Are you a business owner who is struggling to find ways of product engagement strategy for your consumer or customer? You are not alone! This article will give you 10 easy tips on how to increase the interaction with your consumers.
Product engagement sounds like a great metric to strive for - but what exactly does it mean? Essentially, this term describes the frequency and quality of interactions your users have with your software. It's about how often they use your product (usage), how long they spend using it (engaged time), and whether or not the experience meets their expectations (product satisfaction).
By improving product engagement you can then reduce churn, improve loyalty and increase revenue per customer. We must also know there is a stark difference between a consumer vs customer.
To succeed in 2020, any business must be able to engage customers who are splintering their attention among social media, messaging apps, email subscriptions, and more. They expect an integrated experience, with each touchpoint feeding into their overall consumer journey.
If this resonates with you, then your next step should be to ensure that your product is engaging enough to keep customers coming back for more. By reducing churn, increasing loyalty, and improving revenue per customer, an engaged user base can have a huge impact on the growth of any business.
There are nine ways in particular that can help improve product engagement. You'll find all of them expanded upon below, along with practical advice on how to improve each aspect of your SaaS product usability.
1. Empower Users to Guide Your Roadmap
In a world where users have more power than ever before, it's essential to involve them in the process of product development. By engaging with potential customers and asking for their feedback early and often you can reduce churn by creating products that meet user needs. Some ways to do this include:
Surveying New Signups – You can set up an email campaign that triggers after someone signs up, asks them why they signed up and what they'd like to see next (if anything).
Creating a Feedback Slack Channel –If you're struggling to find ways to engage with users, then why not create a dedicated Slack channel for them to share ideas and suggestions?
Surveying Churned Customers – If your churn rate is high, then why not invite the people who abandoned your service to provide feedback on where things went wrong. You can use new data points that emerge from this process to improve your engagement metrics.
2. Validate Your Way to A Great Product
Early validation of any new features or products will help you save time by preventing the addition of superfluous features that don't meet customer needs. How can you gather feedback on early versions of your SaaS product? Here are some great places to start:
Showing Potential Customers a Mockup – A simple way of validating your new ideas is by getting potential customers to give you feedback on a mockup or wireframe. You can then validate that the idea has merit before any development work starts.
Running Paid User Tests – Invest some money in user tests, both with existing customers and new signups who have not yet started using the product. These will provide you with more insight into how well users understand your product and whether or not they find it useful enough to stick around.
3. Trigger The It! Factor (ASAP)
The fastest way to make a connection with a user is by triggering an "It" factor in the early days of their product engagement. This insight can have a huge effect on your retention rates, but it's not always easy to find. How can you trigger this Aha! factor?
Creating Personalised Guides – Aim to create at least one personalized guide that will introduce users to all of your key features and functionality.
Showing Users What They've Accomplished – Whether you use Gamification or some other tactic, finding ways to show customers how far they've progressed through using your SaaS product has been proven to improve user satisfaction and increase customer loyalty.
4. Reduce Friction With A Freemium Version
In the early days of your SaaS product, don't try to squeeze every last penny out of your customers. Instead, create a free version that will let users get to grips with the basics before converting to premium (if they ever do).
By reducing customer churn you can then start to increase revenue per user through upselling and cross-selling. So, here you need to know consumer vs customer differences, to better cater to their specific needs.
5. Announce New Features Within Your Product
When new features are added to products, many companies choose to broadcast this news via email newsletters or social media updates. This is not always best practice though, as updating your existing app with "invisible" new features can be much more effective for triggering engagement. How might you do this? One great way is to use in-app messaging.
In-App Messaging – Announce product updates within the app itself, either through banner notifications or by creating pop-ups that appear when users perform relevant actions. The latter strategy has been used very successfully by Slack, while one of the largest Australian banks witnessed an 11% increase in NPS by using this technique.
