How To Increase Dating App Engagement And User Retention?

Here is the list of mobile app retention strategies that help you increase engagement and retention in your dating app.

Relying on some latest techniques and marketing research work well for boosting user engagement and retention on a dating app. Users prefer dating application that offers:

• Seamless user journey with easy-to-understand UI/UX
• A pool of suitable dating partners
• Sorting out profiles by preferred criteria and personal interaction
• No scam profiles and inappropriate experiences
• Profile visibility settings control in the user’s hand
• Communication panel secured
• App advertising & rewards

Here are a few strategies that help acquire these practices in a dating app.

First impressions are highly crucial in a dating app. When a user opens an app for the first time, they want a smooth and enjoyable experience. Hence, ensure that your onboarding process is quick and engaging.

If users find it hard to use your dating app at the initial stage, there are strong chances that they will abandon it.

To avoid this & to increase the dating app retention rate, you can implement some of the things given below:

• Quick Sign up: Keep minimum steps in the sign-up process & include sign-up via third-party apps like Facebook or Google.
• Teach Gestures: Walk users through the main gestures in your dating app and allow them to check the results.
• Value User’s Time: Never bombard users with a lot of text in the onboarding process; only explain the core features and allow them to explore more.
• Tutorial: Add a tutorial through which users can understand all the features of the dating app.
• End with a Call to Action: Include a call to action at the end of the onboarding process.

For reference, you can check the onboarding process of the Tinder dating app.

The most effective way to measure your dating app retention rate is to start with cohort analysis. It is a type of analytics where you group multiple users depending on their behavior in a specific time frame.

The core purpose here is to identify why users left your dating app. After this, you should take action to retain all such users.

The cohort analysis helps you to achieve the same. For instance, you can consider heatmaps to picture the touch gestures of users while accessing your app. With this, you can understand how users access your app and what they want from your dating app.

Lastly, you can also create visual recordings and then analyze them. You can play user sessions to understand the way users access your dating app after downloading it.

You can also improve dating app retention by providing a tailor-made experience to the users. By creating a customized experience for users, you set yourself apart from the competitors and keep your users engrossed in your dating app.

Personalization further helps you to build customer loyalty.

Depending on the type & amount of information you know about users, you can offer personalization accordingly. In general, you can provide two types of personalization to your users.

Static Personalization: It is a simple yet effective method to offer personalization to users. Example: showing a user’s name in each notification before sharing any message.

Dynamic Personalization: You require the user’s behavioral data to offer dynamic personalization. It could be the history of users’ subscriptions or in-app purchases.

Here, you should collect information about things to which the user agrees. Never take any sensitive details of the users for personalization.

People have an innate desire to win, achieve, and exceed others. You can take this as an advantage for integrating several gamification techniques that help you to improve dating app engagement.

For instance, leading dating apps like Tinder, Bumble & Hinge have made the matchmaking process like a game. These apps allow users to swipe right or left to find a match and initiate communication.

Likewise, various dating apps ask users questions and provide them with the best suitable matches.

You can also introduce a game in your dating app, which app users can play with each other and check their ranking in the leaderboard section.

Apart from this, you can also add gamification techniques to improve user experience like badges, scores, achievements, etc. Depending on a user’s ranking and score, you can provide discounts, coupons, subscription plans, and other things to make money through the dating app effortlessly.

It is one of the best mobile app retention strategies dating apps use to increase the retention rate. According to the localytics report, users who experience customized interaction visit the app 11 or more times.

You can achieve better app interaction by providing push notifications to users for different tasks like welcoming users and later offering streamlined information when the user gets familiar with the app.

Leading dating apps in the market follow this process by being reflective and strategic about how they approach the users.

For instance, offering notifications based on location and usage statistics is highly beneficial for increasing the dating app retention rate.

Moreover, some remarkable benefits of using push notifications in your dating app are getting users’ behavior insights, effective communication, increasing engagement, etc.

Push notifications are basically pop-up messages that appear in the notification bar of a user’s device. Many times push notifications are suitable to deliver messages even when the user is not using the internet. Users have an option whether to obtain push notifications or not.

You can build user engagement by sending different push notifications, such as informational, transactional, promotional, etc. It ultimately increases dating app user retention.

There are various statistics that also prove that push notifications are effective in boosting engagement. According to Airship, users gained through push notifications are likely to retain nearly 2x times more than those who are not. Besides this, sending high-value push notifications helps to improve the dating app retention rate by 3-10x.

If you also want to implement push notifications, you should follow the tips given below:

• Different users will be living in varied regions worldwide. Therefore, you shouldn’t send push notifications to every user at a similar time.
• Provide tailor-made notifications by analyzing their behavior and other things.
• Never send too many push notifications simultaneously.
• Include images, videos, and more in push notifications.

The better the app experience you provide to the user, the more users will get engaged with your dating application.

Notifications are mainly presented on the home screen, while the in-app messages are shown inside the app via the pop-up.

According to localytics, brands observed that their retention rate increased from 61% to 74% within 28 days when they integrated in-app messages into their app.

