It’s all-important for SaaS companies to win customers and, even more important, to keep them engaged. When SaaS customers are engaged, they actively use your product and deepen their commitment to your SaaS brand.
Without engagement, your SaaS users will become lapsed and are at a higher risk of churn. When they’re not logging into and using your product regularly, they fail to realize the value, making them reconsider their options when renewal comes around.
Therefore, SaaS companies want to focus on engaging their existing customers to ensure long-term retention and higher customer lifetime value. Instead of putting all your efforts into acquiring new customers, businesses must achieve high engagement and motivate customers to keep using their product.
What is SaaS Customer Engagement?
SaaS customer engagement is the quality and quantity of interactions that a customer might have with your software product. It is a predictor of the value that customers are able to gain from your software and refers to the degree of commitment between the customer and the product.
Customer engagement can occur at any stage of the customer journey where the customer interacts with your brand. It could be trial users considering an upgrade to your premium service or a customer’s interaction with the onboarding process while using your product.
If a customer is engaged, they are interested in using your product. They are highly receptive to your business’s messaging and may be open to cross-sells and upsells. They’re interested in learning about new features and ensuring that they get the most value out of your SaaS product.
What are the Benefits of Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is important because it leads to higher customer retention and reduced churn. When your customers are engaged personally, they consider your product valuable and are less likely to be swayed by your competitors’ offerings. Engaged customers are happy customers who will be satisfied with the level of service you’re able to deliver.
Engaged customers are also open to giving in-depth feedback to your company, so you can learn how to improve your product. They will take the time to complete surveys and provide details about their experience that you can use to improve the service for others. Your most engaged customers will be the Promoters within the Net Promoter Score.
Engaged customers are also likely to write reviews about your software, which can help attract new customers to your business. They’ll rave about your product in their social circles, generating valuable word-of-mouth marketing.
10 Tips for a Successful SaaS Customer Engagement Strategy
1. Define your metrics for success
Measuring your SaaS customer engagement is important to ensure your strategy is successful. Only by understanding your benchmarks and your objectives can you increase customer engagement on a consistent scale.
Engagement metrics can include:
- Usage frequency – measures how often a customer logs into your software, with high usage frequency correlating with increased engagement.
- Time logged within the app – users spending longer time within your SaaS application can be considered more engaged than those who only log in for a few minutes.
- Popular feature usage – using your software’s features signifies that users are engaged and getting the most out of the product.
It’s important to figure out where you are now and where you would like to be in three months or six months to a year. If you consider that usage frequency is low across the board, you can strategize ways to increase the number of times that users log into the app.
2. Know your users intimately
You can only engage your customers if you know who they are and can monitor their behavior within your app. Keeping track of important information about your customers is one way to increase engagement because this will tell you the types of actions your business can take that will be most relevant to them.
Customer success software like Churn360 can help you get to know your customers by logging their most important attributes through integrations with third-party apps, such as the history of communication with your business, product usage information, and renewal dates.
You’ll be able to have access to a 360-degree view of your customers and target your engagement strategies as a result. Group your customers into segments and make them the focus of engagement campaigns that deeply resonate with them.
3. Create helpful self-service content
Most software users prefer to solve problems themselves rather than contacting a member of your support team. Customers don’t want to wait in line as someone on the other end deals with a queue and searches for relevant solutions.
That’s why self-service content can result in more engaged customers because you are providing the answer to customer questions exactly when they need it. This reduces the chance that customers will get bored and move on to something else while they wait for their problem to be resolved.
A self-service knowledge base can be served in-app, so customers don’t have to switch contexts when they run into an issue. Your knowledge base can be embedded so that customers can immediately search for answers and swiftly move on with their day.
4. Proactively reach out to customers
Customers who are at risk of lapsing can benefit from proactive intervention from your customer success team. If you’re using the right tools, you can check when customers haven’t logged in for a while or if they seem stuck with a particular feature.
Since your success team only has limited resources, they can identify those at-risk customers with high-value contracts with your business. They can schedule phone calls or engage in an email conversation to help get the customer back on track.
