Originally published at thinktank.personagraph.com.

User engagement can be defined in many different ways, but the essence – when it comes to apps – is that a user interacts with your app in some manner and volume. It also depends on the type of app to determine what an engaged user is and what not. User engagement is important because it shows how fond your users are of using your app, which in turn directly affects the success of your app and its revenues. It also provides an indication of how well your app is doing against competitors.

However, to do so, you need to have some actual numbers to compare, which is hard for a concept that isn’t clearly defined. There are metrics that can give a general image of your app’s user engagement. There are a number of metrics you can use, but session length, session interval, time in app and retention are used most often to measure how intensely people use your app. This represents the time and frequency people engage with your app and can be measured with hard numbers. You can set additional goals that are most valuable to your type of app to be included in measuring user engagement, a registration or a subscription for instance, or an in-app purchase. Obviously, the higher your user engagement the more successful your app will be. Here is how you can boost user engagement for your app:

Push notifications are guaranteed to attract user interaction. However, this could very well be negative interaction as well when this feels as an intrusion to the user. To avoid this, push notifications should be highly relevant and useful for your audience. Using location data could be especially useful for this purpose. For example, when you have an app that lets users plan their trip using public transport you can send out a push notification when a user is near a train station.

If you think you’re not doing your users a favor with push notifications, you can still use in-app messages which are completely unobtrusive. After all, the user only sees these messages when engagement is voluntary and the app is launched. These messages are ideal for notifying your users about new features, your other apps (cross- and upselling), or just casual personalized greetings.

Another way of boosting user engagement is to make sure your app is rich in content. Again, location relevant content will be most valuable to your user. It makes the user feel like the app is tailored specifically to fulfill his or her needs. One of the highest forms of user engagement is a steady stream of user generated content. Although not relevant for every type of app, having this feature allows for a user base that is so dedicated that they are willing to spend significant time and effort to engage with your app. This group of “creators” is extremely valuable and will most likely be open for other ways to interact.

Opening up a forum can be the first step to create a community around your app and further increase engagement. A loyal user base needs to be catered to and should have a soundboard to interact with you and other users. Through this community, your users can get to know your other products, can give you feedback, request support and even make purchases.

Having a highly engaged user base for your app is a great success in itself, but can be leveraged even further by expanding into other ecosystems. By connecting with your users over several different platforms you can increase the number of “touch points”. By having a website, an app on all major (mobile and PC) operating systems and a lively social media presence, users can engage from several angles. This also makes you less dependent on a single source of revenue since you can monetize your apps across platforms. The most famous and successful example of this is Angry Birds. The first version of the app was released on iOS in 2009 and since then the creators leveraged the success by expanding into an enormous variety of different ecosystems. The app is available on a wide range of platforms, there is a community that creates and discusses walkthroughs, new levels are added continuously and they even managed to create spin-offs for television series and movies.

The key to achieve and expand a highly engaged user base is to truly understand your most engaged and valuable users. Personagraph gives you the tools to gain these rich insights about your user base. By identifying your most valuable users and subsequently extracting as much feedback from them as possible you gain highly segmented marketing intelligence, which allows you to improve your offering.