What is an in-app nudge?
Used in a sentence: Let's nudge users who fill the cart but leave the checkout screen, and skip anyone who has already paid today.
How it works
A nudge is a lightweight UI element: a tooltip, a small banner, a bottom sheet or a floating button. It sits on or within the current screen, and the user can act on it or dismiss it with one tap.
Nudges are triggered by behaviour, not by the calendar. The app’s SDK listens for events such as “viewed product” or “started KYC”, checks whether the user is in the target segment, and shows the nudge at that moment. Rules decide who sees it, how often, and when it should stay hidden, for example once the user has already done the action.
Example
Many users of a mutual fund app open the SIP calculator, enter an amount and leave. The growth team sets up a nudge that fires when a user closes the calculator without starting a SIP. A bottom sheet slides up with their amount pre-filled and a single “Start SIP” button. Users who started a SIP that week are excluded, and nobody sees it more than once a day.
In-app nudge vs push notification
| In-app nudge | Push notification | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it appears | Inside the app, while it is open | Lock screen or notification tray |
| Context | Knows the current screen and last action | Sent without knowing what the user is doing |
| Permission | None needed | Needs OS opt-in |
Push brings users back into the app. Nudges guide them once they are there.
Best practices
- Tie every nudge to one trigger event and one action. If you can’t name both, it isn’t ready.
- Exclude users who have already converted and users in the middle of a payment.
- Keep the copy to one line, one button and a clear way to dismiss.
- Measure against a holdout group so you see the real lift, not just the click rate.
How to do this with Digia Engage
A growth team builds the nudge in Digia’s no-code visual builder, or imports the design from Figma, then picks the trigger from events already tracked in CleverTap, MoEngage or WebEngage. Targeting, frequency limits and exclusion rules sit in the same campaign. The nudge fires on the user event in under 100ms and goes live without an app release. See the available formats on the Nudges product page.
Frequently asked questions
- What are examples of in-app nudges?
- Common examples are a tooltip pointing to a new feature, a bottom sheet offering to finish an abandoned checkout, a banner reminding a user to complete KYC, and a coachmark highlighting the next onboarding step. Each appears in context and asks for one action.
- How often should you show in-app nudges?
- There is no universal number. Start conservatively, cap how often each user sees the same campaign, and apply a cap across all campaigns too. If dismiss rates climb while conversions stay flat, users are seeing too many prompts and the cap should come down.
- Do in-app nudges need an app update?
- Not if the app uses an engagement SDK that renders nudges from server-side configuration. The SDK is integrated once. After that, teams create, edit and target nudges from a dashboard, and changes reach users without a new build or app store review.
Related terms
Read more
Part of the In-app engagement glossary.