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Engagement is one of the most important metrics to pay attention to in the world of mobile apps. By keeping users engaged, they’ll be more likely to pay for In-App Subscriptions, recommend your app to others, or download other apps from the same developer. So if you’re not already paying attention to app engagement, now is the time to start.
Did you know that 25% of users abandon an app after just one use? Or that 56% uninstall an app altogether within 7 daysof the initial install?
Although the key reason users uninstall apps is that they simply aren’t using them, lack of user engagement and churn are two of the biggest challenges that marketers currently face.
So what should you be measuring? And how can you turn short-term installs into long-term value? Let’s dive into 12 proven strategies that leading apps are using to drive deeper, more sustainable engagement.
Before we get stuck into the individual strategies that are proven to increase in-app engagement strategies and create a sticky user experience, let’s first look at what engagement actually means.
At its core, app engagement is the clearest signal of user value.
It reflects how frequently and meaningfully users interact with your app—whether that’s session count, session length, daily opens, or feature usage. These metrics aren’t just vanity numbers. They’re indicators of retention, satisfaction, and long-term monetization potential.
Tracking engagement gives product and marketing teams a direct line to user sentiment. It tells you if people are finding value, returning consistently, and forming habits that translate into revenue. Strong engagement also reduces your reliance on paid acquisition by deepening loyalty and increasing LTV.
In an environment where CPIs are climbing and competition is fierce, engagement is your moat.
That’s why this article exists—to help you unlock deeper, more sustainable app engagement using strategies that are already working for the top players in the App Store. But first, let’s clarify which engagement metrics actually matter—and what they tell you.
App engagement is the strongest forward-looking signal of revenue performance. Even small drops in engagement—especially among high-intent cohorts—can quietly erode monetization, inflate CAC, and stall growth before churn ever shows up in your dashboards.
Consider a scenario where a subscription app sees a 7% decline in average session length across its most active user segment. On the surface, it may seem negligible. But if that drop correlates with reduced feature usage or skipped paywall exposure, it can lead to a measurable decrease in trial-to-paid conversion and lower LTV over time.
Multiply that across millions of MAUs and you’re looking at a material impact on topline revenue—often before retention metrics flag any red.
Optimizing engagement matters because:
It allows you to surface silent churn risks earlier in the user journey
It directly impacts monetization efficiency, especially in usage-based or freemium models
It improves the ROI of lifecycle campaigns by amplifying activation and habit formation
It strengthens the feedback loop between product performance and growth strategy
For enterprise-scale apps, the margin for error is razor-thin. Engagement is no longer a retention play—it’s a revenue safeguard. The teams that obsess over it are the ones who sustain compound growth, even in volatile markets.
Driving app engagement isn’t about chasing vanity metrics. It’s about creating meaningful user interactions that compound over time.
The most successful teams treat engagement as a system, not a set of disconnected tactics.
Below, we’ll explore ten proven strategies used by top-performing apps to deepen user involvement, increase LTV, and unlock sustainable bottom-line impact.
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First impressions count. Users shouldn’t have to jump through a million hoops to get to the point where they can actually start using an app from Google Play. An effective way to ensure a smooth and simple onboarding process can have a significant impact in terms of improving both engagement and retention rates.
Marketers can achieve this by:
Earning trust first. Most of the time, it’s better not to force users to create a profile before they’ve been able to try it, and to be clear about displaying the value proposition upfront.
Shorter = better. Reduce the number of steps required to sign up. The less input required upfront, and the more trust you build up in the early stages of their user experience, the more likely they are to keep coming back. However, there are exceptions to this rule e.g. language apps where longer setup processes are still capable of engaging users and not increasing churn rates.
Provide support. Self-service help centres, how-to videos and interactive demos - as well as live support agents, if resource allows it! - help to reduce friction and encourage higher engagement.
If users don’t understand the core value of your app within the first session, you’ve already lost them.
High-performing apps make their value proposition unmistakably clear. And they reinforce it at every step of the user journey. This doesn’t just mean a strong onboarding flow. It means surfacing real, tangible outcomes as early as possible. Whether it’s showing progress, unlocking content, or visualizing potential results, your app needs to answer one critical question fast: why should I keep coming back?
Runna, for example, reframes its product as a personal running coach—not just a workout tracker. This positioning is evident across onboarding, notifications, and paywall copy. That clarity drives higher intent engagement from day one.
