Lack of user engagement and retention are the greatest challenges for app marketers, with churn rates growing to become fairly common. So, working with the top app engagement platforms and services can help secure the long term success of your mobile app.
Top App Engagement Platforms
App engagement platforms help app marketers attract and retain users, allowing you to analyze customer behavior and integrate personalized communication methods. Mobile retention companies therefore cover every aspect of an app marketing campaign within one single platform.
In this guide, we will dive deep into this marketing format that is mobile app engagement, and how the best players in the industry can help you engage with your target users through highly effective mobile engagement techniques.
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Get startedWhat is mobile app engagement?
App engagement describes a set of metrics that show how much and in what ways users interacted with your app. These engagement metrics usually include the number of times a user opens your app, session duration and what events or actions users undertook while using your services.
Moreover, mobile app engagement platforms and services enable app marketers and product managers to manage the process of engaging with users. They support methods, like push notifications and personalization, and provide efficient tracking of key data to make sure the mobile marketing strategy is working.
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This marketing concept entails several engagement strategies that will keep users interested in your app, increasing customer retention by attracting them with personalized product recommendations and fine-tune message content.
These app engagement tools are important when it comes to app marketing. But there are several more reasons why you should prioritize customer engagement, and why you should work with an app engagement company that provides everything you need in one single platform.
Featured Mobile App Engagement Platforms
The best app engagement platforms
App engagement platforms are software tools that help app developers improve user engagement, retention, and monetization.
These platforms typically offer a range of features such as push notifications, in-app messaging, analytics, A/B testing, and personalization tools.
By utilizing these features, app developers can better understand user behavior, preferences, and needs, and tailor their app experiences accordingly to keep users engaged and coming back for more.
We’ve listed the best app engagement platforms below.
1. Airship
Airship is an app engagement platform that helps businesses to interact with their customers through mobile messaging. It allows you to send targeted (and personalized messages), such as push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS, to your customers based on behavior and preferences.
Businesses can also track campaign performance, measure customer engagement, and optimize their messaging strategy to improve the customer experience and drive revenue.
Overview
Airship was founded in 2009 by Blake Schreck, Adam Lowry, and Michael Richardson under the name “Urban Airship.” The company started as a mobile app development platform but later shifted its focus to mobile messaging and rebranded itself as “Airship” in 2019.
Today, Airship is a leading provider of mobile marketing solutions, serving thousands of customers worldwide.
Services
Airship provides its customers with the following services:
- Real-time insights into the performance of mobile messaging campaigns, allowing you to optimize your messaging strategy and better engage
- Mobile messaging solutions that help businesses send targeted and personalized messages to their customers via push notifications, in-app messaging, SMS, and email
- Automation tools that enable you to create automated messaging workflows based on customer behavior
2. Braze
Braze is an app engagement platform that helps brands build relationships with their customers by providing personalized messaging experiences across various channels, including email, push notifications, and messaging apps.
The platform’s AI-powered tools allow businesses to better understand their customers and deliver (targeted) messages that drive engagement and loyalty.
Overview
Braze, formerly known as Appboy, was founded in 2011 by Bill Magnuson and Jon Hyman. The company is headquartered in New York City.
As of 2021, Braze serves over 1,000 customers worldwide, including leading brands such as Burger King, Delivery Hero, Domino’s, HBO, and Udacity.
Services
Braze provides its customers with the following services:
- Braze offers a range of automation tools that allow businesses to create and trigger messages based on specific actions, such as cart abandonment and app uninstall
- Personalized messages to customers across multiple channels, including email, push notifications, messaging apps, and more
- The platform enables businesses to quickly segment their audience based on various attributes, including demographics, behavior, and engagement history
3. Pendo
Pendo is a product analytics and user feedback platform designed to help businesses improve the user experience of their web and mobile apps. Pendo provides tools to collect and analyze user behavior data, gather feedback from users, and deliver targeted in-app messaging to guide users through key workflows and features.
The platform’s goal is to help businesses understand how users interact with their apps, identify areas for improvement, and then act on that data to drive better user engagement and retention.
Overview
Pendo.io was founded in 2013 by Todd Olson, Erik Troan, and Rahul Jain. The company is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, and has since grown rapidly, with offices in San Francisco, New York, London, and Israel.
Pendo.io has raised over $206 million in funding from investors such as Battery Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, General Atlantic, and Tiger Global Management.
Services
Pendo provides its customers with the following services:
- Helps businesses understand how users are interacting with their apps by tracking user behavior data such as clicks, scrolls, and feature usage
- Allows businesses to deliver targeted in-app messages to guide users through key workflows and features, as well as to announce new releases and updates
- Feedback tools that allow brands to gather feedback directly from users, helping them to better understand user needs and pain points
4. Optimove
Optimove is an app engagement platform that helps businesses optimize their customer relationships. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze customer behavior and predict future user actions.
