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Holding your customer’s attention when they have no time is a big challenge.
Particularly in today’s digital age, with average attention spans that only last a few seconds, driving business outcomes now relies heavily on employing the right user engagement strategy.
But before jumping into the various types of user engagement strategies used for improving customer experience and retention, let’s quickly understand exactly what a user engagement strategy entails.
What is a User Engagement Strategy?
A user engagement strategy is a plan to:
- Grab your customers’ attention,
- Improve their experience of using your product, and
- Make them engage with the product offering on a regular basis.
Such engagement tools enable us to not only increase customer loyalty and lifetime values, but also optimize the customer experience and boost customer retention for the long term.
5 User Engagement Strategies To Use For Your Next Product
There are many ways to hold your customers’ attention and engage them long enough to make sure they have a great time using your product.
The user engagement strategies highlighted in this article are ideal for growth marketing and product success, and are proven ways to garner customer loyalty and retention:
- Customer Journey Mapping
- Hyper-Personalisation
- Integrating Analytics
- Rewards and Customer Loyalty Program
- Chatbot
1. Map Your Customer Journey
To effectively develop and implement a user engagement strategy, it is crucial to understand who your target audience is and how they use your product.
A good way to do this is through customer journey mapping.
In this user engagement strategy, you map out your product’s customer journey and understand all the different ways a customer can interact with your digital platform or app. This allows you to unravel any challenges the user may face and discover more about your users’ needs and behavior, which is instrumental in identifying opportunities for engagement.
Additionally, analyzing your customers’ behavior will allow you to segment your target base and create customer personas. Collecting this knowledge is the first step in creating a tailored user engagement strategy to interact with each persona according to their distinct preferences.
2. Create Hyper-Personalized Offerings
In today’s day and age, providing personalized experiences has become an essential user engagement strategy. And it makes sense why – customers have grown to want products that are tailored to their needs.
Personalization can be something as simple as showing customers a location-based ad or using their first name in an email.
It could also become something much more complex, by applying nascent technologies such as machine learning and AI to offer hyper-relevant services.
A good example of personalisation in the Telecommunication industry is when a customer who regularly purchases data add-ons to meet his monthly needs is offered an exclusive package to upgrade their plan at a discount. Usage behavior, interests, location, device information, etc. could be used to create a unique offer for each customer that best meets their needs.
Push notifications are also essential when it comes to a successful user engagement strategy and plan. Using these notifications effectively can help improve awareness and usage for your product features. Location-based notifications or offers can allow you to give the users of your product a contextual experience that would be hard to match.
For a deeper dive into Hyper-Personalization, read this article on 6 Customer Experience Strategies you can use to implement it in your organization.
3. Track Business Analytics
There is no way of knowing whether your customer engagement strategies are working or not if you don’t have specific success metrics in place and aren’t tracking them on a regular basis.
Therefore, it is essential to close the customer loop by listening to their feedback and incorporating it into improving your product offering.
Data driven decision-making can allow you to identify behavioral trends and understand how the customers use your product in order to address their needs.
Tracking your daily active users (DAU) as a % of your monthly active users (MAU) can give you an estimate on the number of days your customers use your product in each month.
Segmentation and analytics play a pivotal role in driving the marketing strategy for an organization. Quantitative insights can help build your brand persona and also help identify the USPs of your product. This can be used to create acquisition and retention campaigns to increase usage.
Understanding the onboarding process for your platform and the use of conversion funnels to identify the relevant drop-offs can also play a crucial role in helping uncover design or product level issues that might be hampering your overall user engagement.
The use of analytics tools can significantly impact the growth of engagement on your platform. Using these tools can enable you to segment your user audience based on multiple attributes i.e. age, location, interests. These segments can then be targeted with the use of available communication channels or push notifications, thus generating not only interest but also customer retention and loyalty to your offering.
4. Design a Customer Loyalty Program
Another effective user engagement strategy is to engage your customer through a customer loyalty program that rewards them with points, discounts and gifts in return for frequently engaging with your platform.
These programs can prove to be very effective as they not only improve customer retention, but also increase customer switching costs by boosting customer loyalty. Having a loyal customer base can generate word of mouth and referrals for your product, which can attract the desired audience to your platform.
5. Implement a Chatbot
Chatbots are a proven tool to increase conversion rates, especially when it comes to digital platforms.
An AI-powered chatbot has the ability to analyze data and appropriately reply to users based on preprogrammed recommendations. The program can also be engineered to trigger specific messages based on customer attributes such as location, time, or engagement levels.
Bots can also help users choose products they like, answer FAQs, or even act as a trouble-shooter to decrease churn rates.
Additionally, another key advantage of using chatbots as part of your user engagement strategy is their ability to offer minimum service levels even during after-hours when a call center representative is not available. This helps create an additional channel through which key customer information can be collected so that they can be contacted later.
Takeaway
There’s no doubt that the digital age of today has transformed the way businesses operate and seek out customers.
Therefore, in efforts to keep up with such transformation, it is now more crucial than ever to adopt smart approaches and strategies that put the customer at the center of your engagements with them.
User engagement strategies like the ones discussed above all help you hold your ideal customers’ attention, improve their experience using your product, and keep them coming back for more.
Remember, the right user engagement strategy will pave the way for transforming your target audience into loyal customers that stick with you for the long haul.
FAQs
How to optimize user engagement?
There are many user engagement strategies that help optimize user engagement for your product, digital platform, or app. Some great ways to do this include customer journey mapping, hyper-personalization, integrating analytics, customer loyalty programs, rewards, and chatbots.
How do you increase product engagement?
Product engagement can be increased by incentivising customers (e.g. through loyalty programs and rewards), using and studying user data to create personalized notifications and offers, and streamlining and optimizing the overall user experience through customer journey mapping.