The takeaway? Your app’s value isn’t just what it does. It’s how quickly users feel the impact.
Gamification isn’t about adding points or badges—it’s about creating structured motivation loops that drive habit formation.
The best apps use gamification to make progress feel visible, effort feel rewarding, and commitment feel sticky. Done right, it taps into intrinsic motivation without feeling superficial. Think streaks, level systems, achievement unlocks, or social comparison—but tailored to the behavior you want to reinforce.
Freeletics (more on these later) applies this with precision. Their “Daily Athlete Score” and “Base” streak mechanic offer lightweight, personalized goals that lower the friction to re-engage. The psychology is simple: small, consistent wins build confidence and momentum.
Gamification should never distract from core value. It should amplify it. Focus on systems that make your users feel progress, not pressure.
There are several reasons why a user may unsubscribe, including too frequent or unsolicited communications, lack of high-quality content, and lack of trust.
You may not want a user to unsubscribe, but making the process clear, simple and easy for them is an absolute must in today’s mobile market. It’s bad practice to keep your unsubscribe button concealed or difficult to find or, worse yet, to requiring them to get in touch with support in order to unsubscribe.
Placing an easily accessible unsubscribe button or at the bottom of all email communications ensures users have an easy way out should they want to utilize it.
Clarity and transparency lay the foundations for a trusted and safe environment, reducing uncertainties and risks for the users. Please read our article Blinkist paywall transformation revolutionizes app user engagement to understand the efficiency of transparency to improve user's commitment and retention.
The best monetization strategy in the world fails if your payment flow introduces friction at the point of highest intent.
High-performing apps treat checkout UX as an extension of product-market fit—not just a technical hurdle. Any delay, form field, or cognitive friction can break the conversion moment, especially on mobile where attention is short and trust must be earned quickly.
At scale, small inefficiencies compound. For enterprise apps, even a 1–2% lift in paywall conversion can drive millions in incremental revenue. That’s why teams are now treating the payment funnel as a continuous optimization layer, not a set-and-forget integration.
What works:
Native wallet integration (Apple Pay, Google Pay) for one-tap conversions
Deferred paywalls that surface only after value is clearly demonstrated
Geo-specific UX—such as adjusting payment flows based on local privacy norms or currency preferences
Remember: payment is not just the end of the funnel—it’s a high-signal engagement event. Treat it like a product feature, not a form.
Personalized messaging can increase engagement and conversions as they’re more closely aligned with a user’s preferences. Recent research shows that brands using personalized in-app messaging experience user retention rates of between 61% and 74% within 28 days of receiving the message. Personalized messaging should be included wherever possible such as welcome pages, landing pages, and push notifications, to provide a truly personalized in-app experience to users.
However, personalization shouldn’t stop at the app - an overall personalization strategy that covers all distribution channels and communications platforms is key to increasing engagement rates. A 2021 study by McKinsey found that71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and when that doesn’t happen, 76% get frustrated. The value associated with getting personalization right is increasing exponentially, and getting it wrong can have dire effects on engagement and retention rates.
In line with personalization strategies, relevant push notifications can also increase engagement rates. While 42% of users opt to keep push notifications active on their devices, it’s important to remember not to push just for the sake of it. Each notification should be relevant, add genuine value to the user, and guide them along their user journey.
Tooltips and hotspot notifications are great ways to introduce new users to in-app features and increase engagement:
Tooltips are short hints or descriptions that are displayed when a cursor hovers over them
Hotspots are similar in that they display tips, but often via strobing circles. Unlike tooltips, however, users must click a hotspot to reveal its content.
Creating a personalization strategy that leverages relevant and valuable push notifications – including tooltips and hotspots – can increase app engagement by more than 80%.
Don’t forget, it’s not all about the in-app experience when it comes to improving engagement rates and providing an enhanced user experience. The 2022 Global Messaging Engagement Report found that email is still the most popular communications channel across the world, followed closely by SMS. App marketers can use email and/or SMS to gently nudge disengaged users back toward the platform.
Email campaigns can also be leveraged as part of the app onboarding process, to notify users of updates, sign-up discounts, and more. Executed well, it’s an excellent way to stay top of mind for new users in a channel they likely use every day. Just make sure to use relevant incentives for users to give their email address or create an account.
Deep linking removes friction, drives re-engagement, and shortens the path between user intent and in-app action.
