Email marketing is a critical component of any digital marketing strategy. It’s a tried-and-true method that can be applied to reach customers in virtually any industry. For mobile apps, it can be especially powerful as your target audience is likely to access your marketing emails right from their smartphone. This makes it incredibly easy to encourage users to engage with your mobile app.

There are many different strategies you can use in your email marketing to increase mobile app engagement. We’ll get you started with five of our favorites.

1. Send a Welcome Email

When your app gains a new user, a welcome email can help enhance the user experience. Not only will this first message add a touch of humanity to your app, but you can also use it to provide important information. If you use this email to point out all the great features built into the app, users are more likely to immediately go back and test them out. This encourages immediate app engagement.

2. Provide Users With Promotions and Special Offers

Everyone loves a deal. If your app has a paid subscription or contains in-app purchases, a marketing email is a great way to offer your loyal app users discounts or special offers. In many cases, consumers are hesitant to pay full price for any subscription or feature due to fear of it not meeting their expectations. 

If you offer a free or discounted first month of a subscription—delivered via email—you may get more users trying out the paid service. Once they see how useful it is, they’ll be more likely to continue paying after their free or discounted month runs out.

3. Provide Useful Content Without a Sales Pitch

Yes, we just said you should use email to offer special promotions to sell your service. But not every email should have a sales pitch in it. 

Instead, keep most of your emails informative and build a relationship with your app’s users. You can send emails explaining how to use certain app features, but you can also send out general emails on topics relevant to your app. For example, if your app is for financial planning, an email discussing the importance of saving for retirement may be in order, even if your app has no retirement-related features built into it.

4. Send Focused Emails to Segmented Email Lists

App analytics are extremely powerful. With analytics, you can see what features your app’s users are using the least. This can be helpful in your email marketing, as you can then segment your email list to send out emails only to certain targeted subsets of users. 

If you have one set of users that rarely uses feature A in your app and another group that rarely uses feature B, you can split your central email list into two segments. In doing so, you’ll be able to send out different emails to each group explaining how and why they should be using the feature that they’ve been neglecting. This can immediately increase engagement as users start learning about all they’ve been missing in your app.

5. Curtail Churn With Email Outreach

This is another situation where your app analytics and email marketing strategy come together. By analyzing your app’s usage data, you may be able to identify trends tied to actions users typically take before they ghost you. Once you’ve identified these signs of churn, you can flag any new users that show those traits as a high priority for a retention email list.

By sending out emails to app users at high risk of churn, you can address any concerns they may have about the app. This should help improve app engagement in the short term as well as keep those users from deleting your app.

Email Marketing is a Powerful Tool for Your Mobile App’s Success

Email marketing can be effective for many types of products and services, but mobile app promotion is one of the most seamless. If they download your app on their smartphone, you can be fairly certain that they’ve got an email account on that very device. If you use this marketing channel wisely, you can greatly increase your mobile app’s user engagement because users are so fast to open the app after seeing your email.

If you need help planning or implementing your app’s marketing strategy, get in touch with Camber Creative. We’ve got years of experience strategizing, building, and marketing apps.