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Increasing Monthly Active Users (MAUs) involves understanding user behaviour, prioritising valuable features, creating engaging onboarding flows, fostering user habits, and focusing on retention over acquisition. Product Managers can leverage data insights, segmentation, and feedback loops to continuously iterate and optimise for growth. A holistic approach ensures sustainable MAU growth and long-term product success.
Monthly Active Users (MAUs) are a cornerstone metric for measuring a product’s success. This number doesn’t just reflect how many users are engaging with your product - it signals growth, retention, and overall product health. For Product Managers, increasing MAUs is a priority that requires a blend of strategy, user understanding, and data-driven decisions.
In this guide, we’ll explore actionable strategies tailored to help you grow your MAUs effectively.
Start by identifying the behaviours and actions that define an “active user” for your product. Use tools like Google Analytics or Mixpanel to track user activities, such as feature usage or login frequency. Analyze this data to spot trends, friction points, and opportunities for improvement.
Pro Tip: Segment your user base into groups based on behaviour, demographics, or preferences to create personalised engagement strategies.
Segmentation enables you to tailor your product’s features and messaging to distinct user groups. For instance, casual users might need reminders about your product’s core value, while power users could benefit from advanced tutorials.
Actionable Idea: Send targeted onboarding flows or in-app messages to specific segments, increasing their likelihood of consistent engagement.
Feature prioritisation is essential to ensure your team focuses on what users value most. Use frameworks like MoSCoW or Weighted Scoring to identify and enhance high-impact features.
Example: If users frequently interact with your dashboard but avoid a new analytics tool, invest in making the dashboard more intuitive while rethinking the tool’s design or visibility.
Adopt an iterative development approach, using A/B testing to evaluate changes and gauge their impact on MAUs. Continuous improvements can refine features and adapt to user needs over time.
A seamless onboarding process ensures users quickly see the value of your product. Simplify sign-ups, provide clear instructions, and guide users to key features from the outset.
Case Study: Duolingo’s onboarding involves immediate interaction with its core value—learning a language—before asking users to sign up.
Gamification elements like progress tracking, rewards, and checklists can make onboarding more engaging. Users are more likely to complete onboarding if they feel a sense of accomplishment along the way.
Building habits within your product is key to increasing MAUs. Leverage the Hook Model:
Users who feel part of a community are more likely to remain active. Create forums, user groups, or even in-app features that allow users to share experiences, provide feedback, or showcase achievements.
Example: Fitness apps like Strava thrive by enabling users to share their progress and compete in challenges.
Acquiring new users is important, but retaining existing ones is more cost-effective.
Key Insight: Products with strong retention rates grow faster because loyal users often advocate for your product.
Tracking MAU growth is only the beginning. Dive deeper into metrics like churn rate, feature adoption, and session duration to uncover insights. Create feedback loops to test and implement changes, ensuring your product evolves with user needs.
Example: A product team notices a drop in MAUs following a feature release. By analyzing user paths and conducting surveys, they identify the issue and roll out a fix, boosting engagement.
To increase Monthly Active Users (MAUs), focus on these key strategies:
Daily Active Users (DAUs) and Monthly Active Users (MAUs) are closely related, and strategies for increasing them often overlap:
A good MAU growth rate depends on your industry, product type, and company stage. Here are some benchmarks:
For established industries, a 3-5% growth rate might indicate steady performance, while newer or rapidly growing sectors may aim for double-digit growth.
Increasing MAUs requires a holistic approach that blends data-driven decisions, user-focused design, and proactive retention strategies. By understanding your users, delivering value, and iterating constantly, Product Managers can create products that engage and grow their user base sustainably.
Ready to level up? Explore more tools and strategies to increase your MAUs and drive product success.
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