Most SaaS solutions are built on subscriptions. Their viability is determined by the number of customers willing to renew their membership. If a consumer is not engaged enough, they are likely to forget about your product amidst the tens of others they use daily (until they get a notification of automatic monthly payment).

What is User Engagement, why is it important?

Assuming that the word “User Engagement” is self-explanatory, you’ll be amazed at how many definitions there are. Let’s avoid making things too complicated. We’ll go on to the details later and just assume it is self-explanatory for the time being.

User Engagement is more fragile than monthly revenue or subscriber count. It is more difficult to quantify, yet it has the same influence on product performance as other more “tangible” elements.

What factors influence a high Engagement Score?

While certain SaaS indicators have clear, standardised criteria, User Engagement is variable, and each company must set its standards. Here is how several models of consumer involvement operate.

• The User Engagement score may be used to determine how successful the most recent design upgrade was. Also,
  you can discover which user demographics are less active and decide which ones to target.
• An “Engagement Activity” is sometimes called “Receiving Value.” It would be an order for a pizza delivery service and
  an upload or download for a file exchange business.
• Frequency here helps to specify how routinely the product is used. Let’s assume you occasionally binge-watch
  three movies in a single day. According to this algorithm, a user who sees 1 movie each week would have a higher
  Engagement Score.
• Assigning individual activities a point value will make the formula more thorough. Instead of counting the number of
  actions, compute the total of the points. As an illustration, earning 5 points for finishing a movie, 1 point for adding
  it to your playlist, and 3 points for submitting a review.
• Be aware that great customer involvement does not always equate to high customer loyalty and a low churn rate.
  According to InnerTrends, a product analytics platform, organisations lose around 10% of their highly engaged
  consumers on a monthly basis.
• User Engagement should just be one of a few measures used to gauge a product’s performance in light of this.

User Engagement metrics for SaaS products

Some measurements could be useful for one product while completely useless for another, depending on the latter’s peculiarities. This list is a starting point for constructing your User Engagement monitoring system, not a full guide.

Session time

This would be an appropriate statistic for social media since mastering the art of stealing users’ time, and attention is essential for success. On the other hand, increased session time might indicate a complex UX design, not “an engaging application.”

Use of key characteristics

Usage can be counted by the number of actions users take or by utilizing the frequency calculation mentioned above. The unique feature of this statistic is that it can produce many results. For example, you may assess the effectiveness of various features and determine which ones are more frequently utilized.

Maybe you’ll see that some of the features aren’t needed. Or perhaps you never use it as it’s buried deep in the menu? Or perhaps they only utilize features unrelated to the premium tier? Measuring the use of important features independently can provide several responses.

The quantity of results

If your product is a music streaming service, the number of tracks added to playlists may be used to measure customer engagement. You decide your product’s “outcomes” by setting them yourself: quantity of files, messages, likes, and documents. Make sure it is a vanity metric directly tied to user interaction.

Vanity metrics

Those indicators that appear spectacular but don’t truly provide useful information about the firm are known as “Vanity Metrics,” according to Eric Ries.

According to Nielsen Norman Group, the total number of page views is a vanity statistic if we want to assess user engagement. It could happen as a result of your product becoming featured on a well-known news website, and frequently this measure has little to do with the team’s capabilities.

Effective suggestions to improve User Engagement

• Offer live chat assistance
• Pay attention to the product experience
• Make every consumer communication channel unique
• Develop interactive and interesting content, and then fine-tune the features of your products depending on customer feedback
• Use an omnichannel strategy
• Gamification may be used to boost engagement
• Consult your users. Who could engage them more effectively than the users themselves? Use surveys, one-on-one interviews, and focus groups. You can’t understand which User Engagement boosting ideas would be effective and which wouldn’t unless you put them into practice without asking them, “how do you prefer we engage you?”