According to Venturebeat, more than 50 per cent of Americans own a smartphone, while figures from Apple indicate that 800 apps are downloaded from the Apple App Store every second. Despite these remarkable numbers, our own research reveals that many apps – nearly 22 per cent – are used no more more than once.

 Fortunately, there are critical engagement strategies such as in-app messaging that help brands nurture their users so they will launch apps more frequently and spend more time in them. Increasing the total time spent in apps ultimately leads to stronger engagement, greater user satisfaction and a higher total lifetime value. 

In-app messaging takes engagement to a whole new level, where other approaches typically tail off. Many brands leverage push messaging, which can be a good way to communicate with users, in particular when users are no longer actively engaged with the app. However, the reality is that the majority of users turn off push messaging, and the actual end user experience leaves much to be desired. 

This is where in-app messaging provides a much stronger vehicle for engaging app users. In-app messaging creates a much richer user experience, based on actual in-app behavior to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. Done correctly, in-app messaging ensures the user doesn’t feel like he or she is being marketed to, making it a natural part of the overall app experience. In a nutshell, successful engagement (in-app or outside of the app) is all about one word: context. 

Here are five specific best practices that savvy in-app marketers use to drive engagement with successful apps. 

Understand your app users

The best way to build an engaging in-app messaging campaign is to base it on a strong foundation of analysis. Knowing what your users are doing, and when, is the key to customizing and delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. 

For you to successfully engage your users, you have to know exactly what they are doing within the app. Keep in mind that mobile app metrics are very different than web metrics. Replace page views with screen views, visits with sessions, cookies with user IDs and learn to pay closer attention to version fragmentation, cohort analysis, event and campaign tracking and offline usage. More than anything, your app should help progress the goals of your overall business, and the app metrics should reflect the ones you track, which will fuel your app marketing campaigns and strategy.

Create micro-segments to tailor your in-app campaigns

Once you have an understanding of your user base, you want to see common patterns within your user base to create detailed micro-segments of users (i.e., those who share common criteria). You can start with base demographic data, but creating segments based on actual behavior will ensure your campaigns will be that much more successful. A specific use case may be for publishers to create a segment of users who have accessed the app at least three times within the last week and who are reading a specific article at that instance. You can easily define criteria to trigger your in-app subscription promotion specifically to that target base as they are reading the article. Differentiating your highest-converting users from the lowest-converting will be a key step in your differentiated campaign follow-up. 

Go for quick wins with simple, but effective use cases

To get immediate results and demonstrate the value of in-app messaging internally, determine which use cases make the most sense for you. We’ve seen very common use cases that are being applied very successfully by leading brands. For companies selling goods via apps, a great use case is using in-app messaging to nudge people to checkout. For news apps, a great use case for an in-app message campaign could be to share an article that will drive broader usage. This can also be easily combined with push notifications that alert users to major news stories and that are then followed-up by in-app messages to drive further engagement. 

Test, test, test

Every element of a campaign, from creative design, to text, to call-to-action button colors and promotions can be A/B tested to gauge its effectiveness within specific audiences. The beauty of A/B testing in-app messages is that they don’t require any code changes or resubmissions to the app store, so you can learn and improve on the fly.

Many successful brands use in-app messaging to conduct selective testing of new features to a subset of users before rolling out that functionality to the entire user base. A/B testing lets you easily understand which experiences drive the greatest impact on conversions, retention and lifetime value.

Measure success the right way

Marketers are all too familiar with the traditional success metrics, such as conversion rates and retention. These certainly apply for in-app messaging campaigns, but you can take it a step further. For conversion funnels, dig deeper into each stage and see what users did instead of your pre-conceived notion of the ideal conversion flow. For example, you may realize that instead of completing a checkout process, users go back to the product section in the app to browse additional products. You can easily gauge if you need to make updates to your app, based on this insight. 

No matter what app monetization model you follow, lifetime value (LTV) is the No. 1 metric that brands should use to assess the value of mobile customers. How you define LTV for your app depends on your company. For some, it’s the amount of money spent over the lifetime of a customer. For others, it’s total time spent in the app. Whatever way you define it for your company, when LTV is combined with other engagement metrics, it can fuel your marketing campaigns by revealing which in-app actions you should drive your users toward with in-app messages. 

Bernd Leger is vice president of Marketing at Localytics