9 Product Engagement Mistakes in SaaS and How to Avoid Them
Are product engagement mistakes ruining your user experience and driving down your retention rate?
Customer engagement is often one of the more underrated aspects of marketing and sales. Once you’ve gotten them to use your app the hard work is over, right? Wrong!
Quality product engagement can be the difference between a hugely successful product and a market flop. This article considers some of the most common mistakes companies make when driving user engagement and how you can avoid them.
TL;DR
- Product engagement is an important SaaS metric that checks the level of usage of your application.
- Always collect relevant data on new users and use that data to personalize their experience.
- Optimize the first-time user experience to help users reach the Aha! moment sooner.
- Replace product tours with interactive walkthroughs that are tailored and specific.
- Use hotspots, tooltips, and feature-triggered walkthroughs to guide users to relevant features.
- Avoid using too many in-app messages as this can get tiring or confusing.
- Announce every new feature release or existing feature change.
- Use in-app surveys to collect user feedback from within the application. Always address common pain points.
- UX microcopies should be short but descriptive. Always include relevant CTA’s to engage users.
- Take advantage of in-app live chat, video tutorials, and resource boards to provide users with the support they need while using the app.
What is Product Engagement?
Product engagement measures the level of interaction your product gets from its daily active users. It tracks how often they use your product, the depth/breadth of this usage, and how they navigate across your product.
Tracking user behavior like this allows you to understand how they use your product, what challenges they face, and how you can improve their experience. It enables you to enhance the product for even deeper engagement.
Most Common Product Engagement Mistakes
Understanding product engagement is critical to the success of any SaaS business. Higher engagement levels lead to greater product adoption and more customers.
So, how can you ensure that your adopted strategy is fail-proof? Consider 9 of the most common mistakes that may disrupt your user engagement strategy and drive down user engagement.
Mistake #1: Not collecting data on new users
Product users come from different backgrounds and use your product to fulfill their duties in different roles.
You can only satisfy a few users by taking a one-size-fits-all approach to your customer onboarding process.
Without collecting data on new users, your in-app communication cannot address most users’ pain points and satisfy their needs.
Ultimately, this causes friction while using your product, slows the user’s journey to their ‘Aha! moment, and drives down user engagement.
How to collect data from new customers and personalize communication with users
Personalize your onboarding flow to the needs of each customer to ensure customers get the most out of your product.
Essentially, you want to collect all relevant info on the user to help you identify their user type. This includes their job role, company type, and how they intend to use the application (what they hope to achieve with it).
You can do this using the signup flow just as Airtable does:
Note that asking too many questions during the signup flow may lead to friction in the signup process and cause some to abandon the process altogether.
Instead, use a few questions to identify the user’s demographic and job-to-be-done (JTBD) to determine their persona group. BacklinkManager does a great job of using the welcome screen to identify and group users:
Mistake #2: Not optimizing the first-time user experience (FTUE)
First impressions matter.
If your app is so confusing or complicated that users don’t know where to start, they may not wait long enough to get its value.
To achieve fast user activation, everything from your marketing initiatives to your onboarding flow should get users to experience the value your app provides quickly.
How to drive user engagement with a personalized first-time user experience
In addition to building a simple and intuitive product for users, you must provide them with a tailored onboarding path based on their needs.
To achieve this, your onboarding process should teach you about your customers. ConvertKit provides a great example of how in-app surveys are used to provide a branched, personalized experience:
Additionally, you may wish to guide the user every step of the way by providing them with a checklist of actions they should take to get the most out of the app.
Once again, ConvertKit does a great job of using checklists to ensure users know just what to do every step of the way:
Mistake #3: Using long product tours that confuse users
Everybody hates product tours. Why not? Product tours are typically lengthy and boring as they try to show all of the product’s features at once. By the time the tour is over, the user may not even remember how to begin.
The typical product tour fails to help the user and may even hurt rather than help your user engagement strategy. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
How to replace product tours and drive customer engagement from the start
The best way to drive customer engagement is to do away with product tours altogether. Replace clunky tooltip sequences with a more interactive walkthrough that is more granular and targeted.
Interactive walkthroughs should focus on guiding the user through using a specific feature in your product. For instance, you may only highlight a feature and its uses when the user interacts with it for the first time.
Consider this engaging interactive walkthrough example from Kommunicate below:
Mistake #4: Not guiding users to discover relevant features
Simply having a feature present in your product’s UI is no guarantee that customers will find it or even engage with it. This could be because the UI is too complex, or because visual cues aren’t used properly.
The net result is that users may abandon your product because they can’t find what they need even if it’s “right there.” To ensure that features are easy to find, you must help users find them.
How to drive feature discovery with in-app guidance
Simplifying your UI is the first step toward ensuring features are easy to find. Ensure your UI isn’t like a mechanical engineering text that’s too complex to master.