6. Cut Unnecessary Features
You should always aim to improve your SaaS product by cutting unnecessary features and streamlining user journeys whenever possible. Even small changes can have a big effect on reducing churn for your company, so take care to evaluate all new ideas based upon how useful they are for your customers before adding them into products.
7. Provide Exceptional Support
Start by improving your product knowledge base so that users can quickly find answers to common questions without having to wait for an answer from customer services. This will save you money, but more importantly, it will build trust between customers and your company. How might you turn the tide on complaints about poor customer service?
FAQ Articles – Users are often put off by SaaS products due to a lack of understanding. Create clear, concise articles which answer the most important questions about your SaaS offering before they even arise within user journeys.
8. Talk To Your Users
Get out there and ask customers what's working well with your product engagement strategy, as well as identifying areas for improvement where possible. You can do this through surveys, social media messages, or face-to-face conversations. The more you know about your users and their needs, the better equipped you'll be to improve product engagement.
9. Turn Users Into Collaborators
After improving your product knowledge base, aim to create ways for customers to interact with others who are using your products in order to develop ideas for improvement. This could take the form of an online forum where many people within a community all work together on suggestions, or it might simply entail asking for user input whenever possible.
Either way, communicating that you value customer feedback will help improve engagement. Be it consumer vs customer, both of them would give you positive insights and feedbacks.
10. Offer Appreciation & Recognition
If there's one thing people hate more than anything else, it's feeling under-appreciated by the companies they've given their time and money to. Therefore, even if your customers haven't provided specific suggestions for product improvements, take the opportunity to reward them for being a part of your SaaS community.
You can do this by offering perks such as early access to new features or discounts on complementary products and services.
Now that we have learned what project engagement is let us see how it affects customers and consumers. But before that, we need to understand the difference between them and the reference to two different types of purchasers.
A consumer is an individual who purchases products for personal use, whereas a customer is someone who pays for goods or services provided by companies in return for monetary exchange. This can be confusing as a Consumer could also customer-specific examples of this include:
- A Patient at a hospital is the Customer and the Hospital is also a Customer.
- When you purchase an item and pay with cash, you are the Consumer and the cashier is the Customer. That transaction was between two customers of money.
- A shopper who pays for groceries at a store is a Consumer and the Grocer is a Customer.
- A student who purchases their textbooks from Amazon is a Consumer and Amazon is their Customer.
In all of these examples, there are two customers in each transaction: one pays money for goods or services (the customer) and another uses the good or service (the consumer). In most cases both parties are customers, but not always.
Both consumers and customers play an important role in the economy - if either group ceased to exist, businesses would ultimately fail due to both groups must be recognized as necessary parts of the commercial world. However, for companies that provide goods and services, it's crucial to understand the difference between consumers and customers. Simply assuming that all sales are beneficial is a huge mistake, as this damages business relationship with both types of purchasers.
People who purchase goods or services for personal use rather than commercial gain are known as consumers. Some examples include:
- Someone who buys groceries to feed their family.
- A student who purchases their textbooks from Amazon.
Regardless of whether an individual is rich or poor, they are a consumer if they buy products for personal use only.
Some people have the misconception that "consuming" means damaging or destroying things, but this isn't accurate. The term "consumer" simply refers to people who purchase goods that they intend to use personally.
There are three main types of consumers, including:
A large part of project engagement work is to engage with consumers and customers and to understand their requirements and concerns. This work allows us to better serve our customers with the products and services we provide by gathering information about how they use our product or service, what kind of experience they would like from us, and any problems they may be experiencing. By understanding customer needs and acting on them, we can help improve user satisfaction as well as strengthen and extend the bonds we have with our customers.
A consumer is someone who purchases goods or services for personal use. A customer, on the other hand, is a person who purchases products from a business with the intent of selling them to others. Consumers and customers can be individuals or businesses – regardless of whether they are rich or poor – making it important for companies to understand both groups to provide the best service possible.
