Developing a new product and launching it in the market isn’t enough to guarantee its success. All the resources spent on developing an app or website and then making it viral are wasted if it is unable to engage and retain its acquired users. With the shrinking attention span of users, it is now vital for brands to have a strategy for optimizing the product experience and boosting user engagement in 2023.
Product growth isn’t just about acquiring new customers in large numbers. It is also dependent on engaging the existing users, nurturing your brand’s relationship with them, and providing them with an exceptional product experience. It is no surprise that brands are choosing to invest heavily in user engagement, and this trend will only continue in 2023.
Increased engagement leads to better product adoption. Research shows that companies that have fully engaged users have a 55% higher revenue share and enjoy a 63% lower customer churn.
In this blog, we will discuss user engagement, why and how to measure it, and actionable strategies to boost user engagement in 2023. Let’s get started.
What is User Engagement?
Before jumping into strategies to increase engagement, let us first understand what it really is, especially from a product’s perspective.
User engagement or customer engagement is an umbrella term for all interactions between users and the product or service offered to them. It is an all-inclusive term for all user interactions with your brand, product, website, content, or app.
In simple terms, user engagement is a measure of the number of users actively engaged with your product over a given time period. It is an indicator of whether users find value in your offering or not and is helpful in determining the overall product’s health.
Types of User Engagement
1. Active Engagement
As the name implies, this engagement deals with the most active users of your product. These engaged users are happy to leave product reviews, provide feedback, and make improvement suggestions.
2. Contextual Engagement
Engagement without proper context is just plain noise. Contextual engagement is not only great for the product but also for marketers as it helps them better understand the target audience. The brand can use the information gathered, i.e., their age, location, and other demographics, for behavioral segmentation.
The brand will then be able to offer users a more personalized experience based on their behavior. For example, an eCommerce platform can analyze past purchases and offer similar products to customers at a discount.
3. Engagement of Convenience
This engagement is about making the users’ experience and life more convenient. For instance, the “Buy Now” button on Amazon provides users an option to directly purchase an item from the product’s page rather than be directed through the lengthy “Add to Cart” option. It makes the shoppers’ life easier.
Having “Engagement of convenience” allows a brand to understand the individual needs of its customers better.
4. Emotional Engagement
It is the most challenging yet effective engagement to achieve for an app or website. This engagement works because it deals with the emotions associated with owning a product.
Humans are controlled by their emotions, which come in different forms like favorite color, messaging style, sentence, or design. When users feel they can relate to a product, they are more likely to stay engaged.
How to Measure User Engagement?
The primary challenge in measuring user engagement is that the definition of an “engaged user” varies from product to product. For an expense tracking app, an engaged user is the one who logs in at least once every day to record expenses. A subscription-based SaaS website could see its engaged users come in once or twice a month.
There is no fixed and quantifiable definition for user engagement across platforms.
Moreover, there’s the problem of the shrinking attention span of users. Users have a plethora of options of different apps and websites to choose from, and they don’t think twice before abandoning one product for another. They shower one product with daily usage while the other remains unopened for long durations.
It is, therefore, important to choose the right user engagement metric to judge the health and growth of a product. Here are some of the most commonly used metrics for user engagement in 2023.
– Open Rate
It is the number of users who launched your app or visited your website after the initial installation or the first visit.
– Bounce Rate
These are the users who visited your website or your app but didn’t create an account or register with it. It is an excellent way to judge if your users see the value your product provides early in the product experience. A high bounce rate is an indication to review the user onboarding process and optimize it.
– Active Users
An app’s or website’s worth is determined by how many users visit and use it regularly. Metrics like Daily Active Users (DAUs) and Monthly Active Users (MAUs) help effectively track how often users use the product and find value in it. DAUs can be tracked to see which days of the week are the busiest for the product and so on.
– Average Session Length
It is the amount of time users spend on your product on average. It is helpful in understanding the behaviors of different user groups.
Some may use the product daily, but just for 2-3 minutes, while others use it for over 30 minutes but just once a month. This data can then be used to ascertain which group pays the most and whom to target more in upcoming marketing campaigns.
Average Session Length = Total durations of sessions for a period / Total number of sessions for the same period
– Sticky Factor
As the name suggests, it shows how sticky your product is. It measures the product’s capability to keep users captivated and engaged with your product over extended periods of time.
Stickiness can be measured by simply dividing the DAU by MAU or the WAU, i.e., Weekly Active Users. Brands with low stickiness scores can start by sending push notifications to users to remind them that the product exists.
It is imperative for brands to measure user engagement in 2023 because it makes it easier to deliver real value and generate great revenue. Measurement and a thorough analysis of user engagement increases brand loyalty and reduces customer churn rate. It allows companies to provide their users with a better and more optimized product experience.
