User Engagement 101
The difference between friends and acquaintances is in your habits and depth of communication. A friend is a part of your everyday life. You often talk and meet with them. While an acquaintance is someone you may only meet with occasionally.
Get to know with User Engagement?
In business, customers are more like close friends than acquaintances. You want to stay connected with them and be a part of their story every day. This kind of deeper connection can be found by leveraging what is known as “user engagement” or user interaction.
In short, user interaction is the relationship between a company and users that is built through communication.
Why does User Engagement important?
There are strong reasons why user engagement is so important for business because overall this will be related to company profitability.
- User attention to a service or product is of a limited nature and when users deliberately spend long periods of time on the site or app it indicates that users found what they were looking for. Of course, that way businesses can direct users to buy, use, and subscribe to the products or services provided.
- Usually, active users show engagement because they experience customer satisfaction, so they often recommend products to their friends or family. To find out how high the level of user engagement is, the marketing team can use analytical products to find out what factors make the value of user engagement high. The CRM team can also make a strategy from this data about how the company will increase product profitability in the future.
How to calculate User Engagement?
How to find out the value of user engagement for each business is different. For example, in the media business, it is a positive thing if many users visit online news sites because it will bring lots of advertisements. Conversely, for insurance companies, if too many users visit the site, it is a bad sign because there may be many insurance users who submit claims.
Examples of user engagement metrics seen from several businesses:
- Music streaming applications see user engagement from the number of daily users, time spent in the application, playlists created, provide recommendations for friends, and songs that are listened to
- E-commerce. The form of user engagement metrics can be calculated from the number of monthly users, as well as how many items are put in the cart
- News site, its metrics can be the value of the number of daily users, how long they were on the site, views, searches, content sharing activity, clicks, and comments
- The financial application is seen from the number of weekly users, creating a budget, synchronizing bank accounts to viewing the dashboard, and activating notifications
To calculate user engagement, you can use the formula below:
Total active users in a group during a certain period: Total users in one group = Engagement rate
There are also tools that could help you to count user engagement:
- Userpilot: the best all in one tool for analyzing behavior, collecting feedback & communicating with users
- Heap: for analyzing user behavior
- Mixpanel: Analyzing behavior, communicating with users
- Google Analytics: Analyzing click per post rate
Increasing User Engagement
There are various ways to increase user engagement that companies can use, such as:
- Communicate with users
Product and marketing teams can ask users directly what they expect through the product or service provided. Maybe users want to provide information about their customer experience while using a product or service, express complaints or suggestions. The team can find out this from a customer satisfaction survey given to users or through the NPS method.
- Find out what customers find valuable
How to increase user engagement can then be seen by knowing what customers think is valuable from the product or service offered. Usually, it talks about how useful or useful the app or site is to them. The product team can then group them into actions that they always repeat via the app or website. Then take a common thread from these activities which are often done.
- Increase product usability
One of the valuable things a business is looking for users is the usefulness or benefits of the product itself. That’s why this is a very important way to increase the last user engagement. The product team can find out the shortcomings of product benefits through the difficulties experienced by users during the customer journey process. An example is the case of an e-commerce platform, such as when a customer cannot buy a product because he has to create an account first. The solution for product enhancement that can be offered by the company is allowing these users to buy products even though they are still on the status of a guest or foreigner even with the ease of paying online.
An ordinary user can be a loyal customer if they are satisfied enough with the given product. They would like to repurchase over and over again. It become habit for the to buy or use the product.
Real Case Studies: Retaining User
You’ve read the explanation about user engagement, but how does improving user engagement can affect the usage of an application? Let’s take a case in the real life. For example, Gojek that connected to Gopay.
Pretty sure Indonesian are familiar with Gojek and its e-wallet, Gopay. This is one of many ways to engage users. In this case, Gojek creates a loyal user by connecting Gojek with Gopay. It gives advantages such as cashback and cashless transaction for users who uses Gopay. On the other side, id there is money left on Gopay and not being used, users will feel a loss so they will continue to use gopay. This causes users to top up more and more Gopay.
Another case is Tokopedia and its Tokopoints. If you are using Tokopedia, and ever use promos on Tokopedia, you can get Tokopoints which only valid on Tokopedia. In this case, the user will repurchase at Tokopedia because of the Tokopoints they’ve earned. Tokopedia takes this opportunity to retain users and make loyal customers.
The last case is on my own PPL project. We use Bank Jelantah balance to keep them using the app. They can sell their used oil and exchange it to Bank Jelantah balance or to cash. Users can also transfer Bank Jelantah balance to another user or change it to cash.
Perhaps the examples above clear enough how user engagement could be a benefit to a company and how important it was. User engagement is not only about how many clicks an application gets, but also about how loyal a customer could be.
Source:
