User Engagement and How to Improve it
User engagement measures how many users find value in our product or service. Engagement can be measured by some metrics, such as: daily views, clicks, searches, shares, and many more. With high user engagement, our product generally will have more profit, because there will be more activities that have valuable outcomes, such as: purchases, subscriptions, or transactions.
Why User Engagement so Important?
User engagement most likely will have high correlation with our product business. With good analytics, we can gain insight of what is the factors that will improve the user engagement. The more time the user spend their time on our product means that they have find value in it. And when they think there are value in a product, they will use it more frequently and also will share the product to other people. This will allow us to make profit from services like ads, subscriptions, or sales. If we make room for user engagement’s improvement, it also will make our product look better, useful, and professional.
Calculating User Engagement
To calculate the user engagement, we must decide what activities that considered as positive engagement to our product. For example: All activities in media publication can considered as positive engagement because the site makes money from advertising; While e-commerce might only consider activities that relative with purchases or at least adding items to cart as positive engagement. Here are some of the positive engagement based on the businesses:
- Media site: Daily usage, views, time on page, clicks, searches, comments, shares
- Streaming music app: Daily usage, time spent in app, songs listened to, playlists created, friends added
- E-commerce store: Monthly usage, adding items to cart
- Personal finance app: Weekly usage, sync bank accounts, create a budget, enable notifications, view dashboard
- Enterprise software: Monthly usage, create reports, share reports, invite users
To maximize user engagement, we also have to track negative activities in our product, such as: unsubscribes, uninstalling app, and muting notifications. If we know what events that cause user to become disengaged the most, we can focus on adjust the feature or business concept on them, for example: If many users mute the notifications, maybe we often send them unnecessary information through the notification.
How to Improve User Engagement
After you know what user engagement is and why it is so important, now we will talk about how to improve user engagement. In this article I will share about how to improve user engagement that my team plan to adapt on our project. I and my team work on a project that build mobile application to perform distribution of waste cooking oil (In Indonesian: “Minyak Jelantah” as in the name of the app: “Bank Jelantah”). The distribution of waste cooking oil in our app use the engagement of many user because we only provide platform for all of the user to distribute the oil by selling and buying them from user to another user and from user to factory.
In order to improve the user engagement, we must firstly know what the user want to see or feel when they use our app, and based on that I come with some tips for you to improve user engagement:
1. Good First Impression and help users reach their AHA! Moment early
Onboarding page is a crucial for all new users and has a powerful effect on the entire user journey. Onboarding will be the first hands-on experience that the users will have with our product, so we must leave a good first impression to the user through this. User motivation is typically very high during onboarding, so we must ensure that the user can do meaningful activities and immediately get the value on our product. That is what the onboarding should be: An interactive and well designed brief introduction to our product.
2. Make sure users know our new and helpful features improvement
Our new helpful feature will have value only if the user know it exist. That is why we must announce our new feature so that the user will keep using our product because of that helpful feature. We can use emails or blog posts for announcing new product features, but if we really what our users to discover and immediately use the new feature, we need to communicate the update to our user directly. One of the way is to use in-app messaging where the user will have interaction with the introduction of our new feature.
3. Offers incentives to users
Incentives is one of the most effective way to boost user engagement. By giving users rewards will make the customer very happy and that not only will increase their engagement, but also develop loyalty to our product. The important rule that work in almost every case is to provide users with something valuable. Giving incentives not only work for existing customers, but also can attract new customers in using our product.
Incentives not only about thing that the customers can consume, but can also be something that raise the prestige of the customers, such as achievement, and online collection. One way to utilize incentive for both side profit is to provide incentive that make them use our product again, such as discount voucher and in-app currency.
4. Interaction to users
We can interact with the user to make them feel comfortable using our product. Simple interaction such as reply to user’s comments or suggestions can boost user engagement. Other kind of interaction is to provide subscribe option so that we can interact with the user through notification about update, something new, or recommendation for the user. With periodically interaction, our user will be reminded of the product’s existence and will thinking about their need that can be fulfilled by our product and it will make them use our product more frequently.
That is all of my tips that i currently can share to you. It will be good if you can apply all those tips to improve user engagement. You also can filter the user that you want to engaged in order to minimalized the cost. It’s all up to you based on the circumstance.
Currently, my team’s project is on the early stage and my team has not yet implement those tips in order to improve user engagement, but we will work on it after we finish the business flow in our application.
Source:
https://medium.com/@mille.rama17/user-engagement-676837780e21
https://mixpanel.com/topics/what-is-user-engagement/
https://www.appcues.com/blog/increase-user-engagement
https://www.intercom.com/blog/ways-to-increase-user-engagement/
https://thenextscoop.com/mobile-app-user-engagement-and-retention/
