Top 15 Customer Engagement Ideas to Improve Retention Rate
There’s no product growth without customer engagement. No matter how intuitive and valuable your product is, customers always need a bit of a nudge to experience its benefits and start using it as a go-to solution to their problems.
In the article, we will share 15 great customer engagement ideas that will help you support your customers, let them get the most out of the product, and keep them interested. We also look at examples of SaaS products with excellent engagement strategies.
Let’s get started.
TL;DR
- Customer engagement involves all interactions with customers along their journey.
- Engaged customers are loyal customers. They renew subscriptions and spread positive word of mouth, increasing customer lifetime value, driving sales, and boosting profits.
- Understanding how customers engage with your product helps tailor their experience, improve satisfaction, and reduce churn, which leads to sustainable growth.
15 creative customer engagement ideas:
- Personalize the customer experience by tailoring onboarding flows, dashboards, and messaging to specific user personas.
- Gamify the customer journey using points, leaderboards, badges, and challenges to make the product experience more engaging.
- Support users with valuable insights through self-service resources like video tutorials, FAQs, and how-to guides.
- Enhance customer engagement with an onboarding checklist guiding them through key tasks in a structured way.
- Implement loyalty programs that reward users for regular interactions, such as points-based or tiered systems.
- Improve customer satisfaction by collecting and acting on feedback through surveys and a feedback widget.
- Create an omnichannel customer engagement strategy to ensure a consistent experience across all touchpoints.
- Constantly educate customers through product-led content, certification programs, knowledge bases, and webinars.
- Use a live chatbot to improve customer communications by handling simple inquiries quickly and efficiently.
- Host events for customers to facilitate direct interactions, networking, and feedback collection.
- Improve brand engagement by leveraging customer testimonials as social proof and to reinforce loyalty.
- Re-engage inactive customers with targeted email win-back campaigns highlighting relevant features and benefits.
- Constantly monitor customer engagement to identify and address sources of friction in the user experience.
- Improve customer relationships by building an online community where users can share tips, experiences, and resources.
- Implement the right customer engagement tools to track interactions, collect feedback, and engage your target audience across their journey.
- Book the demo to learn how to implement your innovative customer engagement ideas with Userpilot!
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What is customer engagement?
Customer engagement is all the interactions with your customers along their journey with the product or brand via multiple channels.
For example, a business may nurture potential users who visit the landing page with ad retargeting and keep existing customers in the loop via in-app messages or email.
Its purpose? To turn them into loyal customers.
Why is customer engagement important?
No business serious about growth can afford to ignore customer engagement.
First, engaged customers are more likely to stay loyal, keep renewing their subscriptions, and spread positive word of mouth. Which increases customer lifetime value, drives sales, and increases profits.
How your customers engage with the product tells you a lot about their needs and preferences. By analyzing these interactions, you can personalize their experience and improve the product. To increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn.
In essence, prioritizing customer engagement can help you strengthen relationships with customers and drive sustainable growth.
Key elements of successful customer engagement strategies
What aspects of customer engagement should you prioritize in your strategy? Here are the top 5.
- Customer engagement involves continuous interaction between the brand and its customers across various touchpoints along the customer journey.
- Successful engagement creates an emotional bond with customers. Engaged customers feel valued and connected to the brand on a deeper level.
- A good customer engagement strategy leverages personalized experiences and communications to meet individual customer preferences and expectations.
- Delivering a consistent experience across all channels ensures that customers have a seamless journey with the brand.
- Successful customer engagement focuses on creating customer value beyond the product or service itself. For example, through informative content or excellent support.
Customer engagement idea 1: Personalize customer experience
Your product most likely serves multiple personas, each with unique needs and pain points. What matters to one of them might be totally irrelevant to others.
That’s why successful engagement requires personalization. Otherwise, you overwhelm users and make them wonder if the product is right for them.
Here are some examples:
- When designing onboarding flows, focus on the features needed by a particular user persona. Start the flow with a welcome survey to profile new customers and use the information to trigger a relevant walkthrough or checklist to lead them to value along the most direct route.
- Customize their dashboards with features or templates to help them get their jobs done quickly and efficiently.
- Contextually trigger upsell messages when the user might benefit from a premium feature relevant to their use case.
