Technology has been revolutionizing every passing day, and the trends for various industries have been evolving. Meanwhile, things have changed in the banking and finance industry too. It is important for brands to grow active users in BFSI.
Nowadays, almost every user has a banking or finance app on their mobile phone that they use to perform various actions on a daily basis. Given this shift, BFSI companies need to look for ways to demonstrate growth and profitability via greater engagement, usage, and value for use.
If you are a bank or a finance app owner looking for ways to engage and grow active users in your business, then this article has your back.
Let’s dive in!
What are Active Users?
Active users refer to the number of unique users who engage with your web or mobile application during a predefined period of time.
It is a high-level product metric that measures growth, churn, and product stickiness.
Why is it important to track active users and grow active users in BFSI?
The point behind tracking active users is to make sure that your product or application is providing users with continuing value.
Calculating the number of active users over a period of time can help you assess the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and the overall customer experience your product delivers.
Active user metrics can help businesses calculate additional key metrics like Lifetime Value and retention rates.
Thus, tracking active users benefits businesses by helping them measure growth, identify customer engagement, and track consumer behavior patterns.
It provides a basic measure of the general health of an app and acts as a first step to calculating deeper and more informative metrics further down the line.
Types of active user metrics
Daily Active User (DAU): A daily active user is someone who interacts with an app over the period of a specific day (e.g., January 1st).
Weekly Active User (WAU): A weekly active user is someone who interacts with an app over a period of seven days (e.g., January 1st-7th).
Monthly Active User (MAU): A monthly active user is someone who interacts with an app over a period of 30 days (e.g., a user who opens the app in January).
Tracking these numbers will give you a general impression of your application or site’s performance, but gathering more user data can provide additional context for this metric. In addition to monitoring active users, gather information about user demographics, session lengths, visit frequencies, and consumer behaviors.
Knowing these details provides more information about the value users gain from using your site or application. By collecting information in all these domains, you can learn more about your primary users, what features benefit them the most, and what methods work best to attract and retain them.
How to calculate Active Users?
#1 Define the criteria for active users
When determining your active user criteria, consider your goals, the type of application or site you run, and how you expect users to interact with your site. For example, one way to decide your active user criteria is to imagine yourself using the site. Think about what features are essential to the site’s function and how your engagement with those features shows your activity.
#2 Determine the time frame for measuring user activity (DAUs, MAUs, etc.)
Decide the time frame you wish to use to measure user activity. If you’re measuring your MAUs, think about whether seasonality affects your business. Measuring your number of active users for your busiest months or days and tracking them from year to year can help you find patterns in user behaviors. It can also give you a benchmark average to compare with your numbers each year.
#3 Collect and visualize data for assessment
Finally, after collecting your data based on the established criteria, process the information to create visuals so you can analyze your metrics.
Analyzing your data allows you to identify factors that contribute to increased user activity. For example, if a marketing strategy was especially effective at generating a high number of active users for a month, you might implement the same strategy the next year.
Alternatively, if you find that your number of active users for a month is lower than average, you can investigate what factors contributed to the decline and develop new strategies to resolve the issue.
Example:
- Criteria: a user performs at least one action in the app (e.g., tapping a button, scrolling, swiping)
- Time Period: Daily
- The following events are recorded for a particular day:
- User 1: pressed a button, then closed the app
- User 2: Opened the app and took no action
- User 3: Opened the app, scrolled, swiped, and pressed a button
- User 1: Opens the app again and presses another button
- Result: 2 Daily Active Users:
- User 1: is an active user (but should only be counted once)
- User 2: is not considered active
- User 3: is an active user
Keep in mind that measuring active users heavily depends on the long-term growth goals and business model of your company.
How to grow active users and increase engagement in BFSI
1. Provide a seamless and personalized onboarding experience for each user segment
Onboarding is perhaps the most powerful and fundamental engagement tool you have in your arsenal. To make the best onboarding sequence, it’s crucial to understand its role in your banking, finance, or insurance app.
To increase daily active users, it is crucial to personalize the onboarding experience, making sure the users discover the value of your product fast.
This ensures that users can master usage and reap the benefits much quicker.
It can be as simple as displaying your app’s core features or an interactive tutorial that guides users through the app.
Since your goal here is to get users to the activation point in their journey as fast as possible, you can use segmentation to make the onboarding flow as relevant as possible for each use case.
Then, create a separate checklist for each segment that drives users to engage with the key features of your app relevant to them.
2. Boost engagement with Gamification
Gamification, the implementation of game elements and experiences in an app that isn’t a game in itself, is currently one of the most well-loved strategies for driving engagement.
The popularity of gamification shouldn’t come as a surprise. People love playing games—it’s in our nature.
Here’s how app gamification can influence and motivate people:
- It awakens curiosity. Curiosity helps to encourage users, so they can move forward and get more rewards.
- It fosters competition. Scoreboards with the achievements of other users encourage the players to accomplish more and compare their results with others.
- It creates a sense of control. No one likes to be forced to do something. That is why the critical purpose of gamification is to give the users control and decide which milestone they will complete next.
Fortunately, gamification for apps doesn’t have to be hard. Upshot.ai has built-in gamification features that help you to:
- Create a cohesive user journey that hooks your audience
- Make the user experience competitive to increase user engagement
- Reward engagement and active participation to keep users coming back
- Make progress visible to trigger the desired user behavior
- Use mini-games, create in-app personalized trivia, and drive app engagement
3. Use contextual and timely nudges with In-app messages and Push notifications
Push notifications and In-app messages are the basic ways to create engagement.
That’s because it’s a subtle call to a person that says, “Hey! I have something important for you. Check it out!”
But, apps abuse push notifications too frequently, so users might get annoyed with them. It is not a good idea to dump messages directly into users’ faces.
To maximize user engagement, increase monthly active users and grow active users in BFSI, you need to focus on contextual and timely communication:
- Make it relevant for specific personas and use cases
- Point them at the right time in the user journey
Push notifications and In-app messages can be a double-edged sword as an engagement strategy. Still, as long as you implement them with restraint and keep the user’s needs in mind, they will serve you well.
4. Collect and act on user feedback
In any business, customers are king. The same is true with BFSI. Your app’s features are largely driven by what your users need.
So, how do you know if your app effectively does this? You get their feedback.
Use customer satisfaction surveys to assess how easy it is for users to use the feature and gauge overall experience.
In-app micro surveys will help you get more in-depth, qualitative feedback on specific aspects of a feature. Acting on these insights will drive more user engagement and grow your active users.
Final Thoughts
There are many ways to increase your product’s engagement and grow active users in BFSI. But if you look at all of them, you’ll realize that they all have one thing in common: they put the user first.
Focusing on growing active users is one of the best things you can do to ensure the progress of your product or application.
If your product successfully manages to engage users and provides them with value, they will continue using it and might become your brand advocates.
Want to get started with growing users in your BFSI company? Contact us today, and let’s figure out how to make your product indispensable to your users.
How can Upshot.ai help?
Upshot.ai is an omnichannel, user engagement, and gamification platform that helps digital product owners and marketers improve product adoption and conversions.
With Upshot.ai, banks, Insurance, and FinTech firms can enhance their digital experiences with pre-built gamification features while providing personalized insights, actionable recommendations, and contextual nudges designed to deepen their relationship with their users.
Book a demo of the most comprehensive user engagement and gamification platform to achieve your digital product goals. Join our communities for more insights, guides, and best practices that keep you updated with proven strategies and tips to supercharge your campaigns.
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