8 ways to boost mobile app downloads & user engagement

Wondering what you can do to make your app better? Want to get more downloads? Or increase the user engagement? You’re at the right place. In this article you’ll find 8 extended hints on how to do it with links to articles that go into more depth on each subject. 

Following the information from Statista, that in December 2021, approximately 66 000 new mobile apps were released in the Google Play Store, there’s quite a lot of competition on the mobile apps market. It’s not very easy to make your solution stand out and get a lot of new users. They also get bored very easily and it’s no surprise since they have thousands of new apps to choose from and test in a month. 

That’s why we’ve gathered the most important and effective actions you can take to become competitive, gain more downloads, increase the user engagement and get great reviews from the app users. Enjoy implementing them and boosting the performance of your app!

Let’s start with the ways to boost mobile app downloads. 

Make the customer experience great

First, what is customer experience: CX is what basically defines your business. It’s your customers’ (users’) view on the product, service and overall, your business. Caring about broadly defined customer experience will bring more happy customers to your company and more downloads in the case of mobile apps. 

The two primary points that create the customer experience are people and products.

This means that a great product itself will never be enough. Apart from the quality of the app, the service also matters, it even matters a lot. Because, for example, when your customer has an issue with the app, they expect the customer service to help them with this issue. And if they don’t receive it, they might even stop using it. What’s worse, they probably won’t recommend the product, even if it was fine but there was no one to help them. No one showed interest in solving their problem, so they felt disappointed. 

The same goes another way round. You can make the service great, hire the nicest and most professional people and be as willing to help your customers as possible, but if the app doesn’t work properly, it won’t be enough either.

Good customer experience management means finding a way to make the client happy and recommend your solution thanks to the synergy between your services AND your product. And more referrals means more app downloads. You’ll learn more about CX here.

Customer experience boost strategy

Being an app owner, you should keep looking for different methods of receiving feedback from the users. No one but them will tell you how your app is doing. That’s why you should encourage customers to rate and review the product and the service, but you should also look for their opinions in different places. Keep up with what people are saying about your app and you’ll know what should be changed, improved, left the same etc. 

Where to look for user feedback?

• In mobile app stores – like Google Play Store and Apple App Store, where you can find 1-5 points rates and where user can write a few words about the app
• At social media pages – if they’re talking about your app, you’ll find it in social media – the most popular communication tools 
• In-app surveys – you can create surveys to ask about users’ opinions directly in the app.

Find out more about how to make customer experience great here. 

Try mobile app advertising and build mobile app marketing plan

To simply let people know about your app, as well as to increase downloads, a good idea might be to advertise your app. With ads, new customers will learn about your product, and if you encourage users enough, they'll buy it (or download it for free if you choose a different monetization strategy), start using it and maybe recommend it further. There are many ways to do that. 

Some of them are: 

• In-app advertising – in-app messages can be placed in any mobile app that offers ad space. Taking advantage of this option is possible through an ad network platform that allows you to buy and display ads for your product. Advantages of in-app advertising are for example: large audience of mobile ads, easy access to your app (the ad leads you directly to the download page) and selectable target groups,
• Search ads on Google Play and App Store – they help users discover your app when they browse the mobile app store, matching customers with your app right when they're looking for products similar to yours,
• Social media profiles – as they’re very popular these days, it’s one of the easiest ways to reach a large number of potential customers at once,
• A website for the app – it’s good to have a website to inform customers about the app and its functionality
• Content marketing activities – apart from those in social media, you can create content on your website (e.g. on a blog) and on other portals such as YouTube or websites visited by your target audience
• Outdoor campaigns and events – outdoor banners etc. 

On the other hand, implementing mobile app advertising in your app is one of the ways to monetize your app. 

App Store Optimization

If you want to increase its visibility and make it appear higher in the App Store and/or Google Play search results, to get more installs of your app, take care of the App Store Optimization (ASO). Most of the app downloads are executed through search engines in mobile app stores. By improving and optimizing ASO, you’ll improve the visibility of your app in the store on selected keywords that your potential users use to search for a product like yours, for free.

Let’s move on to increasing user engagement in your mobile app

Take care of flawless UX (user experience)

User Experience (UX) is the overall experience of a person using a product or service. It’s described in terms of value, function, usability and general impression. Considering mobile apps, UX designers take care of creating the app design so that it’s as convenient as possible, understanding users’ values, needs and abilities. It’s described as a process of building intuitive, efficient, meaningful and relevant products. 

When creating a new app, you should take care of UX because it directly affects the entire user’s experience from the moment the app is downloaded through the entire time it is used. Analyzing your clients' needs is crucial here. Implementing solutions that meet these needs is the task of UX designers. 

"It doesn’t matter what the budget for the project is, or how little time you have, each project of creating a digital product should always follow at least a basic UX strategy. What’s the point of spending time and money on developing a product that does not bring anything new to the market or does not solve any users’ problems? If you want to create good software, you need to combine all the most important components of the UX design process, which includes: product definition, research, analysis, design and validation." (source)

Implement mobile app personalization

Mobile apps personalization is all about tailoring the app experience to meet the needs of a specific user. In today's world, people got used to individualized and relevant recommendations, suggestions and offers. Your app can’t stay behind! The app personalization will help you increase the user engagement and make customers use the app more often. 