Customer engagement idea 2: Gamify customer journey
Gamification makes the product experience engaging and enjoyable. And in some cases, it can make it truly addictive.
Common gamification elements include:
- Points for completing tasks.
- Leaderboards to foster a sense of competition among users.
- Badges and trophies for achieving milestones.
- Progress bars.
- Challenges and quests.
- Quizzes, contests, and competitions enabling users to showcase their skills.
- Social sharing.
For a good example of a product that leverages most of the tactics, check out Duolingo.
Customer engagement idea 3: Support users with valuable insights
One of the primary aims of customer engagement is to guide customers along the customer journey so that they maximize the product value.
One way to do it is by providing in-app support, for example, through a resource center.
Self-service resources like video tutorials, FAQs, or how-to guides help users solve common problems without contacting customer support.
This smoothens their user experience and reduces the load on your CS teams, who can then focus on supporting users with more complex issues.
Customer engagement idea 4: Enhance customer engagement with an onboarding checklist
Checklists are another gamification tactic that can greatly enhance customer engagement.
By incorporating them in your onboarding process, you guide users through tasks needed to realize the product value in a structured way.
The best part?
Checklists leverage a psychological process called the Zegairnik effect, which makes them difficult to resist. Basically, users find it difficult to continue with other activities before they tick off the items on the checklist.
Customer engagement idea 5: Implement loyalty programs
Loyalty programs promote customer engagement by rewarding users for their regular interactions with the product.
This could be in the form of:
- A points-based program where customers earn points for completing tasks and reaching milestones and can exchange them for perks like discounts or access to premium support.
- This is a tiered program in which users gain access to higher tiers as their engagement with the product increases. Reaching higher levels gives them access to more attractive rewards or privileges.
- A referral program that rewards the customers for referring new users to the product.
Customer engagement idea 6: Improve customer satisfaction based on customer feedback
Acting on customer feedback is a surefire way to improve customer satisfaction: it helps you improve the customer experience and product functionality. It also demonstrates to users your commitment to satisfy their needs.
Here are a few ways to collect feedback:
- Run regular satisfaction surveys (NPS, CSAT).
- Trigger CES surveys after specific user interactions to find out how easy it is to complete tasks.
- Enable a feedback widget to gather passive feedback and customer requests.
- Trigger contextual surveys to measure the success of new features.
Once you receive the feedback, always acknowledge it with a thank-you message. Keep users in the loop as you analyze it and plan how to act on it.
Customer engagement idea 7: Create an omnichannel customer engagement strategy
In-app user engagement is essential for your product’s success. But their journey begins way before they log in and continues after they log out. Customers interact with the product through multiple channels: your website, ads, social media, forums, and review sites, to name just a few.
And your job is to create a consistently positive experience for all of them, which requires a comprehensive strategy.
This involves monitoring user interactions across channels and optimizing relevant touchpoints. This is much easier if you use analytics tools that integrate with each other for seamless data syncing.
Customer engagement idea 8: Constantly educate customers
Education is a vital part of your customer engagement strategy. It keeps users up to date with new feature releases, improves their skills, and, ultimately, allows them to realize the full product potential.
You can do it by:
- Creating product-led content, like blog posts, guides, and videos.
- Developing certification programs.
- Building a knowledge base.
- Hosting webinars and workshops.
These resources don’t only cater to existing customers but can help you attract new ones, boosting your customer acquisition efforts.
Customer engagement idea 9: Use a live chatbot to improve customer communications
80%. That’s how much faster chatbots are at responding to customer inquiries.
And I get it: they’re AI-powered, and no matter how well you train them, they’ll never replace live customer service agents.
But that’s not their job.
Not all customer issues require agent support, and chatbots are perfectly capable of handling simple inquiries and requests. And they do it more efficiently than humans.
And if the query does require agent assistance, they can route it to the right person and provide the necessary information and resources to support the customer.
Customer engagement idea 10: Host events for your customers
Live events, like Userpilot’s Product Drive Summit or Ahrefs’ Evolve Conference, are much more than educational events.
They promote the product to wider audiences and facilitate direct interactions between the brand and the customers. And they’re a chance to collect customer feedback.
They also bring together like-minded people, so they’re an excellent opportunity to network, strengthen relationships, and exchange experiences.
Customer engagement idea 11: Improve brand engagement with customer testimonials
Customer testimonials boost customer engagement in a number of ways.
