The key to success for every SaaS product is to keep your customers engaged. Of course it’s very important to acquire new leads and attract the attention of your target market, but if you lose them very quickly, all your previous efforts could be in vain. Luckily, you can measure your customer engagement with some useful metrics that will help you assess where you are currently standing, what you can improve and what your strengths are.
We’re on our third startup and we’ve learned that launching a SaaS product is not as easy as it seems. We’ve also learned the most valuable resource is our customer engagement metrics.
Thought you may see the value of your product and know how to use it, your view is always skewed. Growing your user base organically and making sure they keep engaged is the key to your success. No amount of marketing and advertising dollars can fix a product that does not resonate with users at first login. To outperform, you must make quick changes and be completely in-tune to what customers like and don’t like before little mistakes drive potential users away.
During your initial launch and in your growth stage, your whole team’s eyes should be on one thing: data. More specifically, customer engagement metrics. Keeping track of and acting on the right customer engagement metrics is key to the success of your product.
Here are the customer engagement metrics you should be tracking:
Session Time.
You may be nailing your marketing strategy and plenty of potential customers may be logging in, but are they staying logged in? Session time is your earliest indication you need to make changes to keep users engaged.
What’s great is that with just a few users, this metric can tell you a lot. An appropriate session time may vary. Certain SaaS products require users to be heavily connected to create the right engagement (for example a company chat), while others don’t need such a long session time by user. In this case, checking where your users are their session, might be a good indicator of the specific features they are using.
You can also compare your team’s session times with new users. This will tell you whether users really understand your product like you and your team or if they are lost on how to really use it.
Frequency of Return Users.
Are your users creating that first account, going through your onboarding process, and then forgetting about you? If they don’t feel compelled to log back in everyday, how valuable really is your product?
Again, accounts created become a vanity metric when you look at long term value from this perspective. Marketing dollars go to waste when the frequency of return users starts low and gets lower and lower over time. It costs 5 times more to acquire new customers than to retain the existing ones.
You want returning users into your SaaS product. A effective onboarding process is vital for users to grasp the value of your product right away and keep coming back!
Frequency of return users is even more important after they create an account. That’s when they need to incorporate your product into their usual processes to ensure a long-term relationship with them.
This metric is also useful for later in growth stages when you start making changes to design or adding features. Depending on your product, your paid users may not connect on a daily basis. To make sure they are aware of all your product changes you can implement a chagelog combined with push notifications. Keeping your users updated is key to keep them engaged. Learn more about how to use a changelog to announce new features here.
User Actions.
What users do and where they navigate within your product is a great indicator of the value they are getting or what features they use the most.
This is particularly important if you add new features: it’s important not to assume all will go as planned and they will be well adopted. Keeping a close eye on user actions can help you narrow down any problematic spots or points of frustration. This metric can help you drill down the specifics of what is and what isn’t seen as useful and valuable within your product, helping you to streamline and improve without the guesswork. Sometimes the features and functionalities that you may not necessarily think are the selling point are the most valuable and vice versa. Learn more about how to increase new features adoption for SaaS here.
With Beamer, you can announce a new feature and see exactly how many clicks and opens you’re getting from users.
You can also get direct feedback and reactions from your users with a simple ranking and comments. Users are very likely to give you feedback with such an intuitive system.
Net Promoter Score.
Net Promoter Score or NPS is a great measure of customer engagement and loyalty. This metric determines how likely your current customers are to recommend you (and how happy they are).
This can be collected through in-app surveys or email. However, the first option is more likely to have a better response rate, as you are asking your users in context and while they are using your app.
Your current customers, especially when your initial user base is small, are your biggest marketing asset. They can do a better job than anyone on your team at getting your product in front of the right eyes. The leads they bring in are the highest quality possible. Making sure this score is high means guaranteeing exponential growth and long term marketing benefits. Learn more about how to improve your SaaS NPS score here.
Daily Active Users vs Monthly Active Users.
Daily active users can be considered a vanity metric, meaning they hold no real weight in determining value. If you’re dumping enough into ads, these can be easy to make this look good. It might as well be “trials started today”. But to really understand what’s going on with your product, you can determine your stickiness, or how well your product is “sticking” with customers, by comparing your daily active users with your monthly active users. Are users sticking around or falling off within that first month? If you’re seeing a sharp decline, it’s time to look at ways to show your daily value to your users.
Comparing daily active users with monthly active users is another way of measuring your user engagement and returning users.
Week 1 Customer Engagement Metrics.
Connected to Daily active and monthly active users, is Week 1 user engagement. Week 1 user engagement is a vital metric that can tell you a lot about where you’re going wrong in getting users hooked.
Usually, if users don’t adopt your product within the first week of creating an account, it’s exponentially hard to get them back from there. Having this metric strong is a good indicator for effortless success. It’s not worth the marketing dollars to be sending leads to a product that does not convert them into long term customers.
Week 1 engagement determines how well your user experience hooks users, how intuitive onboarding is, and overall how excited new users are about your product.
Tackling all of these metrics and working out how to improve them definitely isn’t easy. If you’re looking for a way to track user engagement and actions, and also increase user engagement with your product, we created a solution while trying to solve this problem on our own.
How Beamer can help with customer engagement metrics.
Beamer is an in-app changelog that lets users know about features you’ve added and improvements you’ve made. Beamer tracks your users reaction to new features and changes while also increasing their engagement more than email, or in-app messages. You can use Beamer’s user segmentation to send the relevant updates to the right users.
Introducing users to consistent improvement is a great way to improve user engagement, increase NPS score and build stronger relationships with users overall. Companies using Beamer have seen 10x more user engagement. Try Beamer on your site to increase your user engagement.
Check out the our new article to learn about 6 ways to improve customer engagement and reduce churn.