Users expect precision. If they tap a notification, ad, or email CTA, they expect to land exactly where the value is—not on a generic homepage or login screen. Yet many apps still overlook the role of deep linking in driving seamless user flows, especially across channels.
Properly implemented, deep links do more than improve UX. They increase conversion rates on re-engagement campaigns, reduce drop-off during onboarding, and re-activate dormant users by reconnecting them with unfinished tasks or relevant content.
For advanced teams, this means:
Integrating contextual deep links that retain attribution and user state
Using dynamic links to personalize destinations based on cohort, platform, or behavior
Auditing every outbound and inbound marketing touchpoint to ensure alignment with in-app destinations
If something were to go wrong in-app, or a user has a query, offering instant support can go a long way in counteracting an issue and help turn a negative experience into a positive one, including informing them about special offers.
Nowadays, 90% of customers expect immediate responses from customer support. Yes, it’s a high bar, but its what we as users and customers have come to expect! And in-app customer support is one way to provide this.
However, marketers should consider in-app messaging as opposed to a live chat. In-app messaging uses what’s called asynchronous communication. This is where customers don’t have to stay connected while waiting for a response. Instead, they’re notified of new messages, and the conversation history is kept. A bit like on WhatsApp.
Integrating in-app messaging can result in increased customer engagement.
Take Uber, for example. It uses in-app messaging to allow customers/riders to send messages directly to their driver once they book a ride, and vice versa – it preserves privacy for both sides and limits potential confusion. On the flip side, brands that do not utilize in-app messaging may struggle with user retention.
No amount of engagement strategy will compensate for poor product-market fit or UX friction. User feedback is your fastest path to closing that gap and gaining valuable insights into user needs.
Top apps use in-app surveys, NPS triggers, and passive behavior tracking to surface usability issues before they impact retention. The goal isn’t just to fix bugs. It’s to identify what’s holding users back from forming habits, realizing value, or converting.
Qualitative input complements quantitative data. For example, if activation rates dip after a new feature release, direct user feedback can reveal confusion or unmet expectations that raw analytics won’t catch.
High-scale teams also segment feedback loops. They isolate feedback by user tier (e.g. free vs paid), lifecycle stage, or platform to prioritize fixes that move the needle.
Ongoing iteration is what powers durable engagement. A product that listens, adapts, and evolves in response to real user needs becomes one that users stick with—and advocate for.
Engagement isn't a one-time win. It's the outcome of continuous experimentation, validation, and iteration.
The top-performing apps treat engagement like a product in itself: measured, optimized, and constantly challenged. Every new feature, nudge, or message is an opportunity to learn what drives behavior and what doesn’t. But without disciplined testing frameworks, teams risk mistaking noise for signal.
Advanced teams build pipelines of A/B tests across surfaces: onboarding flows, lifecycle campaigns, paywalls, and feature interactions. They run sequenced tests, isolate variables, and define success metrics before shipping. And when a test fails, they extract learnings instead of chasing arbitrary wins.
The most effective engagement strategies are retested, refined, and realigned with evolving user behavior. In a market that moves fast, iteration is the only moat.
It’s easy to talk about engagement in theory. But the most useful insights often come from observing how leading apps actually build and sustain engagement through best practices—especially under pressure.
Enterprise teams operating at scale don’t have the luxury of quick wins. Instead, they rely on compounding improvements, tight feedback loops, and deeply integrated product-marketing strategies to lift engagement where it counts.
Below, we’ll break down how two standout apps—Freeletics and Mojo—have driven measurable engagement gains through differentiated tactics rooted in data, experimentation, and user psychology.
Fitness apps face a brutal reality—retention is hardwired to human inconsistency. Freeletics has managed to outperform the industry average by treating engagement not as a surface metric, but as a behavior-shaping system tied to long-term outcomes.
The team identified a key aha moment: users who complete two workouts in their first week show materially higher retention rates. That single insight now informs everything from onboarding flows to feature development. In early 2024, product tweaks designed to boost that early milestone resulted in a 5% increase in users hitting it—an uplift that’s expected to correlate with stronger cohort health over time.
Freeletics also introduced “Base”—a low-effort daily activity challenge designed to lower the barrier to habitual use. Combined with the “Daily Athlete Score,” a personalized performance tracker, these features incentivize frequent interaction while reinforcing progress.
The result? A 4% increase in engagement from paying users in just the first two months of the year.