First, providing a public testimonial can reinforce the customers’ loyalty and commitment to the brand. Human beings have the innate need to be consistent. How consistent would it be to drop a product that you vouch for in front of others?
What’s more, testimonials act as social proof. Success stories and positive feedback shared in this way can influence purchasing decisions and reinforce the conviction that they’ve chosen the right product.
How do you get testimonials?
Use product analytics to find your power users and prompt them to provide a testimonial with a targeted in-app message.
Customer engagement idea 12: Re-engage customers with emails
In-app messages are great for keeping users engaged, but they have one limitation: they don’t work if the user stops using the product.
Solution?
Re-engage inactive users with emails.
Use your analytics tools to create a segment made up of such users and target them with a win-back campaign. In the emails, highlight features relevant to their use cases and their benefits and appeal to their FOMO.
Customer engagement idea 13: Constantly monitor customer engagement to avoid friction
Unnecessary friction, for example, resulting from usability issues, spoils the user experience and can reduce customer engagement over time.
How can you avoid it?
Constantly monitor user interactions with the product for signs of friction. For example, a funnel analysis can show you a stage in the customer journey or a flow where users drop off the most, while a path analysis can highlight the actions or parts of the product that users find challenging.
Customer engagement idea 14: Improve customer relationships with an online community
Community-led growth has been gaining popularity in the product space for the last couple of years.
Building a community around your product offers a number of benefits:
Communities give users the opportunity to access and share their tips, experiences, success stories, and resources. Which reduces their dependence on customer support and enables them to realize the full product potential.
It also strengthens the emotional connection between the brand and the customers.
User-generated content and the sense of belonging are very difficult to copy. This not only adds value to the product but also protects you from potential disruptors.
Customer engagement idea 15: Implement the right customer engagement tools
To implement effective customer engagement strategies, you need the right tools. In your tech stack, you need solutions to:
- Track user behavior.
- Collect customer feedback.
- Engage customers.
Unfortunately, there’s no single tool that allows you to do all three at different stages of the user journey. For example, there are analytics tools that will help you track user engagement on your website and inside your product but not on social media. And they don’t offer engagement features.
However, some of them are more versatile than others.
For example, Userpilot offers powerful analytics, feedback, and in-app engagement features. And thanks to integrations with 3rd-party analytics and CRM tools, you can get a more complete picture of user engagement outside the product, and engage them via email.
Customer engagement examples from famous brands
Let’s wrap up by analyzing how 3 market-leading SaaS companies, Salesforce, Hubspot, and Slack, keep their customers engaged.
Salesforce
Salesforce is well-known enterprise-level customer relationships management platform that enables companies to create a 360-degree view of your customers: their company and user details, needs, preferences, problems, and interactions.
The company engages its customers via a range of tactics:
- Personalized email campaigns.
- Customer success programs.
- The Trailblazer user community.
- Social media campaigns.
- Webinars and Trailhead Academy training programs.
- The Annual Dreamforce conference.
HubSpot
HubSpot is another CRM platform catering to all SMB and enterprise customers alike.
The company is known for its content marketing. Its blogs rank for thousands of sales, marketing, and customer service keywords, and it teams up with other organizations to produce original research studies, like the State of Marketing report, which attracts tons of traffic.
In addition, HubSpot offers free training courses, hosts webinars and live events, and the HubSpot Community is one of the most vibrant ones.
Slack
Slack is a messaging platform that has revolutionized how teams communicate. Apart from the original instant messenger, it supports voice and video calls and file sharing and has recently released project management features.
Their engagement strategy is based around:
- Personalized customer success programs.
- Robust customer onboarding and support.
- Regular customer feedback collection.
- Annual Slack Frontiers conference.
- Local Slack Community Chapters where customers can meet and network in real life.
Conclusion
New business leaders often assume that having an outstanding product is enough to drive its growth.
But growth is difficult to maintain without ongoing customer engagement across multiple channels: you need to capture the attention of potential customers, nurture them before they’re ready to sign up, and support them so that they can reap the product benefits.
And keep them constantly interested so that they don’t start looking elsewhere.
If you’d like to learn how Userpilot can help you implement your customer engagement plan, book the demo!
Try Userpilot and Take Your Customer Engagement to the Next Level
