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Mobile App Design, User Experience Design

8 Proven Strategies to Boost Mobile App Retention & User Engagement in 2025

Posted by Ravi Talajiya on 22 Mar, 2024

Quick Summary: Are you struggling to keep up with mobile app retention and user engagement rates? It's not just about marketing to be blamed; there's something other you must explore. It might be something technical that even marketing can't solve. This article is about helping out with the dilemma that you are facing in maintaining your user retention and engagement with your mobile app. Let's explore;

It's easy to get new customers than retain the existing ones, as once they leave your app or uninstall it, they are gone forever. For businesses getting customers on their website or attracting them to download your app is just a step towards your business goal. It's just the start of the user journey to your website. You need to retain those customers and, most importantly, keep them engaged.

Did you know that the highest retention rate for any business recorded on day 30 of mobile mobile app installs is 5.1%?

We have not included news and magazines in this category. Even if we include news and magazines, the highest retention rate would be 9.1% only.

Statistic: Retention rate on day 30 of mobile app installs worldwide in 3rd quarter 2023, by category | Statista
Find more statistics at Statista


So, you already have a great challenge ahead to tackle. So, from designing your website/app and implementing features to providing content and facilities, everything must be according to the user's needs.

In this article, we have explored the best strategies to increase mobile app retention and engagement rates. But we have covered all the basic points as well. You will find details about the following points.

  • What is mobile app retention?
  • What is mobile app engagement?
  • Why are user retention & engagement important?
  • Proven mobile app retention and engagement strategies?

We have a lot to discuss covering all these points, so let's explore them one by one.

What Is Mobile App Retention?

Mobile app retention rate refers to the number of users who download your mobile app and continue to use it over time. In business, the retention rate is counted as per the number of returning customers. For example, a design company creates a product for a client, and the client comes back with another project with the agency is a successful retention. Similarly, when a user downloads your app and continues to use the app for some time, it will be counted as mobile app retention.

What Is Mobile App Engagement?

Mobile app engagement refers to how users interact with your app, what features they use and for how longer. For example, if you open your app, surf products or services, continue to use the app and even buy, subscribe or inquire about your products and services, it'd be called engagement rate.

Why Are User Retention & Engagement Important?

User retention and engagement are crucial for any business to know as they can get very crucial data, like user behavior, make changes in the strategies, gain more revenue and even reduce acquisition costs significantly.

Increase Revenue: Achieving a 5% higher retention rate will increase business profits by 75%. A higher user retention rate will boost your revenue generation as the more time your customers spend on your app, the higher the chance of buying more products.

Lower Marketing a Customer Acquisition Costs: User retention will boost your marketing effort for no cost and make your user retention effort easy and less expensive.

Better customer relationship: When customers spend more time on your mobile app, you can easily know their behavior and provide more personalized experiences.

Ability to receive feedback: Higher engagement will help you get more feedback and a chance to improve more.

Competitive advantage: When you have higher engagement and retention rates, you will have a better popularity rate among your competitors in the market.

Proven Mobile App Retention and Engagement Strategies?

Higher user engagement and retention rates are crucial for mobile apps to maintain and obtain business success. You need to create strategies to increase engagement and retention rates. We have done this job for you as we have some expert advice on how you can increase your user engagement and retention rates. Here's what.

Smooth User Onboarding

Smooth user onboarding experience is crucial to increase engagement and retention rates. With an easy-to-register and comprehensive self-help process, you can make onboarding outstanding for users. User onboarding is extremely important, and it's a vast subject that you need to explore and help users get better experiences.

Provider High Performing Mobile App

The mobile app you offer to your users should perform faster. It should be easy to navigate and provide unique content to explore for users. You must have the right team to work on this part, as providing a better app is the first step you take toward improving user experience. It contains a lot of things, such as optimized load times, outstanding UI/UX, engaging content, easy navigation and problem-solving features.

Smart Push Notifications

You need to design engaging push notifications that users love to read and take action on. Explore it, research about it, taste it and implement it. You need to create outstanding push notifications and set everything according to your users. For example, what to send, how to send and when to send push notifications to your users. Having expert suggestions for a better push notification experience can make a difference. However, explore yourself first about push notifications so you have control over your project and you know what you want to implement.

Focus on Gamification

Users love to explore and spend time with game-like features. Chrome offline game "T-Rex Dinosaur Game" is a live example of how users love to remain engaged with the app when there's no internet. Make sure your app has game-like elements, such as badges, points, and levels, to incentivize user actions. You can have more plans of action, which you can discuss with your UI/UX design partner.

User Feedback

Gather user feedback and improve your mobile app. Feedback is crucial for mobile apps to improve. Once you deploy your app on the downloading platform, you need to keep a watch on the performance of the application and check how the application behaves on the server, among actual users. Welcome feedback, even if it is negative. You can take that feedback to improve your application.

Personalize User Experience

Develop a mobile app while keeping your users in mind, and the UX of the application should be designed that meet their expectations, letting them feel valued. Users love differentiation: if you are providing them what others can't. From personalizing features to content, you can increase the curiosity of your customers to explore and remain engaged with your products. You must have some research data about your market and target users and use that data to understand user behavior, conversion history, and more. To personalize user experience, you have two options:

Use Statatic Personalization: Static personalization refers to the things that remain the same, like the user's name, notification, and email.

Dynamic Personalization: It refers to something that evolves. You can personalize their experience by understanding your users' buying behavior, history and more.

Use In-app Message

In-app messages are just like notifications, but it is different as they are not sent to users when they are not using the app. It's a notification that usually appears within a mobile app when users interact with the app. For example, it can guide users to use particular features, take the next steps, remind them to download the updates, and more. For new users, it can help them with smooth onboarding messages, introducing the processes to new users, and more.

Rewarding Users

Rewarding loyal users has been a good practice for years. You can continue this trend and allow your potential users to get rewarded. Almost 70% of users expect to get a reward when they shop online or visit stores quite frequently. It simply helps them feel valued, knowing they have got some over their purchases. Create a reward program for loyal customers, and it will work great.

How Does TheFinch Design Help

We are a one-stop shop for all your design and development needs, helping you design your mobile app that boosts your effort to maintain or increase user engagement and retention rates. We design apps keeping core users, their interests, and their pain points in mind. Apart from this, TheFinch design helps its users and clients stay informed with researched and detailed articles around around UI/UX design, development and online business. Whether you are looking for a feature-rich mobile application or an outstanding design for your project, we help you with all your needs. Contact us for a free consultation and explore how we can help you visualize your idea into action.

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