What is a customer engagement strategy?

A customer engagement strategy combines activities and tactics to drive customer engagement and build stronger customer relationships.

12 Customer engagement strategies to build loyal customers

We’ll now go through some top strategic customer engagement tactics that you can use to improve customer loyalty.

Offer personalized customer experience from the start

Offering a personalized customer experience from the beginning holds immense value in building loyal customers. Customers will be more likely to engage with your product as they feel the experiences are relevant to their preferences.

You should use welcome surveys to start your effort to create a personalized and relevant experience. It’s essential to ask questions to help you understand your users’ JBTDs (jobs to be done). Then you can effectively map the features of their interests and align your offerings to meet customer expectations.

Drive onboarding engagement with interactive walkthroughs

Interactive walkthroughs provide users with step-by-step guidance to explore and understand the features. Leveraging them during onboarding can drive user interactions for core features while saving customers’ time and effort in learning how to use the product.

You should identify key actions for the learning process of your product. Then you can use them to create progressive tooltips within your product and trigger them when users interact with the specific feature. Offering interactive guidance like it can help you eliminate users’ initial confusion or frustration and make the onboarding experience far better.

This is how Figma offers its users an interactive walkthrough.

Use tooltips to encourage feature engagement

Tooltips show contextual guidance and invite users to take action at the time they are interacting with them. For example, tooltips can prompt users to try a feature while the users are hovering over them or clicking on them.

You should implement tooltips with concise and relevant information for the users at the right moment. You can use tooltips during onboarding, after introducing a new feature within your app, or even for re-engaging customers with a low engagement feature.

Introduce new features to existing customers using banners

Using banners to introduce new features to existing customers is a key strategic customer engagement tactic. They provide an opportunity to inform customers about the new features at the right time.

To implement this strategy effectively, you can segment your active users who either have requested a new feature or will get the most value from the new feature. You can then use modals or slideouts to create in-app announcements that’ll introduce these new features briefly to the users. The modals or slideouts should follow with a Call To Action (CTA) button to invite the users to try the new feature out.

Use checklists to drive activation across onboarding phases

Using checklists can improve overall user engagement during the onboarding phases. Checklists can guide users through key activities and help them navigate tasks to experience your product’s value.

You should use onboarding checklists as a roadmap that provides users with a clear and structured path during the onboarding phases. The checklists should have the key actions that will get users to the activation point during primary onboarding or tasks to drive new feature engagement during secondary onboarding. Then, the users will easily understand the core functionalities of your product and how to leverage them.

You can also include the key tasks with a progress bar in the checklist. Seeing the progress bar fill up after completing the tasks will create a sense of achievement among the users and can increase overall engagement.

Increase customer engagement with gamification

Gamification is a key strategic customer engagement that can significantly improve your customer satisfaction. When you incorporate elements of game design into your product, you create an exciting experience. It makes your product more entertaining and captures your users’ attention to keep them engaged.

You should use gamification to tap into users’ intrinsic motivation by triggering a sense of reward and achievement. To do that, you may offer users a tangible representation of their progress with a progress bar, daily quests, and interactive UI elements. It encourages users to repeat certain actions by looking for further achievements.

You must align the gamification mechanics with your product’s objectives and goals for this strategy. You need to strategically prioritize which actions’ completion will trigger UI elements so the gamification doesn’t look forced.

Use AI to engage customers

At present, harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) is a solid customer engagement strategy that you shouldn’t miss out on. You can leverage AI technologies, such as AI chatbots or AI assistants, to enhance the user experience and improve customer engagement.

A great use of AI in customer engagement is to refine microcopies for tooltips. These microcopies are small snippets of text that provide instructions or guidance to users within your product. You can then use AI to make the text any way you want to sound more engaging and effective in guiding users toward taking a specific action.

Elevate customer experience with interactive self-serve guide

You should elevate your customer experience through interactive self-serve guides. Using an in-app resource center, you can offer 24/7 help to your customers and eliminate any frustration or possible friction.

You can offer a variety of learning formats, such as replayable interactive walkthroughs, videos, documentation, etc. It ensures that customers have access to the information they need in their preferred way to resolve their issues on their own.

Identify and remove frictions using funnel analysis

Identifying and removing frictions using funnel analysis is a data-driven approach to improve user engagement while also increasing customer retention.

You should use a tool, like Userpilot, with event-tracking capabilities that allow you to collect and analyze user activity data. Then you need to map out the key milestones and events that represent user activity within your product. It creates a funnel that visualizes the customer journey and identifies potential bottlenecks and friction points.

