doing, why they are there, app developers can create an effective engagement strategy. All app owners should be asking themselves these important questions – and location integration can answer them. 

Measurement, analytics and attribution. 

Adding a proximity SDK to your app allows app developers to create a measurement strategy which provides valuable insights into user engagement and behaviour. 

These insights are available with a simple integration, for example, Tamoco offers our partners real-time insights through our analytics platform. This allows apps to visualise their app engagement and understand and measure engagement strategies. Every app is different and will have varying KPIs, but location tech can help to measure these effectively. 

But it’s not all about insights, it’s also about attribution outside of your app. For example, if your app is a branded clothing app with a real-world store, you can measure physical store visits as well as successful e-commerce journeys through the app. This way you will receive a much more comprehensive ROI for your in-app marketing strategy. A good example is the looking at WhatsApp for Ecommerce.

The important part for app owners is that these insights are highly actionable and all ultimately help you to engage with new and existing users. For example, if you understand where most of your users are engaging with your notifications, and you can understand the context (perhaps they just left the local tube station). These insights tell you much more than just how many users opened your notification, they help to analyse why you are getting such a high/low engagement rate. This helps you to improve and create an effective engagement strategy. 

Monetise app engagement

Whilst improving app engagement, app publishers can provide some extra income by allowing third-party brands on our network to send notifications. This provides added value for your users as we ensure that your app only delivers relevant content in the right moment. 

For example, if you want to retain your mobile audience then you’ll want to provide them with value in your app, through relevant notifications and in-app experiences. 

Let’s say that you have a lifestyle app. If a third party brand that is relevant to your app audience is running a nearby event or offer then it could be worthwhile to allow them to advertise it through your app. Using proximity technology we only deliver this to relevant app users, based on their location. 

You’ll receive a cut of the campaign budget for allowing them to use your mobile app to reach this audience. You can define the number of notifications that each user receives, this means that you have complete control over what is delivered to your mobile audience. 

Tamoco, for example, has hundreds of clients on our proximity network who are willing to use third party apps to reach users. You could provide high value to your users and that will keep them engaged and ensure that they keep your app on their phone. This generates behavioural data around your audience. Information of this kind is very useful for app developers. They can gain valuable insights into their audience, understand their actions and understand

Before you know it you’ll be shooting up the rankings and that means more opportunities for background monetisation. 

James Ewen

James is the head of marketing at Tamoco