If you’re trying to make a live service app, you’d want your users to keep using your app for a long time after they install it. This way, you’ll likely get more from your users, either in the form of data or direct profit from whatever business model you’re using.

But, how can we get users to keep using our application? One way to do that is to make an engagement plan

What is an Engagement Plan?

An engagement plan is a collection of methods we can use to make users keep using our app. The advantage of an engagement plan is it uses the user’s intrinsic motivation, the effectiveness will be quite high. By using intrinsic motivation, any additional marketing for the app can also be optional

How can we make one

There are 5 iterative steps to make an engagement plan

1. Define The User’s Persona

Before anything, you need to define who / what kind of people you think are going to use your app. This is called a user persona. By defining user persona, you can tailor the experience & engagement method of your app precisely to the needs of your user.

A user persona consists of 2 parts, psychographics & demographics. Psychographics categorize users by qualitative psychological factors, such as their personality, interests, and values. While demographics categorize user by their demographic information such as age, gender, job, income level, & graduation.

2. Separate Into 4 Categories

Engagement methods in an engagement plan target 4 different intrinsic motivations people have. Those are:

• Mastery: The feedback of continuous improvement
• Meaning: The sense of accomplishment
• Autonomy: The ability to make a choice
• Community: The feeling of being needed

Separate your engagement plan document into those 4 categories.

3. Brainstorm Each Category

Now, jot down every idea you can think of about what your users might want to keep using your app.

Don’t hesitate & don’t erase anything. In a brainstorming session, no idea is considered bad. You can always come back & evaluate them after you’ve exhausted your mind listing them

4. Differentiate Each Idea

Once your document is filled with engagement ideas, separate them again into a few categories. Taken from Chip & Dan Heath’s book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, our brain receives & processes feedback from 3 sources. Those are:

• The rider: Triggered our brain by the prefrontal cortex, where all rational decisions get made
• The elephant: Triggered our brain by the amygdala, the root of our emotional thinking
• The path: Triggers we get from external stimuli

Go through each idea in each category of the engagement plan & identify if it’s motivating through the rider, the elephant, or the path. Add “R”, “E”, or “P” beside each idea.

If there’s more elephant style of engagement, don’t worry. The natural motivation of humans comes from emotional thinking, so it’s only natural if there are a lot more ways to engage through the elephant.

5. Pick a few

At last, evaluate & choose 1-2 best ideas in each category of the engagement plan. While choosing the idea, make sure to choose some rider / path engagement ideas to control their intellectual & environment.

In this step, once again, try to think like your user to determine what’s best for them, while still considering the scope, budget, and feasibility of the development. And the more each ideas work together in some ways, the better.

Conclusion

An engagement plan is needed to help conceptualize how you are going to make your users keep using our app. It’s tailored specifically for your app’s user persona & targets their intrinsic motivation, so the chance of effectiveness is quite high. If at some point your current engagement method fails, you can always refer back to this document & propose a new method.