After identifying the frictions and pain points, you can take targeted actions to address them. Targeted efforts to eliminate friction will help you create a smoother, more intuitive user experience and increase average customer lifetime value.

Analyze customer behavior to track user engagement

Analyzing customer behavior allows you to gain valuable insights into user engagement. You may use a combination of the heatmap, feature tag, session recordings, etc., to track user engagement better.

Heatmaps visually showcase the user activity and highlight high-engagement areas and potential bottlenecks. Feature tags let you monitor user actions like particular clicks or specific feature usage. Session recordings also offer valuable insights by showing a detailed playback of user sessions.

When you use these tools together, you can monitor user behavior and usage level on a granular level. It then gets easier to spot issues like dead clicks, rage clicks, low-usage levels, etc., and work on them.

Collect and act on customer feedback to build engaged customers

Collecting customer feedback should be a part of your customer loyalty program as it helps you understand your users’ needs and expectations – what it takes to engage and retain customers. You may segment your user base and send targeted surveys across various touchpoints of the customer journey. It can help you gather valuable insights into the customer experiences.

Acting on customer feedback from any source, whether in-app surveys or comments on any social media, is equally important. You should carefully analyze the received feedback and strategically focus efforts to address them.

Track engagement metrics to improve engagement strategies

Tracking customer engagement metrics is one of the most critical strategic customer engagement tactics. It allows you to measure the effectiveness of your engagement strategies and bring any change if required.

You should track metrics like active users, session duration, engagement rates, customer stickiness, NPS (Net Promoter Score), etc. It then helps you gauge user engagement by providing quantifiable data. You can also understand whether your strategies are bringing in results or if there are major areas for improvement.

Successful customer engagement examples for SaaS

Let’s look at some successful customer engagement examples in the SaaS industry.

Miro personalizes customer experience using welcome surveys

Miro’s personalized customer experience through well-executed usage of welcome surveys is an example for every SaaS company. It utilizes short surveys with multiple-choice type of survey questions and transparent microcopies to create a seamless and interactive onboarding process.

One of the main reasons these surveys are successful is Miro respects its users’ time. It ensures the surveys are quick-to-finish to achieve higher customer response rates and engagement. Then these surveys act as the collection data point for the later in-app personalization for the customers.

Userpilot builds an onboarding checklist with a progress bar

We’ve talked about introducing gamification for customer engagement, and its perfect example is Userpilot’s onboarding checklist with a progress bar. It motivates users to complete the checklists of key actions during onboarding.

The progress bar visually represents the completion status of the onboarding checklist. It shows users where they are in the process and creates a sense of achievement when they complete each task.

Kommunicate uses interactive walkthroughs to drive actions

The way Kommunicate implements interactive walkthroughs as a customer engagement strategy is exemplary. It provides interactive guidance and prompts users to take action while they explore core features.

You may follow the approach of Kommunicate’s step-by-step instructions to users as they navigate through the valuable features of the product. It will help your users easily understand how to use your functionalities to their maximum potential. This intuitive approach will keep bringing the users back to the features repeatedly and will improve your customer engagement.

Asana implements gamification to boost customer engagement

Asana’s implementation of gamification as a customer engagement strategy exemplifies its success in driving user engagement. It effectively motivates users and creates a captivating experience by infusing elements of fun and entertainment into the platform.

Incorporating game-like elements transforms the typically mundane task of task management into an engaging and interactive process. You can use this fun and entertaining aspect to capture users’ attention with a sense of excitement and motivation.

Amplitude uses an AI chatbot to provide instant help

With an AI chatbot, Amplitude ensures a quick and efficient chat experience for users seeking assistance. The AI chatbot can give immediate responses to customers’ inquiries or concerns.

This quick chat experience eliminates the need for waiting for a customer support representative or navigating through extensive support resources. As a result, users get instant help without waiting for much time. It positively impacts overall customer satisfaction and engagement with Amplitude.

Userpilot offers a comprehensive in-app resource center

Userpilot’s in-app resource center caters to the diverse preferences of its users and offers a self-service customer experience. It provides various learning formats like written documentation, video tutorials, etc.

Userpilot enhances customer engagement by empowering users to choose how they want to learn. This flexibility promotes a sense of ownership among users and improves overall customer engagement.

Conclusion

Strategic customer engagement tactics help you connect with customers on a deeper level. You can leverage them to build a loyal customer base and increase your customer lifetime value.

Want to get started with strategic customer engagement? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can boost customer engagement.