How do you know whether your users find value in your product? It has a simple answer.
If your users find value in your product, they will return to it and engage with it.
It’s common sense that when people like something, they will give it another chance.
If they are satisfied with their experiences consistently, they will try other features of your product as well.
Think about your favorite restaurant and how it became your favorite.
Of course, delicious food is the most crucial criterion. However, there are many other criteria that you may consider, such as how they serve your food, the interior design, the restaurant’s location, and whether they can cook your food just the way you like it.
If these criteria are met, you will be eager to go there more often and try different foods.
The process is very similar for a SaaS product.
Personally, if I find a product attractive and valuable in my first interaction, I will go back to that product.
How do you then increase your product engagement if it is that simple?
Let’s first elaborate on what product engagement is and talk about how to measure product engagement. After doing so, you will have a much better understanding of how you can improve your product engagement rates.
What is Product Engagement?
Product engagement or user engagement refers to how your users interact with your product. In other words, it tells you how often users engage with your product, which features they use the most, and what makes them stop engaging with it.
It is one of the ultimate indicators of your product’s success. It shows you if your product can come up with the needs and expectations of users.
These three fundamental questions need to be answered to understand product engagement:
- Why do you download or start using a product in the first place?
- Can you find what you are looking for in that product?
- What makes you keep using that product?
If your goal is to increase product engagement, you need to find satisfying answers to each of these questions because you can be sure that these are the questions that users are asking themselves consciously or unconsciously.
Why is Product Engagement Important?
Product engagement is important because if you have low engagement rates, it indicates that you are failing to provide users with what they need.
You may have a great product, but if you fail to get users to engage with it, you will have a hard time reaching your goals for your business.
There is intense competition between SaaS products, and you will likely fall behind in the competition if you fail to attract users to benefit from the value of your product.
Also Read: Product Strategies In Marketing
Product engagement and the value of your product are highly intertwined.
That is to say, the more your users engage with your product, the more they will find value in it, and the more they find value in your product, the more they will engage with it.
There may be several reasons why you have low user engagement rates, such as the quality of your product, your user onboarding, or even poor communication with your users.
You are responsible for identifying these pain points through product data and user feedback and improving on them.
To identify these pain points and measure your product engagement efficiently, you can start using third-party tools to save yourself time and energy.
How to Measure Product Engagement
There are several metrics and KPIs to help you measure product engagement.
Before we talk about those metrics and KPIs: using a third-party tool is the first step to measuring and improving product engagement.
For example, Woopra is a great product analytics tool that can help you track user behavior, identify pain points, and track important metrics and KPIs.
1. Percentage of Daily/Monthly Active Users (DAU/MAU)
This is also an important metric as it shows you success in a time frame.
Looking at this metric, you will have a better understanding of the success of your onboarding. The better the onboarding, the more daily/monthly active users you will have.
If people are not giving up using your app, then the onboarding process is effective.
Calculation: Total number of users / daily/monthly active users.
2. Stickiness
This is a great metric that shows how often users come back to your app.
The closer the number of DAU to the number of MAU, the more confident you can be about your product engagement.
It indicates that your users have learned how to find value in your app, and they can’t get enough of it.
You can calculate Stickiness by dividing the number of Daily Active Users (DAU) by Monthly Active Users (MAU). We wrote a whole article about how to improve your product stickiness.
3. Average Session Durations
This is a tricky metric because it should be taken into consideration with regard to what your product wants to achieve.
What I mean by this is let’s say you have a taxi app. The fact that your users have long session durations for such an app suggests that your users may have difficulty finding what they are looking for.
On the other hand, if you have a social media app, long session durations suggest that you provide users with what they want.
4. Retention Rate
Research suggests that 65% of the profits of a business come from existing customers.
Customer retention does not only show the success of your product but your business in general. Therefore, it is one of the most crucial metrics that you need to track in order to have a broader perspective on your users’ engagement with your product.
Here is how you can calculate retention:
[(CE – CN) / CS] x 100
CE – the number of customers at the end of the period measured
CN – the number of new customers during the period
CS – the number of customers when the period started
5. Churn Rate
Churn rate refers to the rate at which your users stop using your product.