Keep features visible and easily accessible. You also want to take advantage of hotspots to drive a user’s attention to a specific part of the UI housing a cluster of features. You can customize your hotspots for efficiency using tools like Userpilot.
Another way to ensure product features are visible to users is through tooltips like the one below. A tooltip should highlight where features are and how to use them. Add CTA’s to each tooltip to better engage users.
For maximum effect, combine the use of tooltips and hotspots with feature-triggered interactive walkthroughs. Such a combination will build a smooth engagement flow and increase product adoption.
Mistake #5: Using too many in-app engagement prompts
One thing that has stood out so far is the need to provide users with guidance during their journey. However, it’s also possible to go overboard and give too much help.
For instance, this one time, I was already editing an article using a newly adopted tool when an in-app message asked me to watch a tutorial. I mean, this was unnecessary as I was already using the product.
To make matters worse, at about the same time, I noticed an NPS survey form at the bottom. Which was I to engage?
That is a typical example of poor use of in-app messaging — sending the wrong message at the wrong time. It makes no sense to the user and distracts them from using your product.
Why, for instance, would you ask a user to try generating an in-depth analytics report when they’re still setting up their account?
In both these instances, the timing is all wrong. The first came too late for the user’s journey, and the second skips too many steps ahead.
Just as annoying and distracting is the use of too many prompts which overlap and obstruct themselves. I mean, take a look at this example from Zoom. It feels like a tooltip ambush and is both unhelpful and distracting:
How to avoid cluttering the product UI with engagement prompts
Ensuring your messaging is right on time and avoiding message clutters are vital to providing an enjoyable user experience.
Use segmentation to keep your message appropriate and relevant to the user. As seen below, you can achieve this using Userpilot:
Mistake #6: Not announcing new features and product updates
Existing users are already used to using your product in a particular manner. They won’t go digging through your UI for changes.
Product changes such as sunsetting a feature or adjusting the way a feature disrupts the user’s flow, bringing them frustration and driving down engagement.
How to announce new features and updates the correct way
Communicate any new feature releases or any changes that affect the product roadmap. Let users know in advance before sunsetting a feature.
Provide feature announcements for any new releases that hold value for new and existing users. Announce it using a modal within the product.
For important (and robust) updates, provide a brief but helpful webinar that guides the user on how to engage with the feature.
Note that your modal should always come first before the user interacts with the webinar.
Mistake #7: Not collecting user feedback (or acting on it)
Friction using your product, which may lead to low engagement, can only be discovered when you collect user feedback.
Collecting user feedback is also necessary even when your product is satisfactory as it helps you to understand what drives customer satisfaction.
How to continuously collect customer feedback in-app
The best way to track customers’ sentiments is from within your app. You can do this by making a feedback widget always available within the app so that the users can give feedback anytime they want.
Jira provides a good example here, even changing the feedback survey to fit the page the user finds themselves at the time.
Alternatively, you can trigger in-app micro surveys at specific moments in the user journey and collect contextual feedback from the user.
Mistake #8: Not using the right UX microcopy
The texts of the in-app messages or surveys described in this article are part of a broader group known as the in-app microcopy. These modals, tooltips, forms, popups, and error messages combine to guide the user through their journey.
When microcopies are unclear, too lengthy, or need even more clarification, they frustrate the user journey. Similarly, microcopies without a clear CTA fail to engage users.
How to write great microcopy that drives engagement
The most important feature of a great microcopy is clarity. Keep your copy short, but ensure it is descriptive enough to be helpful.
Use tooltips to pass multiple messages on a page instead of cluttering the UI. Also, remember to conclude with a CTA to engage users.
For example, consider this helpful tooltip from Airtable. It’s short, simple, and very helpful. It could be much more effective with a CTA prompting users to create a form.
Mistake #9: Failing to provide proper in-app support
Companies today certainly realize the importance of good customer care. However, having a 24/7 support team doesn’t necessarily guarantee a frictionless service.
Users may still have to send a message and wait a few hours for a response. Such friction means the user leaves your app without achieving their goal, leading to a negative experience.
Users also typically prefer self-service support when stuck. This form of in-app support is faster and easier; It immediately provides the answers users need to keep using your product.
How to offer efficient in-app self-service support
Make support readily available from within your app. Build an in-app resource center that users can access for help on-demand. Providing a well-structured knowledge base is a great place to start, but it doesn’t have to stop there.
Include guides and tutorial videos to provide guidance on demand. Ensure easy access to live chat and support from within the app. Essentially, you want to give users all they need to come unstuck at all times.
Conclusion
Many factors work together to turn your SaaS apps into successful products. But, ensuring your users get the most value from your product is most important.
Getting more loyal customers is possible if no friction exists within the user’s journey. Customers should be able to find the features they need, get relevant guidance on using those features, and receive support on demand.
