Engagement strategies
Why is engagement important? Because non-engaged users are much more likely to churn. If they’re not using the product, why should they stick around? Zombies users (eg those that forgot or are too lazy to cancel) do not make for a good business.
If engagement is desirable, how do we increase it? There are four main strategies:
- More frequency
- More intensity
- More features
- More use cases
Reasoning about each strategy
We will dive into each approach in more detail, but first, how do we pick between these to inform what we build? We need to have a strong hypothesis about why users use the product.
While building and promoting novel features may attract new users, without understanding the users’ relationship with the product, those users may not become highly engaged and retained users.
Similarly for frequency and intensity, if a user has to login multiple times to accomplish the same objective, they may appear highly engaged but are actually frustrated from the poor user experience.
Adding too many use-cases may confuse users and dilute the brand. For example, a restaurant serving both Indian food and burgers should technically appeal to a larger audience, but likely will have trouble staying top of mind in either category.
In all cases, it’s important for us to ensure we are improving the product for the target user group, rather than just improving the engagement metric.
1. More frequency
Encourage users to perform the key behaviors more frequenty. A sample metric might be tweets published per day.
2. More intensity
Encourge users to spend more time, money, or other resource on your product. For example, Netflix might want users to watch more hours of content. Clash of Clans might encourage users to spend more per microtransaction.
3. More features
We can also drive engagement by adding features. For example, a text chat app could add support for GIFs or emojis.
4. More use cases
A final way to increase engagement is to open up the product to new use cases. For example, Uber could add the commuter use case, in addition to the get-to-the-airport use case. In contrast with adding features, adding use cases is about solving a significantly different problem for the end user.
In practice
Real product teams have to weigh these considerations against each other; rarely is the correct approach obvious. These strategies are often interrelated, especially as the product grows and goes after multiple personas. Running many experiments with clear success metrics is the best way to validate these assumptions (as opposed to “intuition”). The results of these experiements will inform which strategy to undertake next.