7 best user engagement examples (and what you can learn from them)

Your product's growth and continued success are directly tied to your company's ability to engage your users. If you fail to do that, users will turn to another company that better understands their needs, and provides a better experience.

This chapter of our User Engagement guide gives you real-life user engagement examples. We break down each example to highlight why it’s great, and give you some useful tips on how to apply these methods to engage your own audience.

User engagement examples: 7 ways to engage your users

Engaged users are often happier, stay longer on your site or product, and generate more revenue for your business than inactive ones. But how can you keep your users engaged without annoying them with an overabundance of emails or notifications?

Successful companies know that their hopes of scaling their product and increasing profitability depend on the success of their user engagement strategies.

These seven user engagement examples connect with users across touchpoints in ways that go specific teams and channels. Companies like the ones in our list illustrate how to increase user engagement with a stellar strategy, which tools to use, and how to implement something similar for your own user or customer engagement strategy.

1. ClickUp celebrates milestones to engage customers at their best moments

Every type of user engagement plants a seed for long-term retention. Project management tool ClickUp does this by sending users a congratulatory message to let them know they’re a ‘verified ClickUp Power User’.

A milestone message acknowledges a noteworthy event or customer achievement. It can be:

• An email wishing a customer ‘happy birthday’ and offering a discount

• An in-app message celebrating the first time a new feature was used

• A message congratulating avid users on their one-year sign-up anniversary

Whatever type you choose, milestone messages are a fun way to engage with users and remind them why they love to use the app, product, or service in the first place. Try this:

2. Techsmith built a more interactive product experience to engage users

There are many factors that affect user engagement, including creating an engaging user experience (UX), highlighting your product’s unique value, and the quality and relevance of your user journey. 

Knowing which factors to focus on to boost user engagement involves keeping a close eye on where your users are disengaged vs delighted, so you know what to prioritize and change.

Software company Techsmith uses Hotjar to understand their users, identify broad opportunities for improvement, and build better products that keep them engaged.

For example, the UX team used Heatmaps to redesign one of their main product pages. Click and scroll maps showed them that users were more likely to click on the category image instead of the product name, so they decided to make the whole area of their page clickable to prevent rage-clicks. The result? A more interactive product experience and less frustrated users! Try this for yourself:

3. Revolut uses automated follow-ups to engage with their users

Engagement is a two-way street. It doesn’t just mean your users are engaging with your brand or product. You need to engage back. 

If your users take the time to connect with your business, you need to take the time to communicate with them as well. Mobile banking app Revolut does this by using an automated process.

For Revolut Business, they use triggered event responses to deliver email messaging, in-app notifications, and other types of follow-ups. Since fintech has the highest engagement rates for push notifications, this keeps users up-to-date, active, and connected with the product. Try this for yourself:

4. Duolingo offers a personalized onboarding experience 

Truly engaging experiences go beyond just adding the [FIRST NAME] tag at the end of an email subject line. The most successful companies use personalization to tailor their UX to users' specific needs. 

Language app Duolingo uses personalization to deliver more meaningful experiences to users during their onboarding. The process directs new users through personalized onboarding funnels tailored to different levels of experience. This removes the friction of learning a new language and ultimately makes the app a great fit for a wider range of users. 

Duolingo's product onboarding is aimed at boosting the customer experience and helping users reach their goals.

Users are constantly gravitating toward the brands that recognize them as individuals at every step of their experience—according to Salesforce, about 52% of customers expect offers to always be personalized. Here are two ways to meet and exceed your customers' expectations:

5. Spotify maps out the customer journey to turn users into customers

Creating a customer journey map is a keystone to great user engagement. It puts you in your users shoes to help you understand their experience with your product or service—what your users think, feel, and do at each stage of their buying journey.

In terms of user engagement, music streaming app Spotify is probably best known for their famous ‘Spotify Wrapped’ emails that recap a user’s listening and playlist habits from the past year.

However, their user engagement and marketing strategy is more than just milestone messaging and gamification. By mapping the user journey, Spotify zeroed in on clearly defined user personas. That way, they could identify key areas of user engagement, with a focus on users’ emotions and thoughts at each stage.

As a result, Spotify improved their user interface (UI) and in-app flows to streamline the UX and make every touchpoint relevant to how real people use the product. They could then follow up with a personalized value proposition and keep their value add short and sweet: music curated for you, based on your listening habits. Try this for your business:

6. Whole Foods leverages chatbot capabilities to engage users

Starting on the right foot can set the groundwork for a long, happy, and engaging relationship with your users. 

82% of consumers want immediate responses when they have a question. Unfortunately, that's not always possible: customer support agents might not be available 24/7 to welcome new users, invite them to chat, or offer special deals to increase brand loyalty. This can push potential and existing customers away from your product or service, which is when a chatbot makes perfect sense.

Marketing automation and AI, like chatbots, are becoming a more popular tool for companies looking to boost their user engagement. Chatbots can reduce users’ frustration by providing immediate answers to visitors, suggesting relevant FAQ articles, or transferring the requests to live agents, if needed. 

Retailer Whole Foods’s chatbot, for example, sends customized recipes based on users' responses. People can use emojis, phrases, or ingredients to discover new meals. The best part? It's integrated directly in their social media page, through the Facebook Messenger app. 

The Whole Foods chatbot is a great example of user engagement done right, meeting users where they are—no app download or trigger required. It’s a powerful way to engage their target audience, tackle the power of social media, and promote engaging user content, all while using minimal resources. Try this for your business:

7. Sephora takes action on user feedback

When it comes to fine-tuning how users engage with your product, there’s nothing quite like hearing feedback directly from them.

Beauty retailer Sephora engages customers both at an ecommerce and offline level, through their brick-and-mortar stores. Online, the company actively solicits user feedback with a quick survey question to gauge how customers feel after their interaction with a chatbot or team member.

Surveys are a great way to capture feedback via the same channel, rather than sending a follow-up email, reducing friction for the user and increasing the likelihood of response.

Exit surveys—presented to your visitors when they're about to leave your website—are a great way to gain insights from your bouncing or non-converting audience. You can get valuable insights and use them to perfect your engagement effort. 

Once you’ve collected exit intent data, put what you’ve learned into action by:

• Prioritizing critical updates based on a persistent cause of churn

• Finding preferences across segments to reveal what each audience prioritizes, and how to tailor designs and flows

• Fixing problem pages and recurring issues before they get out of control

Having the option to trigger the survey just before a visitor leaves means you can get the opinion of a user who just finished engaging with your product. In other words, you’ll get qualified feedback that can help you make accurate decisions and tactical moves to improve your conversion rate. Try this for yourself:

Next steps in user engagement

User engagement works when you know everything that matters about your users: when, how, and why they use your product or service. 

None of the user engagement examples in this list have been successful without in-depth data. Product experience insights tools like Hotjar's allow you to gather the data that matters across all channels—to personalize experiences, encourage user or customer interactions, and reward people in a way that matters.