Li-at Karpel Gurwicz is the marketing manager of Conduit Mobile ^[1]. She is responsible for leading the business unit’s marketing strategy and programs, and managing strategic partners.

So you’ve built a beautiful mobile application that is blazing fast and sports an incredibly impressive UI. Now the app downloads should come rolling in, right?

Wrong.

Creating your mobile app is the easy part of the process. Actually keeping your users engaged and willing to open your app again and again is the big challenge.

Mobile analytics company Flurry says ^[2] that on average, 54% of users will open your mobile app again 30 days after the initial download. But as you might expect, the longer users have your app, the less they’ll be using it: After 90 days, only 35% of mobile users will still be using the app, according to the firm. ^[3]

So how do you keep your users engaged and continually looking to your app for information and entertainment? Here are a few tips to keep in mind before and after app creation to ensure that your users get the most out of your app:

1. Leverage analytics: Analytics are hugely important to the success of any mobile app, as it can tell you who is using your app, which users are leaving, and what improvements you need to make to keep users clicking that icon on their home screen.
2. A/B testing: There are several techniques out there to test various alternatives for your user interface and user behavior. My preferred method is A/B testing; it helps you determine which experience is best suited for your users and has served Conduit well in the past as we’ve developed apps.
3. Push notifications: Push notifications are a powerful way to engage users, so long as you don’t overuse them. Location-specific push notifications are especially making waves as an effective way to drive sales and engagement by targeting specific regions.
4. Gamification: This may be a more sophisticated technique than those I’ve mentioned above, but gamifying your app — be it creating contests and leaderboards, or offering virtual currency — is one of the most successful ways to keep users enthralled with your app. Hey, it’s worked for Foursquare ^[4] and GetGlue ^[5].
5. Feedback: Perhaps the most effective way to figure out how to keep users coming back to your app is, quite simply, to just ask them! Collect and answer feedback from your users via reviews about your app, or even from within your app.
6. Don’t forget to update: Your app is always a work in progress. Keep enhancing your app and optimizing anywhere that’s needed in order to improve the user experience.

There are many other ways to keep users engaged with your app for a longer period of time — ads within Facebook apps on mobile devices are fast becoming a preferred method — but the tips above should be enough to get you started down the right path. What other ways have helped your app succeed? Let me know in the comments section, and let’s continue the conversation!

Follow Li-at Karpel Gurwicz on Twitter at @LiatKarpel ^[6]