What is user engagement?
User engagement is essentially the frequency and duration for which users interact with your website, app, or product. It is a critical metric and is vital for the survival of many businesses, especially ones in the SaaS space.
User engagement occurs when users gain value from interacting with products and brands. Your aim should be to understand how users gain value from your product and then use those insights to improve your product and give them even more value than before.
This will be a continuous, never-ending process. That’s because your customers’ needs are continuously evolving and the value they seek to gain from your product also changes.
User engagement is about your users taking meaningful actions in your product repetitively. These could be clicks, downloads, shares, and much more.
Why is user engagement important?
User engagement has direct ties to profitability. There are a lot of distractions in the world today, especially in the digital space, and if someone spends time engaging with your product, that means that they perceive value in your product.
Users that are highly engaged usually end up being more profitable for businesses. They tend to make repeat purchases and spread word of your product to the people in their circles.
If you run a SaaS business and you don’t have high levels of user engagement, you’re in a mess. That means that your users do not see any real benefit or value in using your product. This means that you’ll need to make some major changes before you can really achieve product-led growth.
What are the stages of user engagement?
Here are the four stages of user engagement:
- Point of engagement: The user initiates the interaction
- Engagement: The user is actively focused on completing actions or tasks
- Disengagement: The user stops the activity
- Re-engagement: The user gets back to the activity
How to measure user engagement?
Not all kinds of engagement are equally valuable for all businesses. User engagement carries different meanings for various types of businesses. Here is what three types of businesses could consider as user engagement.
eCommerce: Adding products to cart, adding products to wishlists, monthly users, etc.
Publications: Pageviews, session duration, daily usage, shares, comments, etc.
B2B software: Active users (daily, weekly, and monthly), new user invites, application-specific activities, etc.
Your user engagement rate is the percentage of active users for a particular period. Here is a simple formula that you could use to calculate your engagement rate.
Engagement rate = (Total number of active users during a particular period)/ (Total number of users during that period) x 100
How to increase user engagement?
Here are some ways to increase your user engagement:
Understand what your users consider valuable
You can’t just assume that your users will find value in certain places. You need to ask them questions and analyze usage patterns. See what features drew them in and which features they use the most.
Now look for ways to build on them.
Customer Training
If your customers have to struggle to understand how to use your product, chances are that they’ll just quit using it.
Train your users to use your product to the fullest and gain more value from it. This includes improving your onboarding process and proving self-paced learning materials like a knowledge base and a chatbot.
Ease of use
The easier you make it for a customer to do something that they see value in doing, the more likely they are to do it. Even if your product is extremely valuable, if it is hard to use, your customers will be less likely to use it. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to achieve their objectives using your product.
Gamification
Using elements of gamification helps you keep your customers engaged. There are four aspects to it: initial motivation, action, feedback and/or reward, and emotional response.
Crack this, and user engagements levels could rise substantially. But it has to be done right, or else it might seem gimmicky.
Tie it into activities that relate to user success, This could even include using features that customers don’t use much initially, but once they do, they get hooked.
Gamify the right aspects of your product and make sure not to overdo it.
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