What is an In-App Event?
An in-app event is a feature introduced by Apple that allows you to promote live or time-limited events happening inside your app right on the App Store. These events can include everything from seasonal challenges and competitions to live streams, content drops, or major feature updates.
In-app events differ from standard app updates or releases as they do not require users to update the app itself. Instead, these events serve as promotional spotlights to highlight something exciting occurring now—or soon—within your app.
They appear across multiple areas of the App Store, including:
- Your app’s product page
- Search results, where they’re highlighted with special badges
How Can In-App Events Benefit Your App?
In-app events can significantly impact your app’s visibility, engagement, and user growth. Here’s how:
- Boost Discoverability – Events show up in the App Store’s search results and editorial sections, helping you connect with potential users who may not have discovered your app otherwise.
- Re-engage Lapsed Users – Launching a new event, such as a seasonal challenge or special update, can motivate users to return and explore new features, thereby enhancing retention and long-term engagement.
- Drive Hype Around Updates – Do you have a major feature release or content update? In-app events can help promote it without solely depending on your usual channels or requiring an app update.
- Improve App Store Optimization (ASO) – The event metadata, including name, descriptions, and media, provides more visibility and keywords, helping your app appear in relevant search results.
- Stand Out From Competitors – Adding a live event badge can make your app appear more engaging, current, and community-oriented, which can boost downloads and user interaction.
Why In-App Events Matter and How to Get Them Right
In-app events have the power to transform how businesses engage with their customers. Whether you’re an e-commerce brand, a SaaS provider, or a media platform, strategically implemented in-app events can drive conversions, boost user retention, and create long-term loyalty. But here’s the thing – getting them right is crucial. Poorly planned events can lead frustrate users, lead to low participation, and waste valuable resources.
At Sonin, we help businesses craft seamless, high-impactdigital product strategies. In this guide, we outline our 10 essential tips to ensure your in-app events deliver real results.
1. Set Clear Objectives and Measure Success
What to Do:
Before running an in-app event, defining exactly what it is that success looks like. Are you looking to increase daily active users, boost sales, or introduce a new feature? It is vital that yourgoal or goals should be specific and measurable – for example, “increase feature adoption by 25% in 30 days”.
What success looks like:
A well-planned event should increase participation rates, user retention, and make a clear impact on revenue. You can measure the event’s effectiveness by tracking metrics such as conversion rates, repeat engagement, and user feedback with app analytics.
What Not to Do:
Avoid vague objectives like “get more users engaged” – without a clear target, it’s impossible to measure impact or refine future events.
2. Understand your audience
What to Do:
Understanding your current audience and your target audience is essential. Launching an in-app event that doesn’t align with you and your audience risks the possibility of mispositioning yourself. You confuse and alienate your users as they don’t understand how this relates to them, leading to losing engagement and loyalty. Studies show that 91% of consumers prefer brands that recognise their preferences. (Source: Accenture)
What success looks like:
Expect higher participation rates, longer session durations, and positive user feedback. Personalisation ensures users interact meaningfully, driving stronger brand affinity and customer loyalty.
What Not to Do:
A generic approach often leads to audience dislocation, low engagement and poor conversions . Users won’t engage if an event doesn’t feel relevant to them.
At Sonin, we help businesses identify audience behaviour through data driven insights, tailoring products and experience that resonate with your users and ensuring each interaction feels valuable.
3. Create a Sense of Urgency
What to Do:
Urgency drives action. Events with limited-time offers, countdown timers, and exclusive access incentivise significantly boost conversions.
What success looks like:
A spike in user activity, especially in the final hours before an event ends.
What Not to Do:
If every event is urgent, users will stop paying attention. Overuse diminishes credibility, and extending deadlines too often makes promotions seem less valuable.
4. Make Participation Effortless
What to Do:
The user journey should be frictionless. Ensure users can join and complete events with minimal friction. Keep the sign-up process simple, use clear calls to action (CTAs) and remove unnecessary steps.
What success looks like:
Higher completion rates and low drop-off rates. Google found that 53% of mobile users abandon apps that take longer than three seconds to load.
What Not to Do:
Complex registration steps and confusing navigation will drive users away. The harder it is to participate, the less likely they will.
5. Promote Your Event Everywhere!
What to Do:
Maximise reach by promoting events across multiple channels – push notifications, email, social media, website banners, and influencer collaborations. Multi-channel campaigns increase engagement by 24%. (Source: HubSpot)
What success looks like:
A higher turnout and more engaged users.
What Not to Do:
Relying solely on in-app notifications is risky. If users have notifications turned off, they may miss the event entirely.
At Sonin, we help businesses craft a comprehensive product strategy that can maximise visibility and engagement.
6. Reward Users with Meaningful Incentives
What to Do:
Offering valuable rewards –such as exclusive discounts, in-app currency, early access can be a key driver for use participation, placing yourself in the users shoes and asking “What’s in it for me?” can help carve out what the value for the user is. If there is no value to the user then adoption rates, user loyalty and retention becomes an issue. 77% of consumers prefer events that offer rewards (Statista).
What success looks like:
Creating value for the users should be a priority, if that value is literal then you can expect to see higher redemption rates or repeat engagement for example.
What Not to Do:
If rewards are too small or hard to redeem, users won’t bother participating.
7. Use Social Proof and Community Engagement
What to Do:
Encourage users to share their participation on social media, feature testimonials, and create community-driven challenges. Relating back to point 5, promote your event everywhere; user reviews, feedback and testimonials can be a powerful tool in the promotion of your app. 92% of consumers trust peer recommendations over traditional ads. (Source: Nielsen)
What Success Looks Like:
More user-generated content, organic reach and a growing community.
What Not to Do:
If you don’t integrate social sharing options, you’re missing out on free marketing opportunities.
8. Analyse and Improve for Next Time
What to Do:
After the event, analyse real-time data, engagement heatmaps, and user behaviour to improve future events. Data-driven businesses see an 85% increase in event performance. (Source: McKinsey)
What success looks like:
Better results with each new event.
What Not to Do:
Ignoring post-event analysis means repeating mistakes and missing optimisation opportunities.
Make Your In-App Events Work for You
In-app events can drive growth, increase engagement, and build stronger customer relationships—but only when planned strategically.
At Sonin, we specialise in crafting impactful, data-driven in-app event strategies that deliver results. Ready to optimise your next in-app event? Let’s talk.