7 ways to improve customer engagement
Getting to the top 5 apps in a country/category is a journey for early-stage startups, uninstall rates are exceptionally high for most of the apps. Early pmf, bad UI/UX, fatty pages, buggy apps? If that's where you are, you should fix them first before reading further :)
If that's not the case, congratulations, you are on the right track! If you are a late-stage company where marketing dollars shadow bad retentions, then this is high time to revisit the basics. Don’t get surprised if I say many good-looking apps are also making mistakes leading to bad retention. Yes, there are!
I talked to several product managers about this engagement and retention in the past few months. Thought of putting this article to summarize my learning in 7 simple pointers for everyone's benefit and learn from you guys if you have like to contribute as well this. Do comment, will pick some and add to this as credits :)
Here it goes :
1-Personalization — Help customers minimize the efforts to search and shop, the next time they visit your platform. Your customers would love it. It can be in the form of last viewed products, previous searches, frequency based on the user’s interactions
2-Define customer engagement strategy: Identity which channels are best for what purpose and where you find them more engaging. There are a whole lot of options available: push notifications, Email, In-app Notification, SMS. Make the best use of segmentation and bring them back to where they had left
3-User Onboarding: This gets very important especially for first-time users as first experience/trial matters them most, some pointers below:
3.1-Onboarding Screen: For first time users, the goal is to get the first product and give user understanding of platform/ product value proposition, for e.g. in insurance advice, trust, claim, variety is very important, that should go to onboarding screens with a goal that customer explores one of the insurance product categories
3.2-Force login/signup as the first step: Although it’s a pity to lose primary contact details (Email ID | Phone Number) of users that are registering, In the Circuit’s case, It’s simply not worth the tradeoff to force users to login. Lets first get the user a quick glimpse of what the app is up to, its features, value propositions or we keep it very short and sweet with OTP based or firebase auth API defining some clear benefits to login/signup
Some good examples are as below :
At Qoala.app, we use the progressive web app, where the user lands directly to the homepage with a sticky option on the top right corner to log in, minimizes the friction for product discovery
Enforcing signup flow risks 30–40 % drop, bringing down the screen depth of first-time user to ~ 2.3–2.7
3.3-App permissions: Especially after the Android 6 permission model, as it introduces the new option “Never Ask Again”, giving users context as to why specific permission is requested is the key for them accepting it. This is doubly as important as if a user has declined permission once, the next time he is asked, a new option — “Never Ask Again” will be present in the dialog. So delay asking for permissions as much as you can and if it’s so important to ask for permission gives some context and info as to why this permission is so important, so users are not in dark. Also never capture data that you don’t need, user privacy must be respected and users will appreciate it in the long term
4-Low battery, memory & data-hungry apps: Users hate data & battery hungry apps, wish we lived in a Free internet world :) so 50 % of the problem we could have solved. Now there are 100k + thousand apps on the play store that educate users on a daily basis about data and battery-hungry apps, as well the OS ecosystem is also getting mature to give more alerts to users if some app is consuming more battery. So if your app is not in the top 1 % of the most engaging apps, it is very hard for users to find reasons to get space on their smartphone aka smart ;)
5-Good UI/UX, page load time: The first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on conversion rates. Website conversion rates drop by an average of 2.11% with each additional second of load time. Google & Apple have published best practices to Optimize user flows, follow them and get your copyright sorted asap!
6-3G Compatible — Countries like Indonesia where around 40 % of the population have access to 4G, still have a large user base with slow connections (80–100 KB/sec). We need to make sure our app works well with such internet speed. Don’t hesitate to enable some heavyweight services basis internet speed, load first what’s most important, and get lazy loading in place.
7-Bug fixes: Keen an eye on every single bug reported and fix instantly (Sources, Play store, CS, Internal ops, teammates), fix it inform customer asap “we hear you, will solve this shortly” once solved inform again to the customer that we have solved it and inform them if there is need to update the app or not. Customers will love it and they believe their opinions matter, hence trust will skyrocket
Once this setup is in place, make sure to connect the dots by talking to actual users, reviewing heatmaps using Hotjar or other tools. Direct feedback will help you break the blind spots.
PS: This is the first draft, I will be adding more to it over this week as I am getting more inputs and feedbacks
Credits to Deepanshu Suhag, Alfonso Fiore for your inputs