8 Actionable Techniques to Boost User Engagement in 2023
Now, we know what user engagement is and its importance in 2023. We also covered ways to measure it correctly on your website or your app. It is now clear that brands should focus on user engagement for increased profits and better conversion rates.
Let us now discuss strategies to develop a robust user engagement model for your product.
1. Optimize the User Onboarding Process
First impressions matter. This is also true for apps and websites. Research showed that if a product wasn’t meeting user expectations during onboarding, over 60% of users didn’t use the platform again. Users should see value in the app or website during their first interaction with it.
User onboarding can be optimized by having users go through the key features of the platform. The goal should be to help them realize the key value proposition of the product faster.
An app that has nailed the onboarding process is Duolingo which uses intuitive screens and messages to guide users through the process.
2. Offer Personalized Customer Experience
Product owners and designers are now focusing on event-driven automation and personalized customer experience to ensure that users remain engaged with the platform. Users enjoy a customized experience with the product and go on unique customer journeys.
Not just the product but the content surrounding it must be personalized. Use demographics like age, gender, and location to deliver a more tailored platform to users that meet their needs and preferences. It helps to reach out to customers as people and not just leads or prospects.
3. Use Gamification to make it fun
Gamification is a winning strategy for customer engagement. Gamifying the product experience and making it fun ensures that users remain engaged with your platform. This is especially useful in the case of traditionally mundane activities that users need to perform on the app.
For instance, CRED uses gamification to keep its engagement numbers high by motivating users to complete “boring” tasks like completing credit card payments and offering them rewards.
Gamification elements like loyalty badges, rewards, points, etc., motivate users and convert the consumption of a service or product into a game. It is a sure-shot way for brands to increase user engagement on their platforms.
Also read: The Complete Guide to In-App Gamification in 2023
4. Fine-tune Product Features based on Analytics
Introduce analytics into your product to track user behavior. Identify areas that highly engage users and areas that the users rarely visit. Always look to improve the app based on the analytics results. Build up the better-performing features and keep adding valuable functionalities. Gradually introduce users to new features and don’t overwhelm them with too much too soon.
Toning down or removing unused product features is essential as it tends to pull down the better-performing features in your product. These features might also confuse users and lead to a poor user experience. Try repurposing unused features as a new use case to garner fresh perspective from users.
Use surveys and other analytics tools to track feature adoption rates. Surveys help track metrics like NPS, which is an excellent way to gather customer feedback. Show users that their feedback matters by making changes in the product based on user feedback.
5. Provide Omnichannel Communication and Experience
Providing an omnichannel user experience enables users to use the product seamlessly across devices and platforms. Brands using a solid omnichannel experience for user engagement tend to retain over 89% of their customers.
Every user has a different personality and prefers a different communication medium. Omnichannel communication will be paramount in increasing user engagement in 2023. It will be vital for brands to communicate with users on their preferred channels. It all eventually leads to higher customer satisfaction.
6. Use Push Notifications and In-App Messages
Push Notifications remind users about the existence of your app or website. They have proven to be a great tool to rekindle dwindling user engagement. Moreover, introducing deep links in push notifications encourage engagement of convenience. They also give users another reason to use your product, for example, by informing them about a new sale or discount.
Also read, Push Notification Strategies to increase App engagement in 2023.
Push notifications can also be sent after behavioral segmentation to provide more targeted and personalized marketing. In-app Messages, or IAMs, are also helpful in reminding users to complete actions or tasks in-app and engage with long-forgotten features.
7. Upsell Existing Users
It is more pocket-friendly for brands to upsell existing users rather than acquire new ones. Expand your existing user base and reinvest in ways to reduce customer churn. Reach out to existing users and invite them back to your product to try out new features or use exciting discount offers. This method is often underrated but will be used widely to skyrocket user engagement in 2023.
8. Automate Trigger Communication based on In-App Behavior
Sending users welcome messages, newsletters, and thank you notes isn’t enough. It is imperative to send users more relevant communications based on their in-app behavior. Automating the process based on in-app actions creates more personalized messaging experiences for users. Nudge users to complete the Check-out or sign-up process through these triggered communications.
Conclusion
It is crucial to prioritize user engagement. Highly engaged users form a personal connection with the brand and eventually become lifelong customers. Strategic planning and personalizing all customer journey touchpoints increases the customer engagement.
Remember to implement these strategies to boost user engagement in 2023. It should also be remembered that there is no one-size-fits-all model for user engagement. What works for one product might not work for another. It is thus essential to experiment while devising a plan that works best for your product. Upshot.ai can help you with it.
The Upshot.ai Advantage
Upshot.ai is an omnichannel, user engagement, and gamification platform that helps digital product owners and marketers improve product adoption and conversions.
With Upshot.ai, banks, Insurance, and FinTech firms can enhance their digital experiences with pre-built gamification features. It can provide personalized insights, actionable recommendations, and contextual nudges designed to deepen its relationship with its users.
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