Even though in-app messages don’t need instant attention; however, they play a vital role in delivering notifications to the users.

Moreover, to increase retention in your dating app, you can provide in-app messages in the onboarding process. Like whenever a user accesses a new feature, you can explain how to use it.

Apart from this, in-app messages help you to alert users about payment issues, account alerts, version updates, etc.

Here, you should note that in-app messages are not beneficial for everyone. It would help if you segmented the audience and provided relevant details whenever necessary. To integrate in-app messages, you can use location API and deliver personalized content to the users.

If you have any opportunity to offer a reward or loyalty program to the users, you should think about it. Here you should provide constant rewards and loyalty points in the form of gifts to engaged users.

By offering loyalty points, you encourage users to visit your dating app again & again. Through this, they will feel more valued and appreciated.

Based on the nature of your dating application, you can provide incentives. In case your dating app has an in-app purchases model, you can offer time-sensitive discounts.

If you have integrated a subscription-based model in your dating app, you can give usage-based rewards rather than discounts. Ultimately, all of these things improve engagement and drive more conversions.

With an incentivized program, you can connect your brand to international events. For instance, popular dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge have offered various incentives to vaccinated users. Dating apps allow users to add a special badge of vaccination and offer some premium features.

Source: Tinder

When you start looking at your dating app as your own child, you will look upon it with much care & respect. Moreover, you will update its features & functionalities from time to time and offer a personalized experience to users.

When you continually update your app, it will become fast and efficient. It ultimately enhances user engagement and retention.

The best strategy to update your dating app is to track user behavior and reviews to understand what users want from your dating app. Based on your analysis, carry out improvements in each app version.

Another strategy is to look at your competitors and list what they offer. For instance, you can check out the features of Tinder. After checking the features of competitors, you can integrate the same features or add some unique features as per your needs.

In this digital era, customers look forward to developing a solid relationship with the business or brand and feel that they are an integral part of the company. Hence, creating two-way communication is highly essential for your dating app.

On the other side, if you don’t collect feedback from users, how will you know what users expect from your dating app?

One of the best ways to create two-way communication is to obtain direct feedback from the app users. When you do this, you will stop users from posting negative reviews for your dating app.

Also, you will be able to understand the root problems that your users face while engaging with the app. You can build engagement metrics to track user behavior to increase your dating app retention rate.

Lastly, being there for users regularly will help you increase engagement and retention for a long period of time.

If you want to improve the users’ interest in your dating app, you should try to engage with them personally.

To do this, you can use email or personalized messages to tell them about any new individual who has joined the app if he/she fulfills all the criteria (at least most of them) that they have filled in the questionnaire or form.

You can also send an email about a new feature of your dating app and encourage them to use it.

You can also send an email about special discounts on third-party services that users access from your mobile app, such as buying flowers, booking a restaurant table, etc.

If you follow these points, you will be able to attract more people to your dating app and help them find their desired match.

You must realize that the taste of individuals keeps changing over time. If you want to serve them through your dating app, you need to keep updating the engagement quotient in your app to succeed.

Your dating app should have a help section where the app user could look for any information about how to use it.

Make sure that if any premium services are available, then the help section should have proper guidance on how to subscribe to them. And what kind of extra advantages the dating app user will get through them.

When you integrate a proper help section, you allow users to discover all the things efficiently. Hence, they will remain engaged with your dating app.

When people use your dating app, they are eagerly waiting to find their perfect match.

People like to find a match as per their criteria. It varies from person to person depending on their physical characteristics like age, weight, height, body type, and hobbies. Out of all filters, location is the most important. It allows users to search dates based on the city or choose a radius for the search.

You can provide this by integrating an advanced search filter feature in your dating app. Ultimately, it enhances the experience and helps users sort better matches according to their needs.

Source: Tinder

You can also use the latest technologies like Augmented Reality, Alexa, and Virtual Reality, to improve user experience. To know more, check out these different ways AR helps to improve user experience.

By providing an enhanced user experience, people will feel connected with your dating app. Hence, its retention increases.

For any individual who is dealing with such a sensitive matter, the first thing they will look for in a dating app is a guarantee of security of data and other information relating to the app user.

Dating apps give anonymity to the users so that they can pursue different leads without the knowledge of other app users.

In any case, if the security of users gets breached, people will lose trust in your dating app.

Hence, it is crucial to provide a safe and secure dating experience to the users. When you do this, you reduce users’ risks, and they will feel secure while using your app. It will ultimately increase your dating app’s retention rate.

Here are some things you can consider to enhance security:

• Account Verification: Verifying users’ profiles before allowing them to start finding a date.
• Profile Privacy: Allowing users to hide their profile for some time or for specific contact lists.
• Scam-free Platform: Enabling users to report any suspicious activity anytime, profile monitoring, and more.
• No Abuse: Automatic content moderation, reporting abuse, and real-time customer support.

By adding proper security to your dating app depending on the age and location of users, you can increase engagement and retention.