What is User Engagement?
User engagement refers to any interaction your customers have with your brand, product, or website across all touchpoints.
It can be anything starting from signing up for a product, completing an onboarding checklist, upgrading the account, filling out a micro survey, and canceling the subscription.
Why is User Engagement important?
Every product manager wants to see how customers enjoy using the product and how much value they see in it. In other words, they want to see high user engagement. But why does that matter?
Here are the most important reasons why user engagement matters.
- High user engagement leads to high retention which is a critical component for SaaS growth.
- If customers are engaged with your product, they are more likely to buy additional features or upgrade their accounts. This drives account expansion.
- Highly engaged users tend to leave positive reviews and drive word of mouth and this is a great source of acquiring new potential customers.
Having a strong emotional connection with customers and keeping them engaged throughout their journey is a tough task but it’s critical if you want to maintain a healthy and successful product in the long run.
Do you need tools for User Engagement?
Wondering why you even need a user engagement tool? There are several reasons why you may need one:
User engagement is not solely one department’s responsibility. In fact, product marketing, product management, customer success, and even development teams should work hard for this shared goal.
But what if you’re a small team where everyone is super busy with their priority tasks? Luckily, there are still solutions for such cases and this is where user engagement automation comes in.
Let’s see why investing in a good user engagement tool is important.
- Create tooltips, checklists, modals, and hotspots to provide in-app guidance and engage customers without having to waste your developer’s time as you can do it completely code-free.
- Segment customers based on their product and feature usage and send highly personalized messages and in-app prompts at the right time to the right users.
- Building micro surveys to collect contextual feedback and understand the reasons behind low engagement
- Implement A/B testing and see which in-app experiences and flows get higher engagement so you can identify patterns and replicate them.
A user engagement tool is a must for any SaaS product, and if you don’t have one you are definitely missing out. As we move forward, we’ll discuss the best tools for user engagement and offer advice on how to choose them.
What are the best tools for User Engagement?
Want to boost your user engagement but not sure which tool to choose? Here is our list of the best tools in the market that deserve a try.
- Userpilot: best user engagement tool for personalized in-app guidance and automated onboarding.
- Appcues:: best user engagement platform for user segmentation.
- Userguiding:: best user engagement platform for user onboarding.
- Chameleon: best user engagement tool for product tours.
- Pendo:: best user engagement tool for customer feedback and sentiment analysis.
Let’s dive deeper into how each stacks up for different company sizes, budgets, and jobs to be done!
What are the must have features of User Engagement tools?
Before deciding which user engagement tool deserves your try, you should have a basic understanding of what features you should be looking for.
Although the exact features you need will differ based on factors such as the size of your company, your business strategy, and your goals, here are the most crucial features you should look for:
- Make sure the tool you choose has basic UI patterns, such as checklists, modals, tooltips, banners, and hotspots. This will allow you to create product experiences and flows to keep customers engaged.
- Look for advanced segmentation capabilities so you can build customer segments based on product usage, in-app behavior, feedback, and user persona so you can craft hyper-personalized messages and trigger them at the right time.
- Product analytics is another “must have” that a decent user engagement tool should provide. Gain insights into product usage data to understand your customers better.
- The right tool should also offer integrations with other tools so you can add them to your stack and get better insights into your data under one roof.