Some of mobile app personalization methods are:

• Implementing push notifications – if the user of your app receives a message (a notification) just at the right time and place, with the relevant content, it will work,
• Creating pop-ups and dialogue boxes – make the pop-ups helpful for users by guessing where and when the user will need a particular piece of advice, assistance or information (while using the app),
• Adjusting the displayed content to users’ needs – relevant content (tailored to the user’s needs, motivations etc.) provides personalized user experience. To adjust the content to your customers, you might find creating a user persona very helpful,
• Search recommendations – these are hints placed in search engines in the app. They give you hints on keywords you might want to see in search results while you type in the search bar. They also provide a sense of personalization as the app "guesses" what the user wants to type, which is very convenient for them, 
• Location-based app personalization – if the user provides a permission for that, you can see their location and create content, push notifications, recommendations and search recommendations based on it, 
• Discounts and special offers – they are always a good idea to keep the app users in and attract new customers. What’s more, a discount tailored to the particular user will work even better than a standard one. An example can be a promo code based on previous orders.

Find out more about mobile app personalization here. 

Ensure compact and simple mobile app onboarding 

Great mobile app onboarding can help you reduce the number of mobile app uninstalls after the first use. It basically should: 

• Provide instructions – to guide the user step by step through each stage of the app usage, especially at the beginning 
• Enable mobile app customization – it’s the best to offer the possibility of the app customization right at the start, when a customer uses the product for the first time
• Make users aware of the value of the app – the onboarding process should also include showing the user what they can achieve with the app.

All you need to do is make the user onboarding flow really useful and convenient. The whole process of app onboarding should be simple and rather quick, so that it doesn’t disturb the app users. Simply put, if new users like your app at the beginning, they’ll stay for longer. Interactive onboarding and product tours tailored to your customers’ needs can bring you even more good results in terms of number of downloads and user engagement. 

Demonstrate the value you offer and teach how to use your app. Make the process fun and simple! 

Target your audience (app users) better

What does it even mean to reach the target audience? Actually, many different things but in general, it means to address the appropriate people with the content you share. That’s why you need to take care about the right targeting of your notifications.
Personalized messages can be very effective. Why reach the whole audience if the message is only addressed to a part of it? Users get angry if they get information that is useless for them. Having a mobile app, one of the ways to target your audience is with Firebase – by Cloud Messages and In-App Messages. 

Targeting your audience with Firebase Realtime Database is very easy and accessible as there are instructions to support you on each step. Firebase is also great for inexperienced users – you can quickly learn how to use particular features. It provides different tools to give you the possibility to manage your app in real time and from any place. That’s how in-app messaging and the other ways of targeting the right groups help you make your mobile app work perfectly when it comes to reaching audiences and, in general, improving its performance. 

Follow the mobile apps trends

As there are so many mobile apps available on the market, yours doesn’t necessarily have to be innovative, but it definitely needs to stand out from the competition. One of the ways to make it special is to follow the latest trends and attract users by this. 

So what is “in”? Among others:

Wearables 

Statista reveals that the number of connected wearable devices worldwide has more than doubled in the space of three years, increasing from 325 million in 2016 to 722 million in 2019. It is therefore worth considering implementing such solutions for your users, for example by adapting the app to work on Smart watches. 

Artificial intelligence 

Popularized ​​in different industries, such as high tech and telecommunications, financial services, healthcare and pharmaceutical. AI means that you’ll be able to use machine learning in your app, e.g. to suggest products to buy, etc. That’s why it is also a good idea to consider implementing it in the app for customers. This can also be considered as a method of mobile app personalization.

Mobile app security 

As the awareness in terms of fraud threats increases, mobile app security also becomes the top topic among app owners as well as among users. That’s why it’s highly important to take care of the security in your mobile app and also inform your customers that they can feel safe while using it, especially when they provide their personal data.

Mobile commerce 

E-commerce mobile apps have become very convenient and commonly used even before 2020. The number of mobile commerce users is higher and higher as stationery shopping loses popularity. That’s why, having an online shop, m-commerce app is a must-have now.

Food & Grocery Delivery Apps 

Also because of the pandemic, food delivery apps have become very liked and popular. Wondering what kind of app you can create to attract lots of users nowadays? That’s definitely a good idea to do some research concerning food delivery apps and consider building one for local products in your area. See our competitive analysis on the example of Glovo app here. 

M-commerce trends

For e-commerce apps the best trends that will probably encourage more and more customers, also in 2022, are:

• Voice commerce – shopping with the help of voice assistants and mobile devices, 
• Livestream shopping (live commerce) – buying products from streams in real-time, 
• Augmented Reality – enabling to see the product in real size before buying it, in virtual reality,
• Social commerce – selling through social media. 

Find more information about mobile commerce trends to watch in 2022 here.

Measure the performance of your app

In order to find out how your app is doing, you obviously need to measure its performance all the time! Using different metrics, you can assess what are the areas that should be improved and which features do a great job. It’s basically measuring the success of your app. That’s also how you plan future work on the app. 

What areas can you explore with mobile app metrics (among others): 

• User satisfaction (e.g. reviews and ratings)
• User engagement (e.g. monthly active users and daily active users, number of the app downloads, retention rate) 
• App revenue (e.g. average revenue per user, return on investment)
• App performance (e.g. number of crashes, load time, average response time, API latency)

There are lots of tools you can use to measure and track different metrics in web and mobile apps. The most popular one is Firebase, a great solution from Google. 

Summing up, by measuring and optimizing these metrics you can retain existing users and attract new users to download your mobile app. 

Conclusion

To sum up, things you can do to boost your app downloads and user engagement are: 

1. Make the customer experience great 
2. Advertise your mobile app
3. Take care of flawless UX (user experience)
4. Implement mobile app personalization
5. Ensure compact and simple mobile app onboarding 
6. Reach the target audience as well as possible 
7. Follow the latest trends
8. Measure the performance of your app.