Compared to a high retention rate that indicates success, a high churn rate indicates the failure of your business and product in providing users with what they need.
A high churn rate shows you that you fail to get your users to engage with your product.
This is how you calculate your churn rate. Divide the number of customers who leave within a given period by the number of customers who join at the start of the period.
How to Improve Product Engagement
Product engagement can be significantly improved by following these five steps:
1. Identify Pain Points
“The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations.”
-Roy H. Williams, Author & founder of the Wizard Academy Institute.
There are two ways that you can identify the problems or the needs of your customers.
Analyze Product Data
Find the features that are used the most and used the least and compare them with each other to figure out what you are doing well and what you can improve on.
Segment users and find out what types of users have high or low product engagement in certain areas in the product and focus on providing certain users with what they uniquely need.
Collect Feedback
You should give the utmost importance to your user feedback in order to increase product engagement.
Keep in mind that you shouldn’t bombard users with constant pop-ups that ask for feedback. You should also not ask for too much information.
Another vital point is that you should determine the best moments for asking for feedback. For example, you can ask for feedback about a feature after the users use that feature.
2. Provide an Excellent User Onboarding Experience
According to a survey, 55% of users said that they had returned a product before because they couldn’t figure out how to use it.
If you look at the best product led growth examples always have great user onboarding. This includes great companies like Slack, Zoom, and Calendly.
Although the former and latter steps are parts of user onboarding, I will discuss some of its most apparent aspects here and elaborate on the other elements in the following steps.
User onboarding starts from the first moment a user finds out about your product. In this regard, you should produce content that will clearly and briefly describe what value users can find in your product.
Following your content marketing efforts for user onboarding, you should continue to provide users with:
- An easy sign-up process. Again, do not ask for too much information during the sign-up process. Make it easy for users to sign-up and keep in mind that you can always ask for further information later on the user journey.
- Onboarding checklists and progress bars. This way, you can help your users better manage their time and know where they are on their journey.
- Interactive product tours/ product walkthroughs. You should make it optional for users to take the tour or not because some users may have already taken the tour.
- Send personalized onboarding emails that are well-designed with images and other visuals. These emails will be one of your first interactions with users. So, try to be as attractive and clear as you can be.
3. Communicate in the Right Way
To increase product engagement, you need to know the right way to talk to your customers.
When announcing new features, asking for feedback, or helping users with their problems, you should find the suitable medium, best tone of voice, and the right moment.
You have various mediums that you can use to engage with your users. For example:
- In-app Messages
- Push Notifications
- Emails
- SMS Messages
In-app messages are the most effective way to communicate with users when compared to other methods. This is because they are great at catching the users’ attention and conveying what they need to know.
They are especially useful when announcing new features.
However, in-app messages can only be used while your users are using the app.
When users are not using your product, you can send them push notifications. By segmenting users who haven’t been using the app for a while, you can send them push notifications to get their attention.
When communicating with users, you should personalize your messages. Personalization makes it ten times better for users to build a relationship with your product and business.
In fact, you should personalize every process of a user’s journey in your product.
4. Do A/B Testing
Now that you have segmented users after educating yourself through product data, you can do A/B tests to see which strategy will work best for increasing your product engagement.
By constantly analyzing customer feedback and product data, you can consistently improve product engagement for your SaaS product.
Through finding the points where your users struggle the most and running A/B tests you will be able to make the necessary changes for improving product engagement.
5. Encourage Your Users to Take Action
You should not always ask for something from your users. You should also give them something in return. When you encourage your users to take action, your engagement rates will increase.
Rewards, discounts, or birthday gifts are all encouraging gifts for your users.
Conclusion
You should put your focus on providing value to your users because that is the ultimate way to get your users to engage with your product. The best way to do so is by educating yourself through product data and understanding user behavior.
When you identify what makes your users engage or stop engaging with your product, you should take the above-mentioned steps and take your game to the next level.
Also keep this in mind. The more your users engage with your product, the more they will find value in it. And the more they find value in your product, the more they will engage with it.