Check out the podcast episode to hear the full story.
Mojo’s growth didn’t hinge on virality alone—it was engineered through relentless focus on engagement as a product multiplier. The team understood early on that retention would follow if the app consistently delivered immediate creative wins.
From day one, Mojo prioritized lowering the activation threshold. Users could produce premium-looking videos within minutes, without needing professional skills. But what really drove stickiness was a strategic decision to align monetization with perceived value: offering a free trial that capitalized on the app’s “wow effect” while collecting early signals on intent.
That strategy worked. With over 40 million downloads and $400,000 in monthly revenue before spending a dollar on paid acquisition, Mojo’s early-stage growth was driven almost entirely by product-led engagement loops.
Crucially, Mojo treats engagement as both an outcome and a feedback engine. Hundreds of A/B tests—some even focused on technical underpinnings like rendering algorithms—help the team fine-tune everything from feature layout to trial notifications.
One surprising win? Sending a simple reminder before a free trial ended boosted conversion in culturally cautious markets.
Check out the podcast episode to hear the full story.
As we’ve said, app engagement is the holy grail of app engagement metrics. But behind all the technical terms, you’ll see that what it really means for app owners is far more simple and human: creating valuable, long-term customer loyalty relationships with app users through a mobile app engagement strategy. That’s it.
So what are the various metrics used to measure engagement? Let’s take a look.
This refers to the average amount of time a user spends on your app and the average number of sessions. It’s an excellent indicator of app engagement and usefulness. Generally, the more time spent in app - i.e. the higher your average session length - the more engaged they are.
There are two key metrics used to measure active users:
Daily Active Users (DAU) - the number of unique users that use an app within a 24-hour window. Typically used by game developers where daily engagement is expected.
Monthly Active Users (MAU) - the number of unique users that use an app within a month period. Typically used by B2B or B2C apps where users are expected to engage a few times a month (e.g. banking or shopping apps).
The criteria used to define an “active user” depends entirely on your industry and what the goals are for your users - are you looking for them to complete specific actions, or stay logged into the app for a minimum period of time?
This is one of the most important mobile metrics. It tells you how many of your active monthly users engage with your app over a 24-hour window.
For example, let’s say you had 4,000 MAU and 1,000 DAU last month. Your stickiness ratio would be 25%. Which would mean that, out of the people who used your app last month, one in four of them used it on any given day.
Here’s how it’s calculated:
With this formula, you can predict potential revenue over time. It also gives you data on the value of your app for users by seeing how often they return to use it.
Note: Don’t confuse stickiness ratio with retention rate – stickiness is about the frequency of active users returning to your app; retention measures users who revisit your app after installing (and usually within a given time-frame - see below).
Retention is the number of users that come back at least once, within a given timeframe, after the initial download has taken place. Marketers tend to focus more on retention rate than acquisition rate due to the reduced costs associated with keeping existing users over finding new ones. Retention should be measured frequently because marketers need to know that out of those who downloaded the app, how many users have stayed and how many have churned or uninstalled it altogether, including the churned users.
This is opposite to the retention rate and measures the number of users that cancel, unsubscribe, or uninstall an app. A high subscription churn rate is bad news and often points to something not working as it should or providing a low-quality user experience. Churn rates are made even worse by the fact that there are a whole host of reasons why a user may uninstall, and it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly why.
This is where marketers measure which page or screen resulted in a user not engaging with an app. Not to be confused with bounce rate, which looks at how many users abandon an app without engaging with the content, exit rate shows exactly where they left. This provides marketers with greater insight into which pages are performing well and which aren’t.
App engagement is the heartbeat of sustainable growth. The most effective teams build systems that encourage consistent, meaningful user actions tied directly to business outcomes.
When engagement becomes a product priority, every touchpoint improves. Retention strengthens, monetization becomes more efficient, and user value compounds over time.
Purchasely is the app experience platform built to help mobile teams turn engagement into revenue. Use Purchasely to build high-performing paywalls, test in-app journeys, and optimize subscription flows — all backed by real-time data and advanced experimentation tools.
Ready to see what better app engagement looks like? Book a product tour today and explore how Purchasely can power your next growth curve.
7 October 2025
App engagementDiscover 12 tried-and-tested strategies to boost app engagement and keep your users coming back. Elevate your app's performance with our expert tips!
Nicolas Tissier
Co-founder & CPO @ Purchasely
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