Without a plan to engage your users, acquiring them in the first place is simply a waste of resources.

This is no different in digital health. Think of all the mobile applications out there nobody uses after trying them out once. People need to be triggered to keep coming back.

Without that elicited engagement, users will not be motivated to come back.

Nir Eyal has some really powerful insights to help you create services that inspire habitual use. One such thing is the "Hook Model" he created.

There are four phases to this model, which can be put on loop indefinitely.

👉 Trigger: This could be external triggers such as personalised push notifications. But the end goal is for the user to develop internal triggers. For the users to come back without external triggering.

👉 Action: Here we get actions from the user. In digital health, think conversational PROM/PREMS. By getting actions as a response from the trigger, we can gather data on the user to personalise our health suggestions.

👉 Reward: These can be small rewards for each step your user takes in improving their health. Consider how Duolingo offers medals and points for people who learn a bit everyday on their app.

👉 Investment: Asking the user to do a bit of work. Could be sharing on social media their new exercise regime which helped lower hear rate.

The lesson to learn from the "Hook Model"? Investing in user acquisition and retention shouldn't be mutually exclusive, learn how users behave and nurture habit-forming engagement.

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