Businesses can create personalized marketing campaigns and loyalty programs and track customer engagement and retention rates. The platform is used by companies across a variety of industries, including gaming, eCommerce, and financial services.
Overview
Optimove was founded in 2009 by CEO Pini Yakuel. The company is headquartered in New York City, with additional offices in Tel Aviv and London.
Since its founding, Optimove has grown to become a leading customer retention platform, serving businesses around the world.
Services
Optimove provides its customers with the following services:
- Uses machine learning algorithms to segment customers based on their behaviors, preferences, and other factors
- Enables businesses to create personalized campaigns across multiple channels, including email, mobile push notifications, and SMS
- Helps brands design and implement loyalty programs that incentivize customers to stay engaged with their brand
5. CleverTap (Leanplum)
CleverTap provides a range of tools for customer engagement, including push notifications, in-app messaging, email marketing, and more. It also offers advanced analytics and segmentation features to help businesses better understand their users.
The platform allows brands to test different marketing strategies to determine what works best with their users and offers automation features to streamline the delivery of personalized messaging.
Overview
CleverTap was founded in 2013 by Sunil Thomas, Suresh Kondamudi, and Anand Jain. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and has offices in San Francisco, London, Singapore, and Mumbai.
CleverTap has become one of the leading mobile marketing platforms, trusted by thousands of companies worldwide to help them engage with their users and grow their businesses.
Services
CleverTap provides its customers with the following services:
- Helps businesses engage with their users through personalized messaging across multiple channels, including push notifications, in-app messaging, email, SMS, and more
- Allows businesses to segment their users based on a variety of criteria, including behavior, location, demographics, and more, to deliver targeted messaging
- Provides advanced analytics and reporting capabilities to help businesses understand how their users are interacting with their apps and campaigns, allowing them to make data-driven decisions
6. MoEngage
MoEngage is a customer engagement (and retention platform) that allows brands to deliver personalized and contextual messages across multiple channels, such as mobile push, email, in-app, web push, SMS, and more.
The platform uses automation to help businesses understand their customers better and engage with them. MoEngage also provides real-time analytics and insights to help brands measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and optimize their customer engagement strategy.
Overview
MoEngage was founded in 2014 by Raviteja Dodda and Yashwant Kumar. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, California, and its offices are in Bangalore and Berlin.
MoEngage has a diverse range of clients across industries such as eCommerce, finance, and travel. Some of their key clients include Ola, Flipkart, McAfee, Samsung, Deutsche Telekom, and Airtel.
Services
MoEngage provides its customers with the following services:
- The platform uses automation to help businesses deliver the right message at the right time to the most suitable customer
- Businesses can leverage MoEngage’s deep linking capabilities to drive higher engagement and conversions from their push campaigns
- Push notification services include personalization, segmentation, automation, and real-time analytics
7. Adikteev
Adikteev is a mobile ad company that specializes in providing app retargeting solutions to app developers and marketers. They use machine learning algorithms to optimize ad campaigns and deliver personalized and engaging ads to app users.
The company’s main focus is on improving user engagement and retention for its clients by delivering (relevant) ads that drive higher conversions and revenue. Adikteev’s solutions include personalized ad creatives, dynamic retargeting, and programmatic buying, among others.
Overview
The company was founded in 2012 in Paris, France, by a team of three entrepreneurs: Xavier Mariani, Emilien Eychenne, and Frederic Leroy.
Adikteev focuses on providing app retargeting solutions to app developers and marketers, with the goal of delivering value to both app users and clients.
Services
Adikteev provides its customers with the following services:
- Dynamic retargeting solutions that are designed to deliver ads to app users based on their behavior and interests
- Programmatic buying solutions that enable clients to buy ad inventory in real-time and at scale. They use machine learning algorithms to optimize ad campaigns and deliver personalized ads that drive higher conversions and revenue
- Provides clients with detailed reporting and analytics on their ad campaigns, including metrics such as impressions, clicks, conversions, and revenue
8. Iterable
Iterable is a customer communication platform that helps brands deliver experiences with (individualized) communications at scale. Marketers can create, optimize, and measure interactions throughout the customer journey.
You can send a rich push and amplify the message with custom images, GIFs, and tapable action buttons so users can interact without leaving their home screens. Iterable boasts users among brands such as Fender, Calm, and Box, which build customer-centric experiences by delivering the right content to the right audience.
Overview
Andrew Boni co-founded Iterable in 2013 and has served as CEO since 2021. Prior to Iterable, Andrew worked on Google’s Strategic Partnerships team. He graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from Boston College.
Notable clients include Airtable, Rover, and DoorDash.
