Who should take the first step?
A question that may have different answers depending on the situation and people. However, for a company and its customers, the answer is crystal clear:
It’s the company that should take the first step and gives constant attention to its users.
If you are wondering the reason why you have low user engagement rates, you probably don’t give awful a lot to your users to engage with your product.
Now, there may be various reasons why you fail to have your user engage with your product. In this article, you will read about some of the best strategies to increase user engagement with great examples.
Let’s get into it!
What is user engagement?
User engagement measures whether customers find value in your product by identifying the quality and frequency of interactions. There isn’t a universal way of a set of metrics for it, nor is there a standard benchmark of a successful rate, as both the volume and frequency of interactions are ultimately tied to the nature of your product. Based on the specifics, metrics typically include churn and retention rates, active users, upgrades, subscriptions, downloads, likes, or shares.
Why is user engagement important?
The user engagement reflects how likely your customers will stick with your product or services, so it’s naturally highly correlated with profitability. The more value customers find in your product or service, the likelier they are to opt for upgrades, subscribe to paid tiers, repeat buy, renew, recommend, and review—pillars of survival in today’s overly saturated digital market.
Implementing well-groomed user engagement strategies lay the foundation for the dream scenario for businesses, where their customers become the ultimate loyal advocates and recurring revenue sources while cutting churn rate significantly.
4 Proven User Engagement Strategies to Get You Going
It all sounds good and dandy, but one question remains: how exactly? There are a million ways, perhaps a limitless number of combinations to achieve the perfect user engagement strategies. It really depends on your target audience and the nature of your product. But there are some steps to be taken, of course, to get the ball rolling.
1- Offer a personalized experience
One of the fool-proof user engagement strategies, which has also become a necessity, is to employ a personalized approach to your users. It’s no longer a plus, users now expect a tailored experience, and they tend to be more willing to share their personal data in exchange for improved experiences.
When you talk about personalization, it’s almost a sin, not to mention Amazon, which revolutionized the e-commerce industry with its uniquely dynamic interface unique to each user. This pays off tremendously, as 44% of customers buy from Amazon’s product recommendations and an estimated 35% of all purchases come from those recommendations alone.
That being said, Amazon, sitting on astronomic resources, most definitely do not set the standard of personalization—but that’s not to say that you can’t take a leaf off of its book.
Customers value personal experiences, willing to share information, and tend to be rewarded in return. So this journey can start from adding the name of the customer to welcoming emails, all the way to dynamic onboarding, which will set the tone for future interactions. This brings you to the next best thing…
2- Strong and continuous onboarding
You can’t overstate the importance of user onboarding. But let’s try to state the importance of never actually stopping the process. The ultimate anti-churn device, continuous onboarding, is rarely utilized, and someone put a stop to that (see what I did there?).
As it is commonly known, the aim of onboarding is to catch that ‘AHA!’ moment, where the user figures out the use-value of the product or services. Should it go flawlessly, say you provided a product tour in disguise of a to-do list or fun quiz, you got the user hooked for your product or services.
Making the process continuous is to consider secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and further touchpoints to further improve your users’ experience using your product and services.
The goal here is to drive more value; this might come in the form of introducing secondary features and making their experience more advanced and sophisticated, mini onboarding sessions for new feature launches, and regular health checks to assess their experience. This brings you to…
3- Asking for feedback at reasonable intervals
A good feedback collection system is one of the most reliable customer engagement strategies. It helps you get to know your customers, how they found you, reduce pain points, and form your target audience. It also gives you ever most valuable insights into new customer segments to tap into. Naturally, listening to your users translate into improved user experience, higher engagement, and lower churn.
Here is a great example of a feedback email that can help you increase your user engagement rates:
Send emails, deliver pop-up quizzes, run regular A/B tests, surveys, or fashion a reward system where users are incentivized to give feedback.
4- Utilize Gamification
One of the greatest solutions to ever-shortening attention span, gamification is a key factor in retention and high engagement as a great way to create snack content without compromising quality. By implementing game-like elements into a non-gaming context, businesses encourage their target audience to carry out certain behaviors.
The whole idea of gamification is to create a reward system where your product directs users into realizing your business goals. The dynamic and interactive nature of gamification brings about high engagement and, by eventually setting a habit, ensures a sustainable engagement pattern.
Take the gamification gods Duolingo for reference. Duolingo makes the most out of gamification’s most important strategy: making users feel as though they are getting closer to a goal. It breaks down the challenges into million pieces and includes points, levels, meta-levels; and most importantly, it celebrates all those milestones with you.
Perhaps the biggest advantage to Duolingo is the enthusiasm that comes from design. It simplifies what’s actually a monstrous work of learning a new language tremendously without compromising the quality. Such that on top of surpassing a whopping 500 million users, a great number of universities in the USA now accept Duolingo certificates for English proficiency certification!
It is no wonder that video games are the fastest adopted products that are out there.
Conclusion
All in all, if you want to increase your user engagement rates, you should start by providing a great user experience. The best way to do that is to have an ongoing user onboarding process, through which you help your users find the value of your product.
In addition to providing users with a great user experience through excellent user onboarding, you should also make them feel at home by personalizing the whole process.
BONUS: Here is the Webinar with Chris Gale about Using Video Perks to Increase Engagement and Educate.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is user engagement a KPI?
Yes, user engagement is definitely a KPI and it is a KPI that tells a lot about the success of your product and services.
How do you increase user engagement?
There are various ways to increase user engagement but mainly, you have to provide a great user experience, an excellent onboarding process, and a reason for users to engage with your product. For example, rewarding users is a good way to encourage users engaging with your product.
What is a user engagement tool?
User engagement tools help you listen to users and understand their needs and expectations. They also help you provide them with the necessary solutions. UserGuiding, Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Amplitude are some of the user engagement tools that you can use for various purposes.
