Users != Customers

Why users are not (yet) customers

Engagement is a choice, and you’re the lucky one

“When someone agrees to use your app, you should consider it a miracle. Every single tap is a miracle. The moment you don’t treat each tap as scarce, you lose.”

Nikita Bier, Head of Product at X

To create an engaging mobile app, or any digital platform, you need to remember the human behind the screen.

Each person using your app has agency. They made a decision to be there and engage with it. There are a million other apps, real-life obligations and distractions they could be spending their time on instead, so it really is a miracle.

Treating visitors as users, not customers

Engagement is about connecting, interacting, and building relationships with users through digital platforms and their associated channels. It goes beyond simply having a platform with user accounts: you want to provide genuine value to the user.

Many apps fail to generate long-term engagement because they treat the relationship with the visitor as purely transactional.

That can be fine for some platforms, such as ecommerce, where the visitor is a customer and a transaction is the motivation for the visit.

In other cases, extracting value from the visitor by forcing transactions is the wrong approach.

As The Digital Value Loop shows, engaging users creates the opportunities for transactions. Provide true value first and the transactions will come.