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

Your product should capture the attention of your users and keep them engaged for the long haul. When mastered, user engagement becomes part of every touchpoint with potential and current customers—keeping them interested in your brand and encouraging them to take action.

Last updated

7 Nov 2022

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8 min

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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.

Get a detailed view of how your users engage with your product

Hotjar helps you understand your users to create and improve products that keep them engaged.

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?

When users engage with your product or service, it’s the first piece falling to create a domino effect of success for your brand. 

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’.

#ClickUp notifies users by email when they’ve reached a customer milestone
ClickUp notifies users by email when they’ve reached a customer milestone

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:

Congratulate your best users for regularly using your product or achieving certain milestones
Show users that you care as much about them on day 100 as you did on day 1
Remind people of the value they’re gaining from your business—and why they should remain loyal customers

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.

#A Hotjar Heatmap in the Techsmith dashboard
A Hotjar Heatmap in the Techsmith dashboard

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:

Make user-centric design decisions—like adjusting the style of your page, including its language, layout type, and item placement—to help users easily access all the information they need and improve their product experience (PX)
Test out different product page designs with Hotjar's Heatmaps to see which attract more engagement—and ask users why with Surveys
Get more comprehensive insights about your most important user segments by filtering and carrying out a targeted analysis of their behavior

Pro tip: filter continuous heatmaps by specific criteria like device, browser, user path, or user attribute to see how different types of visitors behave and engage with your product.

#Filters help you compare the behavior of different user segments across heatmaps

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.

#The Revolut Business app keeps users engaged by notifying them to fill in expense information
The Revolut Business app keeps users engaged by notifying them to fill in expense information

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:

Use personalized follow-ups and notifications to grow the relationship with your users and increase customer satisfaction
Tailor and automate messaging based on behavioral data, and prompt users to re-engage with triggered messaging
Provide real-time information, reminders, and messages about new features to create value and boost customer loyalty

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 prompts new users to indicate their level of expertise, and then test their aptitude before learning a new language. Source

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:

Deliver personalized UX to deliver more relevant, useful, and delightful experiences to users
Use dynamic content (like adding a user’s first name to their dashboard) and event-driven automation (like choose-your-own-adventure self-segmentation) to personalize user experiences

Pro tip: monitor user recordings to improve engagement during onboarding.

Onboarding is a multistep process, and it can be easy for users to get frustrated and abandon it midway.

When their onboarding rates dropped from 75% to 37%, education startup ClassHero’s sales manager used Hotjar’s Session Recordings to uncover a glitch in their process.

By watching playbacks of user sessions on their website, they saw flustered users that were prompted by thousands of zip code results—many of them giving up and leaving the site. A quick redesign of the zip code field solved the problem and got users engaged again in just a week.

Hotjar Session Recordings led the ClassHero team to an almost instantaneous solution to their user engagement problem

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.

#Spotify’s user flow map focuses on one feature only
Spotify’s user flow map focuses on one feature only

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:

Build relationships with engaged customers by creating relevant experiences and satisfying individual needs
Engage users where they are to seamlessly guide them through the user journey and product lifecycle
Present a unique value proposition by focusing on what the users get out of it

Pro tip: use Hotjar Surveys to collect real-time suggestions—from real-life users—about your website or app to make data-driven decisions and validate assumptions that inform and elevate your customer journey map.

Hotjar’s no-code UI makes it easy to create drag-and-drop surveys

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. 

#Users can tap into a recipe database from their phones and use AI to converse with a robot chef
Users can tap into a recipe database from their phones and use AI to converse with a robot chef

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:

Use marketing automation and AI to help users quickly realize the value of your product or service, while resolving any issues that may arise
Leverage speed and personalization by having multiple options for your customer base (like chat, phone, or email) and automatically transferring people to the right agent or documentation to avoid long wait times or bottlenecks

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.

#Sephora uses their Live Beauty Help feature to solicit user feedback
Sephora uses their Live Beauty Help feature to solicit user feedback

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.

By collecting feedback, you make users feel special and important, especially when an interaction elicits a strong emotional 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:

Set up feedback mechanisms to quickly learn if, when, and where users are struggling
Solicit feedback with a prompts functionality on the same platform to get contextual data
Compare average feedback scores on every page and discover the most problematic parts of the user experience

Pro tip: find out why people leave your website, app, or product.

Bounce rates and exit intent responses help you spot recurring issues, but sometimes you need more context. Session Recordings reveal how users experience your product, so you can determine what’s causing the problem. 

Look for patterns of user behavior—did they navigate erratically? Did they miss an important link? Did they encounter a bug? Answer these questions, and you’ll know what needs improving.

A Hotjar Session Recording in action

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.

Get a detailed view of how your users engage with your product

Hotjar helps you understand your users to create and improve products that keep them engaged.

FAQs about user engagement examples