The Top 10 User Engagement Strategies for SaaS
Are you concerned about end-user engagement in your SaaS product? In this article, we share some proven strategies to help you keep your users engaged!
Engaged customers are the driving force of a SaaS business. They trigger product-led growth and help SaaS businesses achieve new milestones. That’s why, when engagement drops, it takes the company revenue with it.
Let’s see what customer engagement for SaaS is and how you can increase product usage for increased revenue and better customer retention for your platform.
TL; DR
- User engagement measures the quality and frequency of interactions users have with your software or product.
- Focusing on increasing customer engagement reduces churn rate, increases customer success, and leads to the growth of your platform.
- End-user engagement is different from customer engagement. Users pay after trying your product, and customers may have already tried it and pay before using it.
- A buyer persona is critical for the execution of an engagement strategy.
- You can retain your product users with in-app communication by using tool-tips, NPS surveys, etc.
- Personalizing the onboarding process enhances engagement.
- Provide consistent and well-timed AHA! Moments to keep users engaged throughout their journey.
- Use interactive walkthroughs to educate the users about your product without boring them.
- Announce and introduce new features to the users continuously.
- Micro surveys are a great way to collect customer feedback and optimize your product and improve users’ engagement in SaaS.
- NPS surveys help measure customer satisfaction and, when used with follow-up questions, can give insights into customer behavior.
- Creating a knowledge base is an excellent way to keep your users engaged while helping them solve their product-related problems.
- Focus on improving expansion revenue by continuous onboarding and product marketing.
- A/B testing different customer engagement features can help determine the best customer engagement strategy and benchmark it for product development.
First, what is user engagement in SaaS?
User engagement in SaaS tracks and measures all the interactions your users have with your software. It determines how much value a customer derives from your product and can guide the product development process to optimize products for better usage frequency.
Why is user engagement important?
User engagement determines how likely users are to stick to the platform. That is why a drop in engagement could be a sign of problems within the platform and could lead to high churn rates.
A well-built SaaS customer engagement strategy can help funnel your customers from trial to paid conversion. But, for this, it is critical to adapt it to where each person is in their journey.
The definition of SaaS customer engagement for each product, however, is different. So, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to tracking the right customer engagement metrics. For example, salary disbursement tools may have engagement only once a month, while a task organization tool may need users logging in every day for better engagement.
End-user engagement vs. customer engagement
End-user and customer engagement are often used interchangeably across SaaS companies. But their definitions differ slightly.
While there is no universal way of using the two terms, we can understand how they differ from one another by looking at how an end-user differs from a customer.
An end-user is a person who starts using your product by signing up for a free trial or creating a freemium account. On the other hand, a customer is someone who pays to use your product.
This difference between the two terms alters the approach you can adopt to keep them engaged.
Now that we have clarified the difference between these two phrases, it’s time we jump right into the strategies you can adopt to drive engagement and increase product usage in SaaS.
What to do before testing different user engagement strategies?
To ensure that your product helps the users, you have to understand what value means to them and adapt your engagement strategy to their unique requirements.
You must build a detailed buyer persona and develop a SaaS customer engagement strategy based on this persona.
Here’s what an example buyer persona might look like: (this is built based on Userpilot’s personas, so yours will not look exactly the same.)
Now let’s look at some strategies to increase user engagement in SaaS.
User engagement strategy #1: Utilizing in-app contextual experiences
In-app messaging can keep your users engaged within your product by providing contextual and timely messages. It includes all the UI patterns used to communicate inside the application, including checklists, modals, tooltips, NPS surveys, etc.
However, the success of in-app marketing and using the in-app messaging approach relies on how smart you are with time and context. You can’t just drop a message out of nowhere in front of a customer. It will confuse and frustrate them, take away from their satisfaction, resulting in reduced engagement.
Are you looking to build focused in-app messaging with user segmentation? Get a Userpilot demo today!
Strategy #2: Personalize onboarding for maximum end-user engagement
Client onboarding sets the tone for their entire journey and determines whether the users will stick to your products or churn. So, you have to do it right.
The best way to enhance the onboarding experience is to use a welcome screen.
Here’s an example of what a welcome screen should look:
Contrary to popular opinion, the function of a welcome screen is not just to welcome users to your product. You can also use a welcome screen to introduce your unique value proposition and engage the users right from the start.
Furthermore, when done right, a welcome screen is the best way to collect relevant information that you can use to segment your users, personalize the onboarding flow and offer a better customer experience that reflects increased engagement.
Personalizing the onboarding flow with information collected through the welcome screen survey, you can quickly lead your users to their first Aha! moment, converting them into active users.
Want to build interactive welcome screens without needing to code? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can build welcome screens!
One onboarding best practice is to bring the users to their “Aha! moment” as quickly as you can to drive engagement. This is because, once someone has found value in your product, it is difficult for them to churn.
The Duolingo onboarding process is an excellent example of how you can help users find their “Aha! moment” fast.
They begin with a small survey and then ask you to take a small test that can help you see the value of their product in less than five minutes!
That’s how you offer a quick win.
But after the initial quick win, you have to hold on to their attention.
That means you have to provide consistent Aha! moments to the users and keep them engaged with your product by introducing them to new or advanced features.
However, when providing “Aha! moments”, timing is critical. You cannot introduce an advanced feature to new users. It will only confuse and frustrate them.
Therefore, arrange your subsequent “Aha! moments” at appropriate, yet regular intervals to improve customer success.
