Once you’ve realized the importance of user engagement for your mobile game growth, that’s half the success.
Pushwoosh has discovered in its hot-of-the-press game apps research that the metrics like push notification opt-in rate, CTR, DAU, and MAU are all interconnected. Moreover, they all correlate with retention rates and conversions. And, most importantly, a major part of game apps overlooks engagement metrics completely, meaning you’ll have a competitive advantage if your focus on this stage of the customer lifecycle.
So, how do you boost engagement in your mobile game? Here are some field-proven tips, also backed with data.
1. Get More Players to Opt-In
Permission to send push notifications is crucial for you to be able to communicate with your players while they are idle. Here is the most effective way to obtain an opt-in: explain the benefits that users will receive with your messages and deliver on your promise in every push so that players stay subscribed.
What kind of benefits will be the most enticing? Gamers would say: special offers and in-game rewards.
BONUS POINT: Pushwoosh data shows that game apps with high push notification opt-in rates also have high CTRs and User CTRs. This is true both for iOS and Android games — looks like a good reason to get serious about the opt-in rate as an engagement metric!
2. Send Push Notifications That Players Want to Click On
To have outstanding CTRs, your pushes need to catch your users’ attention and also entice their curiosity so that they want to seize the offer straightways or learn more. Here are some of the elements that will do the job:
- Limited-time offers
- Anything NEW: in-game items, challenges, or levels unlocked
- CTAs: you can be playful, teasing, and even provocative with your mobile gamers
And we certainly recommend you brainstorm more ideas and A/B test them.
BONUS POINTS: High CTRs and User CTRs are your bridge to higher numbers of DAU and MAU — research has revealed a correlation between the engagement metrics.
3. Engage Your Players ‘Till They Swell the Ranks of DAU and MAU
At this point, you must have learned what kind of offers and messages draw your users’ maximum attention. Now you want to keep delivering that high-performing content on a regular basis. Even (and especially) if it means pushing your players daily, you will want to automate some processes:
📅 Schedule notifications with daily offers and challenges
You may vary your pushes’ content depending on the day of the week, like a stellar Pushwoosh customer, Bladestorm does in its GC.SKINS app. Since introducing a daily calendar of automatically sent notifications, the app saw an impressive 16.62% increase in DAU, and the results came in a few months.
🔄 Re-engage your less active players effortlessly
To have your numbers of DAU and MAU at a high level, apart from engaging more and more new users, you want to keep those who are already active. In other words, you don’t want to lose your high-valued players when one day they stop opening your app. And, as a busy professional, you want to solve this problem time-efficiently.
This is when automation features for content creation come to help. You may know them under the name of Dynamic Content (like we call them at Pushwoosh). Such features allow, for example, multiple game marketers to create one generic re-engagement message for all apps. More context, such as the name of the game, can be added to the push copy automatically, saving your creative energy for some other tasks.
User Engagement: Your First Feat in the Mission for Game App Growth
Once you’ve figured out user engagement, your mobile growth journey has only just begun. Next comes user retention — another stage of the customer lifecycle to be linearly dependent on engagement, as Pushwoosh research has found out. You now know that good rates come to those who engage, so play this marketing game well!
This post has been written by Max Kuzakov, Senior Customer Success Manager @ Pushwoosh.
Pushwoosh is the top customer engagement platform for mobile-driven businesses.
Using Pushwoosh’s tech-easy solutions, 80 000 gaming and non-gaming companies have built effective communication strategies with the use of push notifications, in-app messages, emails, SMS, WhatsApp, and omnichannel triggered messaging.