How to Increase Web Application Usage
We hear it all the time from our clients, “I have a great web application but my users don’t come back to using it regularly.” It’s a common problem with web applications and mobile applications. How do you get users to go back regularly and use your online application? People are extremely busy. They might have downloaded your mobile app to help them solve a task, they liked it, they intended to use it again, but they forgot about it. You’ve tried to send them online alerts that read “Our mobile app is great, come back and use it again.” But that isn’t working. A great solution is to get users to check your application by regularly pushing them data.
Setting up a Relevant Push Email to Users of your Web or Mobile Application
I’m a Google Guide. If you don’t know what that means I basically rate a lot of companies, restaurants and post a lot of pictures of places to Google. If you want to see one of the awesome web development companies (Shameless self promotion 🙂 ) you can see some of the content I’ve created as a Google Guide. What’s really neat about how Google get’s me to keep using their application is that they send me regular updates via email and mobile phone push notifications to keep me updated about how my content is doing. See the image below for an example. They don’t tell me how great their app is, or try to tell me why I should use it, they just push me regular information that is personalized to me.
Things to Include to your Application Users in a Push Email
1. Information that is new since the last time they used your application
2. Information that is built around their last interacting with your mobile application. For instance (Last time you used our mobile app you looked at Resturant X, here is information about Resturant X).
3. Some type of number that shows that your application is changing and that they should therefore use/check it often. For instance on the image above Google tells me that I have lot’s of users that view my photos.