#4 Educate and engage users with interactive walkthroughs
You need to teach the users how to use your product and derive value from it. But no one likes boring product tours, which are often irrelevant and contribute negatively to the users’ experience.
A better approach to acquainting the people to your product is adopting interactive walkthroughs.
An interactive walkthrough is a step-by-step guide that quickly leads to activation. They are an excellent alternative to boring product tours because they:
- are focused on the value that is unique to each person.
- begin with a micro survey and deliver targeted information that the users need.
- they are contextual and only tell the users what they need to know at that moment.
- are easy for the customer to follow through and optimized for usability.
- relevant, to the point, and take up as little time as possible.
Trello, a task organization tool, offers an excellent example of an interactive walkthrough.
They opt for a single welcome screen modal as an interactive product walkthrough. It provides a comprehensive and interesting product tour in just four steps on a single screen.
#5 Continuously onboard user to drive new feature engagement
You should not expect your users to stumble upon your product’s new features and start using them right away. You have to take these features to the users and help them see their value.
A good way to do this is to announce your new features with in-product marketing to increase product adoption and customer retention.
Asana introduces its new feature by drawing the user’s attention to the features they’ve added:
They have highlighted the feature on the UI and have deployed in-app messaging to explain the benefits of the new features.
Making sure the users discover the new features and know how to use them is critical to enhancing product experiences, and when combined with great UI and UX, they can convert passive users into active users.
#6 Use in-app micro surveys to collect feedback and improve user experience and engagement
Micro surveys comprise of a couple of questions with simple click-not-compose answers.
They are more reliable and successful because they are shorter and easier to fill. Therefore, they have a high submission rate and can provide massive data.
Collecting the data from these micro surveys is only half the battle though. The other half is acting on this data.
To increase customer satisfaction, you must use these surveys to collect their feedback, then close the feedback loop by acting on their response.
There are many types of micro surveys. Take the post churn feedback, for example.
This survey form appears after someone has churned to ask why they are leaving the SaaS product. Response from this survey can help reduce the churn rate.
#7 Use NPS surveys and engage with users to proactively fix issues
A Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that shows how likely customers are to recommend your business to their friends. It measures customer loyalty and satisfaction with your product or business on a simple scale of 0-10 and it is the most used customer satisfaction metric. 55% of companies worldwide use NPS surveys, but very few of them leverage their full potential.
An NPS survey does not only measure satisfaction on a scale of 0 to 10. It also supplements you with qualitative feedback if you follow it up by asking your customers why they gave the score.
The key to enhancing customer success in SaaS is to actively listen to their voice and take action based on their feedback.
Therefore, following up an NPS Survey with this question is a great way to delve deeper into how your customers feel about your product. These insights can help you optimize your product to offer a better experience and engagement.
Using a tool like Userpilot, you can not only collect NPS feedback using an NPS survey, but you can also segment users based on their score and automate responses that close the feedback loop and drive engagement.
#8 Offer in-app guides and self-serve support to boost end user engagement
Guides, self-serve support and knowledge bases are in-app widgets that provide the users with all the guidance they may need throughout their journey.
81% of software users try to find the solutions to their problems themselves. Therefore, you have to focus on building an all-encompassing and comprehensive resource center within your product. You can offer help in your resource center through different content types like video tutorials, guides, etc.
Doing this will provide your users with the self-serve support they prefer over conventional support (live chat, etc.) and will ensure that they stay engaged with your product, even when they are confused about something and are looking for help.
Miro is one of the SaaS businesses that do an excellent job of providing in-app guides and self-serve support.
They have:
- triggers for in-app experiences.
- tutorials and Courses
- direct connection to the support team.
They use this self-serve support widget to drive account expansion as well. Now that’s a proper help center contained within the platform!
#9 Focus on improving expansion revenue through in-app user engagement
Upselling to existing customers is much easier (and twice as affordable) than new customer acquisition.
By remarketing your unused and new features to the existing customers, you can enhance engagement and ensure that the existing users don’t churn.
However, you have to target the right users with timely and contextual messages. By doing so, you will be able to drive better engagement and generate greater expansion revenue.
Loom is a video recording tool that offers a great example of a well-timed and contextual upselling prompt to drive expansion revenue.
It displays an option of removing the filler words from the video like ‘ahs’ and ‘ums’ by upgrading to a premium account right after someone has stopped recording. They hit the users with the right message exactly when they want to see it and win the game of upselling to existing customers.
#10 A/B test in-app experiences to drive more end-user engagement
Working to improve user engagement is not a set-and-done activity. Nothing is when it comes to SaaS products.
A/B testing helps you develop prototypes for various in-app features and compare them to see which one drives the most customer retention and the best results.
Continuously testing different app engagement types like messages, tooltips, interactive walkthroughs, and content (have you tried increasing engagement with video tutorials or micro-videos?), you can benchmark the most promising tactics to engage users in your application.
You can also play with color psychology and try changing colors of buttons and navigation controls for optimizing engagement.
With its A/B testing functionalities, Userpilot is a great tool to drive engagement through building and testing in-app experiences.
Putting These User Engagement Strategies To The Test
User engagement sustains all SaaS companies. It increases customer retention and leads to product-generated growth. There are many ways to increase your customer engagement, like optimizing onboarding, using in-app communication, NPS surveys among others.
Want to get started with end-user engagement in SaaS? Get a Userpilot demo and see how you can engage your users and reduce churn!
