Let’s first define saas customer engagement from the product’s perspective and discuss why it is such an important metric for your SaaS company before discussing strategies for increasing engagement.
The saas customer engagement rate is the proportion of users who continue to use your product for a predetermined amount of time. Changes in this metric could indicate issues that may arise in the future. A great way to assess your product’s overall health is to keep track of the number of customers who continue to be truly engaged with it.
The fact that different products may have different definitions of what it means to be “active” is the main obstacle to tracking product engagement. A budgeting tool may have users who log in once or twice a month but still count that as high engagement, whereas a social media automation tool may have users who log in every day.
For the state, Lincoln Murphy offered yet another clearly defined engagement:
The majority of SaaS companies lose their free trial customers after just one use. Engagement is when your customer is realizing value from your SaaS,” as the saying goes. If you want to get the most out of your trial period, you need to keep those users interested. However, you must assist your customers in maximizing the value of your product over time in order to truly increase engagement.
An honest attempt to improve engagement necessitates increasing regular product use at every opportunity because engagement changes throughout the user journey. By placing a strong emphasis on user engagement and communication, you can assist in preventing customer churn, keep existing customers informed of product updates, and identify issues before they escalate.
Engaged customers keep them coming back. Find out how Appcues is used by the best SaaS companies to:
Improve paid conversions Start a free trial Charts and graphs Now, let’s look at six tried-and-true methods for making SaaS products more popular with users:
1.Early user onboarding, which has a big impact on the customer journey as a whole, can be facilitated. Because your onboarding process is the first time your customers actually use your product, it’s important to make a good first impression. Consider user onboarding to be necessary for long-term engagement.
Onboarding is a good time to encourage users to take meaningful actions and receive immediate value because user motivation is typically at its highest. Your product’s most important features should be shown to every new customer so they can quickly figure out its core value proposition, or “aha” moment.
Duolingo, a platform for learning languages, shines in this area. Before asking users to sign up, they conduct a brief translation exercise as part of their onboarding process. This demonstrates how simple and quick it is to learn a new language.
Getting users to commit to a goal before they sign up has a significant impact on their likelihood of continuing to use the platform.
Due to the human tendency to want to complete things or tasks.
Select a language learning objective from the Duolingo mobile app’s screen. Users have already completed a brief lesson toward their goal when they can sign up:
Duolingo is able to demonstrate the value of their product before even asking users to register by reversing the onboarding process, which begins with the product and ends with a signup form. Using Duolingo, you can:
The “time to create a profile” prompt on the Duolingo account creation screen. Learnings from the Duolingo onboarding process:
Avoid being coy. Create an onboarding procedure that welcomes new users and gets them to the “aha” moment more quickly. A straightforward onboarding checklist and a progress-based approach like Duolingo can be very beneficial.
You can personalize the onboarding process by segmenting your users based on their in-app activities. Through segmentation, Duolingo can easily point users to lessons with varying difficulty levels based on their language proficiency.
Send messages that are relevant to the job and the circumstance
Utilizing UX writing. Avoid putting UX writing on the back burner. Microcopy in your product, such as CTA buttons, form descriptions, modal dialogs, and other similar elements, can assist users in successfully completing actions, communicate technical information in everyday language, and encourage them to continue using your product. Naturally, persuasive copy has the ability to convince trial users to upgrade to paid accounts, thereby increasing revenue and saas customer engagement.
Mailchimp is a great example of how microcopy can inspire users to take action. Mailchimp’s concise feature descriptions and calls to action help users quickly identify and comprehend the features they are looking for, and the friendly, personalized welcome text aids in keeping users’ attention each time they log in.
A screenshot of the MailChimp welcome screen can be seen here. It introduces itself, has straightforward graphics, a customized message, and lots of white space around important CTAs. What MailChimp’s UX writing taught us:
Write with kindness. When describing your product, avoid using technical jargon, keep sentences succinct, and whenever possible, use user-generated language.
CTAs will stand out if you use strong words and design elements like white space to create urgency.
Give your brand some personality if you can. Without hesitation, incorporate the upbeat and welcoming image of your brand into your microcopy.
3.Introduce new, useful product features to users gradually This shiny new feature might be very useful, but users won’t know about it. Emails and blog posts are good ways to announce new product features, but you must also talk to your app users if you want them to discover and use your new feature for saas customer engagement.
An illustration of a message in a feature announcement litmus tooltip:While 62% of users who saw the tooltip used the feature, only 2% of users in the control group did so. That’s a 22-fold increase in feature adoption, which is incredible.
Lessons learned from Litmus’s new feature announcement:
Make use of in-app callouts to point users to each new feature’s announcement as if it were a mini-product launch. A brief walkthrough or modal dialog that clearly explains how the feature works and how it will benefit users may be helpful for more complicated rollouts.
Nevertheless, keep announcements of new features brief and to the point. To improve your users’ experience, you want to make it easier for them to use new features. However, prolonged or severe interruptions defeat the purpose by interfering with their workflows.
4.Regularly send emails based on what users do in the app. This keeps customers interested long after they leave your product. Setting certain events to send an email at the right time is a great way to reinforce the product’s instructions through another channel and increase user action. This is due to the mere-exposure effect, which states that people enjoy reflecting on information they already possess.
For sending behavioral emails, the following options are available:
emails for activation and signing up. Because they have some of the highest activation rates of any type of email, welcome emails are the best way to introduce your brand and begin making a personal connection with your customers.
one-time emails about particular events. When certain in-app events occur, emails that go into greater detail about features the customer is already using can be sent without interfering with their work.
Education drip sequences You can help customers in saas customer engagement get the most out of your product over time by educating them about its features and benefits.
Surveys for customer feedback. Utilizing in-app surveys and feedback forms demonstrates to your users that you value their input.
From this Growth Lab formula, take aways:
Timing determines everything. Utilizing in-app triggers, send the right email at the right time.
Make sure that each email directs users to the logical next step in your product by creating a seamless flow.
Ensure that users are rewarded for successfully completing each step. Examples of this reward include an elaborate checkmark on an onboarding checklist or an animated modal window.
5.Gather qualitative feedback to identify improvement opportunities. Tools and analytics for quantitative data can reveal a lot about your product’s flaws. It cannot, however, explain why. That requires you to inquire from your customers.