Customers will be more engaged if you actively invest in customer-facing teams like customer success to reach out proactively. Customer success helps customers to get the most out of your software and minimizes their chance of churn.
5. Ask customers for their feedback
Customers will be more engaged when you actively solicit their feedback about your product. Ask them what features they most enjoy using and what they’re currently using your product to achieve in their business. Asking customers for feedback prompts them to think about what your software means to them and shows that your business cares.
Keep your surveys short and to the point so it only takes customers a few minutes to share their thoughts. Thank them for their contribution, and let them know when you’ve implemented any changes they have suggested.
Sending pre-formatted surveys like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) can also be a good way to gauge how engaged customers are with your business.
6. Promote new features in-app
You can increase customer engagement by reaching out to them when they are already engaged. Promoting new features within the app with push notifications is a great way to help customers learn more about your product and generate more value.
When you send notifications to customers while they are already using your product, this increases the likelihood that they will engage. They are already logged into your platform, and it’s simple for them to explore that new feature in a few clicks.
Customers who are learning how to use new features of your product are more engaged and satisfied with their experience with your software. New features help customers accomplish more with the product and become happier users.
7. Keep iterating on your product
To keep customers engaged, you’ll need to keep iterating on your product by releasing new features and launching updates. Inevitably, you’ll have bugs that need to be fixed and areas where the platform can be improved. Use your release notes to keep customers informed about the changes that you have made and assure them that the platform continues to deliver value.
If the product stays the same for a very long time, it will likely fall behind its rivals in the market. This puts even very engaged customers at risk of considering your competitors, who are striving to achieve excellence.
Don’t rest on your laurels, and assume customers will stay engaged if you do nothing. Continue to update the product and show customers that your product roadmap is heading in the right direction.
8. Don’t forget about content marketing
Customers might be willing to engage with your software product even while outside the app. Using content marketing to educate customers about features and use cases can be a great way to drive engagement with customers who are open to your messaging.
You can share content such as videos and blog posts on social media and through email marketing to ensure that customers don’t miss your updates. Customers are more highly engaged if your business produces content to educate them and then shares it on appropriate channels.
Customers might discover features of your app they have never heard of before, which directly drives engagement with your platform. Using examples of other successful customers is a powerful method to bring your content to life and help customers get the most out of your product.
9. Reward your most engaged customers
Keeping track of the customers who are most engaged is useful because you can reward those who exhibit the behaviors you value most. For example, a customer who logs into your platform every day could be given a discount to upgrade since you think they would be a good candidate for your premium plan.
Rewarding these highly engaged customers can create instances of customer delight where your customers know that your business appreciates them. Offering these incentives might motivate them to recommend your service to others, as would a loyalty program that rewards engaged customers.
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Your incentives should be something your customers want, such as discounts or upgrades that are tangible rewards for engaging with your brand. It must be unavailable to most customers, making them feel special and singled out.
10. Automate engagement strategies with CS software
As we mentioned, customer engagement strategies will only succeed with the right software to back them up. Especially when you’re dealing with a high volume of customers (and we hope you are!), you can’t always perform every process manually.
Customer success software enables you to automate many engagement strategies, such as identifying those customers at risk of churn and freeing up your customer success managers to perform those actions that require the human touch.
Don’t hesitate to consider Churn360 as a solution to help with your customer engagement strategy. Track your customers across the entire customer journey and find out where they get stuck, so you can implement strategies to reengage them. You can assign tasks to your CSMs, so no customer is forgotten.
Wrapping Up
Ensuring customers are highly engaged is important for SaaS companies who want to experience sustainable business growth. If customers aren’t actively using your product and obtaining value, they will likely churn and never return. This means you are at a disadvantage when it comes to offsetting your customer acquisition cost (CAC), because you’ve lost potential revenue from that customer.
You must develop a strategy to engage your SaaS customers and ensure that engagement remains high over time. Keep an eye out for the signs that mean customers are less engaged and take steps designed to draw them back in.
A highly engaged customer base will support your SaaS business’s expansion and ensure continuously increasing revenue. It’s not all about acquiring new customers – your existing customers are also a goldmine