Services
Iterable provides its customers with the following services:
- Enables marketers to leverage real-time user, demographic, behavioral, and custom event data to (instantly) trigger campaigns
- A cross-channel marketing platform that offers push notifications, email, in-app messaging, and more
- Allows brands to scale with a high level of customization
9. OneSignal
OneSignal is a popular platform for mobile and web push notifications. It allows app developers and website owners to send notifications to users’ devices, keeping them engaged (and informed) about new content, updates, and more.
OneSignal also provides features for audience segmentation, A/B testing, and analytics to help optimize notification performance.
Overview
OneSignal was founded in 2014 by three individuals: George Deglin, Long Vo, and Zack Hendlin. OneSignal’s mission is to empower businesses to engage with their users in a meaningful and effective way.
Some of the leading clients of the platform include Adobe, IBM, and Overstock.
Services
OneSignal provides its customers with the following services:
- Brands can test to see what messages resonate most with their users to optimize campaign performance
- Industry-leading event tracking to drive goal-based results
- Businesses can streamline their messaging workflow without losing anything in translation
10. Aampe
Aampe is an Agentic AI platform that enables you to assign a dedicated AI agent to each user in order to personalise their UI/UX experience and lifecycle communications. Aampe improves the efficiency of your lifecycle marketing and product teams, and drives greater engagement and retention from your users and customers.
Each agent is tasked with increasing their assigned user’s engagement, conversions, and retention by learning and optimizing for their individual user’s preferences and patterns, networking with other users’ agents to discover helpful patterns, and using the tools available from the business (including different messaging channels, event data, app content and inventory, and more.).
Each agent plans, builds, and executes a completely unique customer experience for their assigned user.
Overview
Aampe was founded in 2020 by a team of PhD neuroscientists, anthropologists, and data scientists, who leveraged their previous experience in mobile and data science/AI to build a new way for businesses to capture user attention and drive customer engagement.
Aampe is currently used by forward thinking apps in every major vertical across the globe.
Services
- Aampe provides its customers with the following services:
- Clean, orchestrate, and mobilize data from multiple sources
- Build fully agentically-driven customer experiences across product and all communication channels
- Provide detailed analytics on user behavior, engagement patterns, and messaging performance by tag to help businesses understand their customers better.
- Easily integrates with existing marketing technology stacks
11. Sendbird
Sendbird is a chat, voice, and video API and SDK for mobile apps and websites. It allows developers to integrate real-time messaging and chat features into their apps using Sendbird’s messaging platform.
The functionality on offer enables users to communicate in real time through text, voice, as well as video chat.
Overview
John Kim, Esteban Saez, and Harry Kim founded Sendbird in 2013. The platform is used by thousands of apps and serves millions of users worldwide.
Some of Sendbird’s leading clients include Reddit, Delivery Hero, Hinge, Yahoo Sports, and Gojek.
Services
Sendbird provides its customers with the following services:
- Provides APIs and SDKs for creating robust chat features within mobile and web applications. This includes one-on-one messaging, group chats, and open channels
- Supports real-time voice and video calling capabilities, enabling users to connect more personally and effectively
- Facilitates live streaming services, which are ideal for hosting live events, webinars, and interactive sessions
12. Amplitude
Amplitude is a product analytics platform that helps companies understand user behavior, measure the impact of new features, and drive product-led growth.
The platform provides insights into user engagement, retention, and conversion rates to help businesses make data-driven decisions.
Overview
Amplitude was founded by Curtis Liu, Jeffrey Wang, and Spenser Skates in 2012. The platform is used by thousands of companies worldwide.
Some of Amplitude’s leading clients include Microsoft, PayPal, Instacart, Atlassian, and IBM.
Services
Amplitude provides its customers with the following services:
- Allows businesses to understand the full user journey by tracking and analyzing user interactions within their product
- Provides tools for testing, analyzing, and optimizing product features at scale, enabling data-driven decision-making for product improvements
- Unites data across teams to provide a comprehensive view of customer interactions and behaviors, facilitating better data-driven strategies
Why is customer engagement important?
With a plethora of mobile apps being available on Google Play and the Apple App Store, users have endless options to choose from, making the app market incredibly competitive for marketers today. Expectations are set extremely high, and, hence, so are churn and uninstall rates.
In fact, every 1 in 2 apps is uninstalled already in the first month of being downloaded, with the average app losing about $33,000 a month, due to uninstalls. This just shows how much of a challenge it is for apps to keep their users engaged.
On the other hand, 90% of users who engage with an app even just once a week are more likely to stay interested in its product and services. Customer engagement efforts are therefore crucial for creating and maintaining top-level user experience in order to successfully meet their expectations and needs.
