25 Customer Engagement Ideas to Jumpstart Customer Success

Do you ever struggle to come up with new customer engagement ideas?

It’s one thing to understand the importance of user engagement, but implementing the strategy and creating relevant touchpoints for your users can be a daunting task. Supporting customer success through engagement can help your team learn about your users’ needs, goals, and opinions, build the relationship, and aid in driving value. With all the possibilities, though, you may not know where to start.

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Below we’ve compiled an extensive list of different customer engagement ideas that you can start using in your own business today.

Grouping Customer Engagement Ideas by Stage

One way to make the task of creating and implementing customer engagement points is to consider each phase in the customer journey. By looking at a single phase at a time, you’ll be able to hone in on what customer success looks like in the moment. Knowing what a customer wants to achieve and where they might face hurdles provides a clear path for creating engagements.

Customer engagement also becomes much easier when you automate alerts that signal a touchpoint and customer in need of attention. Your customer success team’s to-do list will be much more focused and productive when they receive messages about decreasing health scores, dramatic changes in activity, uncompleted actions, and more.

Awareness & consideration

During the awareness and consideration phases, potential users are doing exploratory research to put a name to their problems and understand their options. Here you should focus on education.

Create niche-specific content

Content that is related to a person’s industry or niche is automatically more engaging. Create blog posts, webinars, and guides that help them begin to form opinions about how to best solve the issues at hand.

Share lead-generating content on social media

Next up, share your niche-specific and lead-generating content on social media. Use your platforms for conversation, too. Instead of talking at followers or sharing content for the sake of being “present” on social, respond to and seek out potential users to have conversations with and/or learn from.

Offer live chat on your website

As potential users move from the consideration to decision phase, it’s useful to enable live chat on your site. 63% of customers are more likely to return to a website that offers live chat, and it can be a powerful conversion tool. Live chat can help point people in the direction of the solution they need or answer any questions they have about the product.

Decision & purchase

During the decision and purchase stages, your engagements are focused on quelling any doubts and pointing out any last minute details.

Offer a product demo

The value of a product demo goes both ways. One one hand, potential users get to see the service in action. On the other, sales team members begin to establish a relationship with the customer and learn about their goals and needs. Information gathered here can be used to create engagements later that are tailored to those goals and needs.

Retarget return visitors with info or trial

If having a live chat makes it more likely that people will return to your site, you better have a plan to retarget them. A simple pop-up message, like the one we use below, picks up where the user left off and allows us to maintain a throughline in conversations with prospective users.  

Adoption

Thorough customer onboarding and product adoption are absolutely critical to the long-term success of your customers. It’s no surprise then that there we have plenty of ideas in this section.

Survey new users to assess goals and needs

Asking new users what they want to accomplish is important. You can learn this through person-to-person communication with the customer success team, through a short questionnaire, or through in-app survey engagements based on their segment.

Send onboarding emails to prompt engagement

Messages to users need to happen when and where they’re most needed. That means that engagements should be set up both in and out of your app. Onboarding emails act as a catalyst to get them into the product and should be centered on educating the user on how to perform a task or how to gain more value from the platform.

Welcome messages

Give users a warm welcome after they sign up or when they first log in. Whether this happens in an email or in-app, point out resources and make them feel a part of the community.

First-login feature introduction

Set users up for success as quickly as possible by pointing out top features the first time they log in. These one-page in-app modules are short and digestible. In UserIQ, we deliver a series of first-login engagements, a few of which you can check out in our user engagement templates.

Guided product tours

Not only do users need to know which features are most relevant to them, but they also need to learn how to use them. Guided product tours show new users the ropes on the features that will move them to their “WOW” moments. (If you’re really good, you can segment new users by role or tier to offer tours tailored specifically for them.)

Error announcement

While feature introductions and guided product tours introduce users to a feature, error announcements give them a boost to see a task through. These engagements point out the actions that need their attention or input, like updating account settings or connecting an integration.

High-fives and progress bars

Learning a new tool and incorporating it into your workflow is hard work and, in most cases, requires enabling change management. High-five engagements and progress bars celebrate progress made and provide an emotional boost to keep going.

Blank state

Blank state engagements are yet another way to guide users through new tools or tasks. When a customer encounters a feature that isn’t populated with their information yet (perhaps due to a missing setting or integration), provide simple instructions for activating the feature or work around the missing info.

Tooltips

Sometimes you need to provide extra information or clarification about a feature in a more subtle way. In these cases, tooltips can call attention or give further detail in a non-intrusive way.

Retention

While adoption is the first milestone for customer success, there’s still work to be done. Use the customer engagement ideas below to keep users engaged for the long haul.

Triggered emails for churn risks

Use automated alerts to send emails that address customers at risk for churn. While tooltips and tours work within your app to point out useful features, emails can point to resources that help a user work through a feature they’re struggling with, or present a new use case to get disengaged users back into the app.

In-app and email surveys

While we’ve grouped surveys together in this point, they come in all shapes and sizes. Surveys can be sent via email or launched in-app to collect either quantitative or qualitative information. Retention stage surveys can be NPS or CSAT surveys.

Micro-feedback

While surveys can cover a wide range of topics, micro-feedback captures user sentiment about a specific feature in the moment. A micro-feedback survey could consist of a simple happy, sad, or neutral face. By asking a user’s opinion on the feature they’re currently using, you can capture real-time thoughts.   

Expansion

Why strive for a retained customer when you could have a growing customer? These expansion engagement ideas keep users up to date with new features.

New feature announcements

Go ahead, tell customers about the latest and greatest your product has to offer. It’s helpful to foster cross-communication between marketing and CS so that users don’t receive update alerts about features they’re already struggling with.

Release notes

In-app pop-up messages are also useful for summarizing releases. By giving a high-level review within the app, users will be able to quickly explore the new features or updates that interest them most.

Advocacy

Customers that have been gaining consistent value from your product for a while can become powerful advocates.

NPS

Deploying Net Promoter Score surveys within your app help you identify your advocates and detractors. And, because they’re delivered right inside your platform, you’ll have much higher response rates for a better picture of your entire customer base. 

Referral CTA

Once you’ve identified the users that are excited to vouch for your product, send them an in-app alert about your referral program. You can also follow up with an email that is easy to share.

Ask for user-generated content

Use email or social media to ask users to send in their photos, reviews, and stories to share with your community. This type of advocacy is an excellent way to boost word-of-mouth referrals.

Create a customer community

Setting up a community, such as a Slack channel or Facebook group, for your customers can foster peer-to-peer sharing. Customers can help each other with shared issues, and you can watch and engage to learn more about user goals and preferences.

Establish a customer advisory board

A customer advisory board is a group of invested users who can give you a new perspective on strategies and ideas.

Winback

The customer journey doesn’t have to end when a customer churns.

Winback emails

Of course, it doesn’t make sense to send out in-app messages to lapsed customers. Instead, send them emails that entice them to come back; for example, let them know if you’ve added a feature that had been missing for them before.

No matter which customer engagement idea you choose to implement, there are a few key elements that can make them more effective. First, segmenting customers help you deliver a more personalized experience at scale. Data is another crucial element to customer engagement. By using data to understand customer behavior, you can provide targeted engagements.

Do you have any customer engagement ideas that aren’t on the list?