What Are In-App Stories and Why Do You Need Them?

A growing number of people prefer visual content and information, particularly when it’s in a video or animated format. Platforms like Instagram that implement Stories features are incredibly popular largely for this very reason. Additionally, more and more brands are using social media platforms and visual content to promote their brands and offerings. One of the best ways to take advantage of this trend for your app is to use in-app stories, which offer a fun and engaging way to connect with users of all types.

Here we’ll discuss what these app stories are, their many benefits, and how you can integrate them into your mobile app experience.

What Are In-App Stories?

Mobile app stories are a type of storytelling element that you can use in your app to deliver content to users. Stories include various types of content that promote your products or services that users see within the app, and you can use different stories to achieve different goals. For example, you can use stories such as images, videos, GIFs, polls, and emojis, among other kinds of engaging content. They’re excellent for driving user engagement and encouraging people to continue using your app and connecting with your brand on a regular basis.

Stats About Mobile Stories

Although Snapchat is the inventor of the mobile story format, currently, Instagram is notably the biggest app to integrate this feature, namely through Instagram Stories. It enables users to easily share and consume content, including commercial content that businesses publish and share with audiences. However, mobile stories, in general, have a profound effect on engagement.

Studies have found that viewing stories is the number-one activity on social media apps, with 42% user engagement. In addition, 74% of mobile phone users publish or view stories on a weekly basis, and over 50% of people open a brand’s story, with more than 85% of them viewing the entire story. Stories also fuel engagement because they’re so brief, seeing as the attention span of users has decreased to eight seconds.

People love mobile stories and want to consume them across all platforms. This is why, if you want your app to engage users on a consistent basis, using in-app stories is the key to success.

Why You Should Use In-App Stories

Smartphones are among the most personal devices that people use. Because of this unique element, mobile apps aim to find new and effective ways to establish strong relationships with their users. However, some of the biggest challenges that mobile app developers and brands face are user retention, feature adoption, and churn.

Storyly is a powerful interactive and mobile-native content builder that can help resolve the potential problems of boosting user engagement and retention. Storyly is specially designed for mobile-first applications, making it especially capable of helping overcome the many challenges that come with launching mobile apps. Within the last few months alone, we’ve seen our customers use Storyly to boost engagement in several key ways, including announcing new features, onboarding new users, sharing promotions, and recording customer feedback. This means that Storyly is not merely a tool for content featuring, onboarding, or other single uses. Instead, it’s a platform that allows for versatile communication with users to achieve several goals throughout a customer’s entire life cycle.

In helping you get the most from our platform, we’ll work to provide new and exciting ways for you to reach, communicate, and consistently engage with your users. Our goal is to drive mobile engagement in a way that’s fresh, innovative, and unique, without interrupting the user experience at any point. We understand the importance of sharing rich visual content to users to optimize engagement, which is why we’ve developed Storyly to connect with all types of users. Using our platform, you’ll be able to deliver your content in the most timely and effective way to keep users hooked.

How In-App Stories Help Connect With Users

Mobile app stories offer several benefits that help brands connect with their audiences through mobile devices and unparalleled in-app experiences.

Increase App Engagement

One advantage of app stories is the ability to deliver short and visually appealing content to audiences, which is critical as audiences don’t want too much information at once. Stories offer brief touchpoints to introduce users to your app and get them to come back. You can achieve this with story features such as tests, surveys, GIFs, swipe-up options, special filters, music, and gamification. People may also want to share stories from your app on their social media profiles, which contributes to word-of-mouth advertising.

Build Relationships

Brands are becoming increasingly transparent, to the point where audiences expect this transparency of new and established brands alike. If you want to exhibit this transparency to connect with users, you need to have a deep understanding of what your users want. Through polls or quizzes and other stories that may function as surveys, you can get feedback that helps you grow and cater content to audiences. In turn, people will feel as though you value them when using your app, leading to a better relationship with new and existing users.

Give Your Brand the Chance to Stand Out

Using stories will significantly help boost your brand’s visibility among users. Unlike other brands that rely on dull and uninteresting features, mobile app stories consistently engage users to keep your brand in the spotlight. Subsequently, you’ll be able to stand apart from the many competitors all doing far less.

Inspire Your Audiences

Through app stories, you’ll also have the ability to inspire audiences with language and concepts that both communicate with and encourage users to share their experience. For instance, in a language-learning app, you could accumulate usage data and present it in a fun format to your users, such as achievements and specific milestones in language skills. This could drive users to share the story on social media and with their friends and family. It may also inspire them to use your app more frequently.

Building these types of inspirational experiences among users will also help drive loyalty and imbue a sense of community among users.

Stay Competitive

Using in-app stories features can go a long way in helping you maintain a competitive edge and move forward. Doing so will help ensure your audiences remain consistently loyal to your app and both put and keep you ahead of the competition.

How Storyly Can Drive the Results You Want

Using stories via Storyly, you can take advantage of numerous features to keep your users engaged and drastically increase retention. These capabilities include:

Multi-Messaging UI

Storyly goes much further than conventional engagement methods, giving you the chance to deliver multiple messages to users without risking annoying them. As a result, you can create a kind of communication hub that enables you to communicate a wide array of messages.

Full-Screen Messaging

Stories on our platform are full-screen canvases that are more effective than banners and pop-ups. Using Storyly, you’ll be able to use a visually rich message and narrative that holds people’s attention much more effectively than longer and less visually compelling content.

The Ability to Experiment

With traditional engagement methods, brands only have one shot at developing and testing a message. With the help of Storyly, you can experiment with multiple messages and creative elements to determine what works best.

Engage Users in Many Creative Ways

Brands and developers can use our platform to engage with their users in nearly any way imaginable. Some use cases we’ve seen in the past include:

• Onboarding — With so many complex and different features, mobile onboarding is a common challenge for many brands. However, Storyly makes it easier with the ability to develop more fluid onboarding flows that effectively attract and continue to engage new users.
• Product Discovery & Sales Conversion — Brands need to enable users to discover more of their offerings, which Storyly enables through rich, full-screen views of new products that better contextualize them. This streamlined experience also helps move people down to the bottom of the sales funnel more efficiently.
• Campaign Participation — You will require a good way to deliver campaigns to maximize participation among users. App stories can boost awareness for your campaigns through regular messaging and high-quality content.
• Collecting User Feedback — If brands want to better comprehend their audiences’ needs and wants, they can use story features such as polls and surveys to find out what people are looking for in the ideal app experience. Developers can then implement suggestions to continually optimize the user experience.
• Personal Communication — You can use stories to personalize a variety of content, including everything from birthday greetings to subscription reminders. By addressing users directly, they will feel as though you’re actually communicating with them as individuals, leading them to take action.
• Retention & Gamification — Gamification is one of the best ways to engage users, turning potentially ordinary interactions into games that keep users coming back. Quizzes and social stories are a couple of different ways you can implement gamification in your app.
• Education & Entertainment — People still love video content more than almost any other content type, making it crucial to include it in your app. Using videos in app stories, you can harness the power of video with brief, snackable content.
• Monetization — App developers and marketers are always looking for ways to monetize their apps and maximize their in-app revenue. Stories offer the chance to boost revenue without becoming too intrusive to users. In-app ads will simply be a part of the user experience as opposed to a hindrance.

Use Storyly to Get the Most from Your App

In-app stories can be the key to engaging and holding onto your users. People using your app will continue to interact with your brand over competitors and are more likely to become loyal users over time. If you want to fully utilize in-app stories to connect with audiences, turn to Storyly today. Using our platform, you’ll be able to easily and seamlessly integrate stories into your app experience.