By developing a closer relationship with your acquired users, you can turn one-time users into lifetime customers. User acquisition and retention are both priorities in your marketing strategy, as the mobile app market becomes more competitive. Therefore, app engagement is the leading marketing concept that motivates users to keep coming back to your app.
Now that you understand the importance of mobile app engagement, let us take a look at how exactly to increase engagement, and keep your users interested at every point of the journey.
How do I increase mobile app engagement?
The number one reason why users stop using, or worse, uninstall an app is because they don’t need it as much.
So, you need to understand what will keep your users active and interested in your app. Making your services highly interactive can mean different approaches depending on the nature of each individual app.
But the goal is still the same: To increase the value of your app to users and build a long-term relationship with them.
Just because your app has been downloaded by target users, it does not mean the app will be used – installing an app is just the starting point. Mobile app engagement is therefore the determining factor for the long term of your success.
Smooth onboarding
You want to make the onboarding process as straight-forward and simple as possible. If the introduction to your app is too complicated, there is a high chance users will abandon your app – and in worse case, without using it even once.
An efficient onboarding process consists of reducing the complexity of creating an account and signing up, and introducing the app’s features and quality functionality just enough – not overwhelming users right away.
An enjoyable onboarding process will also ensure a positive app experience, making your users want to continue to engage with your product and services.
Use push notifications
To continue to engage with your users that have already downloaded and installed your app, you want to optimize push notifications to remind them of your app’s features and their benefits.
Including the right messaging and sending this to users as a pop-up notification at the right moment can greatly improve app engagement, re-emphasizing the value and importance of your services to your users.
Pro tip: geo-targeting is an effective method, for example, to give users a personalized experience by sending a push notification about a service based on their location. Remember, this method needs to be consistent in order to retain and engage users.
Integrate offerwall & incentivized advertising
If your mobile app includes services that allow you to offer reward or loyalty programs, you want to take advantage of offerwall and incentivized advertising.
In-app purchasing that includes discount offers and rewards, is a monetization model that incentivizes users with usage-based offers to use your product. This app engagement strategy makes users feel valued and important to a brand, making them want to interact with your app further.
Personalize in-app messages
Customer engagement and retention increases when brands communicate and interact with their users via in-app messages.
While in-app messages do not motivate direct or immediate action from users, they are still important to keep people updated on any current news or status, keeping your mobile app ‘alive’.
Pro tip: Make sure your in-app messages are real-time updates as well as personalized content that feels organic and individual, basing them on users’ preferred interests, behavior, gender and age.
But aiming for a high number of downloads and installs is only a part of app marketing, and merely the starting point of the journey.
You want to keep users engaged through bespoke methods – or, you can work with app engagement platforms and companies that will make your mobile app stand out in the highly competitive app landscape.
How do mobile engagement platforms work?
Mobile engagement platforms cover every aspect of the mobile marketing journey, integrating effective strategies as well as retrieving data to track the performance of the marketing efforts, maximizing the success of our app engagement.
In essence, customer engagement platforms provide you just the tools and equipment you need to efficiently interact with your users as well as to track their behavior, and see if your engagement tactics are actually working.
Think of app engagement as a marketing format that enables business communication between you and your users, through multiple channels, like the app itself, email and SMS. This connection with customers aims to build loyalty and long term satisfaction and involvement.
Top mobile engagement platforms also make sure data and personalized messages are accurate and integrated properly with, for example, mobile email campaigns. These companies share this insightful data with a mobile analytics dashboard, ensuring the best results for your campaign.
Integrated analytics tools, such as notification responses or email views, can easily help create accurate user personas, allowing you to effectively categorize users into segments. This way, you can create more personalized messages and target these various groups with notifications based on their specific, unique behaviors.
Partnering with top app engagement companies and platforms will allow marketers to stay ahead of the game in the mobile app realm, keeping your app up-to-date, with a loyal customer base.
What are the benefits of working with top app engagement platforms?
Hiring the best app engagement company out there promises the most effective mobile marketing campaign, including tools and strategies, such as in-app messaging, push notifications and email marketing that are personalized to your target users.
Customer engagement platforms will make sure your users are satisfied and their needs stay fulfilled, retaining them far beyond the moment they download and install your app. So the true value of our services and product will be showcased to users, through tailored messaging and notifications.
Keeping track of your app engagement efforts are crucial to get a better understanding of your ROI, and building a long term relationship with your customers. User behavior data is therefore an integral part of the app engagement process, and only the best mobile engagement companies will provide qualitative efforts, at every step of your campaign.
Having an accurate database and an efficient platform that translates this information into functional efforts to enhance your app, will significantly improve the overall user experience, resulting in the sustainable and long term success of your mobile app.
Below, we have listed the top app engagement companies and platforms that will increase user interaction, app retention rates and conversion rates.
