What is User Engagement?
User Engagement can be defined as a metric to measure the engagement of a user on a particular activity, be it liking a post, visiting the same webpage, opening an app, or maybe buying something from an online store.
User Engagement metrics are quite useful in aligning our business requirements to get the best Return of Investment, if we talk about any product that’s being sold online, there is a journey that a user goes through, and during this journey the user interacts/engages with many resources in order to get some information / purchase the product.
What does a User Engagement Journey mean?
The User Journey while buying a Product/ Availing a Service is as follows:
A user will engage with your brand and the product directly or indirectly many times in the below User Engagement Journey.
- Awareness: This is the phase where, the user is made aware of our product, this is done via various inbound methods like sending Push Notifications, Emails, In-App, WhatsApp Campaigns, Ads on Social Media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SEO blog posts, etc.
- Consideration: Once the user is aware about our product, we are in competition with other products in the market, and they are also, in the race to get the user attention, we need to follow up with the user via sending them customized push notifications, emails, messages, etc, to keep our product in attention, we can target Ads towards them, by sharing curated content, giving personalized offers, etc.
- Purchase: Once the user has made the decision, to purchase the product, we need to make sure that the purchase is made asap, and this can be done by giving a special discount, Some compelling offer and excellent support, so that a user is fixed with the decision.
- Retention: This is one of the most important factor, any business has to consider, retaining the existing customers, this can be done by ensuring the success of the customers, few simple steps to ensure the same are as follows:
- A good onboarding experience.
- Regular follow up each quarter to check if all is good.
- Sharing curated content, which will help them utilize the product better.
- Making sure the customers are getting good returns on their investment by using your software.
- Better Renewal offers, Free Add-On features, etc.
- Advocate: Once ensured, that the customer is satisfied with the product and is getting good ROI, the advocacy automatically follows, and to top that up, We can give referral bonus to them for their advocacy for referring new customers to us.
SMEs should avoid these mistakes while branding their products.
Why should we analyse User Engagement data ?
Anyone running an online business should definitely analyse their user behaviour patterns and engagement levels with the help A/B Testing campaigns to get the nitty/gritty details, and then target the best performing campaign toward the users to get better engagement levels, One can use a Marketing Automation/ User Engagement tool like CleverTap to achieve the same.
A/B testing Campaigns: [Trying out two or more inbound campaigns to get the user’s attention towards your campaign message]
Marketing Automation is the process of using a SaaS software to automate several marketing-related repetitive tasks such as recurring email marketing, scheduled social media posts, running various ad campaigns, the automation not only saves times and increases efficiency, but also gives a brand the option to personalize the inbound campaigns according to the end users behaviour.
Some User Engagement / Marketing Automation Tools that one can consider are : [In no particular order]
- CleverTap: CleverTap is a complete and powerful marketing platform for mobile growth teams, By combining real-time analytics, a powerful segmentation engine, and a suite of engagement tools, one can build an amazing mobile experience for their customers.
- HubSpot Marketing Hub : HubSpot is known as the pioneer in Marketing Automation, and it works a full-fledged CRM system, not just for marketing but for sales also.
- Marketo: Marketo`s Engage makes the complex buyer journey simple, by giving measurable insights from the acquisition of the customer to advocacy, thus helping the brand make better decisions.
- Wingify: With Wingify one can easily discover insights on various user data, build an experimentation roadmap, test the ideas, and make better marketing decisions.
- WebEngage: It is a smart Marketing Automation platform that has advanced features like Tag-based analytics which helps in comparing various running campaigns simultaneously.
With Some Marketing Automation Tools, one can not only run recurring personalized Marketing campaigns but also get detailed user engagement data that can be utilized to make better decisions on the marketing front, in turn getting a good ROI for your efforts.
Some Use Cases of leveraging the User Engagement Data.
- E-Commerce Apps: Send Users personalized coupons who have abandoned their shopping carts, notify them of a product that is in stock again, analyse user’s spends and recommend then membership plans.
- Banking Apps: Suggest Users to invest in digital assets, give incentives to users who pay their bills on the app.
- OTT Platform Apps: Recommend Users better video titles and plans based on their usage data, such as watch time hours, show users relevant ads, etc.
- Food Delivery Apps: Recommend customer’s dishes based on their history, send offer push notifications, send in-app feedback messages, etc.
Our Experience with User Engagement tools.
I have a first-hand experience of using CleverTap, and since then, I have been excited about the User Engagement data analytics, and the amazing campaign customizations it offers, and I believe these features can be used any b2c company to get better ROI out of their marketing efforts.
In the future, If I get a chance, would definitely like to try out other amazing marketing tools, excited about the future of Marketing engagement analytics and new the upcoming new campaign outreach capabilities of different tools.
Thumbnail Credits : Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash
Article Photo Credits: CleverTap.
