A download is just the beginning. The onboarding experience of your financial service’s app is crucial to its long-term success. These four strategic focuses will get you through the critical first impressions phase and keep your audience returning to your app for more.
When it comes to the strategy for engaging your customers through an app, it’s too common for financial services brands to overly focus on downloads at the sacrifice of everything that comes after.
The (sort of bad) news: getting your app downloaded is the relatively easy part. Most apps lose almost 80 percent of daily active users within just a few days of download.
Don’t assume that you’ve earned your audience’s full attention just because your app is in their pocket. Think of it more as an audition than a done deal. The good news? You’ve piqued their interest — now you’ve got an opportunity to knock their socks off.
1. Use Descriptions to Focus on Benefits Before Features
Yes, your app needs to do something valuable. But as your audience is just getting to know it, position features based on the reasons they should believe before listing out the specifics of what all those features do. Bring your unique value proposition to life with relevant keywords while staying concise, focused, and straightforward. There’s not a lot of space for text, and users don’t want to scroll to get to the good stuff.
2. Stand out Visually With Video Previews
Likely, your audience is already regular users of many other apps. They’ll have high expectations and know what a stellar onboarding experience feels like. Set yourself apart from your competition by tapping into new trends that will make the first days of using your app stand out.
App store preview videos have been shown to boost conversion by over 20 percent but are still primarily underutilized. A succinct, entertaining video intro can build immediate engagement while also subtly educating on the ins and outs of how your app works. Part tutorial and part promo, you can show off your app’s top features while wrapping it up as part of a highly engaging first impression.
3. Retain Interest With out-of-the-box Release Notes
Well-written release notes can keep your users informed of the latest and greatest additions to your app experience. But for those that aren’t really paying attention that closely, they’re also an opportunity to surprise and delight in a way that shows off some brand personality. Will everyone you’re targeting read every single release note? No. Should you act like they are? Absolutely.
4. Tap into the power of progressive disclosure
After download, users want to get right to the point. Make it easy for them to see and feel the value of your app ASAP.
Instead of long-winded tutorials, use the progressive disclosure technique to make seemingly complex concepts short and snappy. Educate your new user in tiny micro-sized bites with interactive elements designed to abbreviate and empower immediate access. Highlight the basics and get their buy-in with streamlined content previews, animated hints, and accordion elements that will get them taking fast actions and solidify engagement. Save the more complicated, lesser-used aspects of your app for later.
The author, Anton Morrison, is VP of User Experience & Design at Appnovation.
