Customer engagement isn't simply a thing you can put on the blast mode. It's more about making it personal, smart, and timely.
That's why you're considering customer engagement automation in the first place: It could change how you connect to your audience.
This guide will show you how to move away from the old playbook and use smart automation to build customer relationships that stick and improve customer satisfaction (without dumping all your money on operational costs).
Let's take it from the top layer of scoring loyal customers...
Customer engagement automation is the process of using technology (like a customer engagement platform) to draw in and engage customers, no matter what lifecycle stage they're at.
When you automate customer engagement, you can expect two things:
Automation is often mistaken for personalization. The two have distinct, yet complementary roles.
Automation is what drives it all. It regulates repetitive tasks and helps you avoid human errors like stuff falling through the cracks.
Personalization is what fuels the driver. It lets you customize every customer touchpoint, content, tone, and timing to individual customers' unique needs, preferences, and behaviors.
But while you can automate personalization too, automation isn't meant to replace human connection.
Rather, it enhances it, freeing YOUR time. So if you run a SaaS company, you'll need automation to provide automated, custom onboarding tutorials, send check-in messages when users slow down product usage, or simply for upselling.
The benefits don't stop here.
Say your business has just started seeing an increased growth in users, but you don't yet have customer engagement automation in place.
New users will sign up, only to ultimately fumble through the platform.
Why? You probably didn't set up personalized onboarding, in-app training, or custom implementation to match specific teams' needs.
When you don't allow automation to play its part, your customers will lose the benefits of custom onboarding and even miss out on key product/feature updates or options to maximize value and engage with.
The results? They might just drift off the platform unnoticed.
Your customer support team will also struggle. Support tickets can quickly stack up. Meanwhile, the rest of the team will be stuck manually onboarding, educating, or struggling to retain users.
Users nowadays want more. More personalization. More of the right message at the right time.
71% of customers expect personalized interactions with businesses. And when other businesses deliver such personalized customer experiences, you'll be left behind.
Customers' expectations continue to evolve because the "personal touch" is now the new norm. Customer engagement automation meets these new expectations head-on by:
To put it all into perspective, we're having a closer look at the advantages of automating your customer engagement strategy:
When automating customer engagement, onboarding goes from a sink-or-swim state to an outstanding experience.
For example, a SaaS project management tool could use automation to send a welcome email to new users with a video tutorial, followed by a drip campaign showing key features like project creation or Kanban boards.
Here, automation shortens time-to-value by "nudging" users to explore and adopt core functionality. This way, the user doesn't abandon your platform just because they're confused with the interface or you're throwing too much information at them.
New users need to stay involved. Using automation is the best way to recognize and remind all users when they disengage so you can get them back before it's too late.
Let’s take a fitness app as an example:
If a user hasn't logged a single workout in a week, you can send them an automated push notification to remind them of their last workout. A motivational message or progress tracker goes a long way to bring them into your app once more.
Note that you'll only get to keep this benefit if the in-app experience delivers upon your promise. If you don't fix the issues that cause people to leave, your re-engagement efforts won't cut it.
Got a smaller team? You have a big advantage! Automation instantly allows you to manage loads of users without needing extra employees.
For instance, if you've got only five people on your growth team, you can still automate it all—from lead nurturing emails to in-app tips and reminders for renewals.
Yes, you can actually deliver a custom message to every single one of your users through automation.
If you want (and you should) to ditch blast emails, you can use automation to build a more cohesive messaging flow: an email announcing a new security feature, an in-app banner for active users, and a social media push for trial users. All three messages will maintain the same tone and go out at the exact time you set.
Let's break down how customer engagement wins by looking at what goes into successful customer relationships:
While in-app tips or tutorials do give you in-the-moment support, they won't reach users who left the app before engagement with your content was complete. An in-app and out-of-app communication plan will ensure users don't just leave.
On the opposite end, siloed messaging leads to disjointed experiences and lower customer satisfaction.
A user may view an in-app prompt suggesting they try a specific feature of your site with no intended action taken to reinforce their experience later. Later, without an email or push notification to engage them, their initial experience disappears.
Let's put it this way: Collaborating across channels enhances your influence and even your brand reputation.
In-app messages encourage the user when they most need it.
Emails or push notifications re-engage users to continue momentum.
Consider a simple example: An in-app onboarding flow displays a tooltip to help users create a new project. A day later, a follow-up email with a video tutorial and CTA to continue enabling the dashboard section arrives.
Together, they encourage the user.
Multi-channel messaging with Appcues creates more cohesive experiences by bridging the gap between in-app behavior and out-of-app engagement—no engineers needed.
But how should you use customer engagement tools to make the most out of customer data and automate workflows? Here's a six-step process for using your marketing automation software correctly:
Identify gaps and redundancies in messaging.
Are new users receiving onboarding emails but lacking any guidance in the app? That's a gap.
Are they receiving duplicate "welcome" messages through an email notification and an app notification? That's redundancy.
Go through and determine when messaging goes silent (e.g. after a user drops off after their trial) or duplicates unnecessarily (e.g. multiple nudges about the same feature, etc).
Dig into more customer data to review performance metrics and customer journey maps to check how touchpoints correspond to relevant phases. If you can prove elevated churn rates occur after sign-up, when no engagement cues were offered, you know your starting point.
Recognize major moments that influence the customer experience. Automate onboarding to direct newly signed-up users toward their "aha" moment.
For instance, a well-designed workflow could trigger in-app tips and a welcome email for new users. For feature launches, try scheduling announcements and tutorials to encourage users to discover new features.
Find moments that will move you closer to your goals, rather than just help you score the low-hanging fruits. Once you identify high-impact moments in the user journey, connect those moments to the user journey.
Use product usage data to improve user engagement through targeted messaging. User behaviors that mark important events include logins, feature usage, or the completion of a task.
Once you find these trigger behaviors, you can start automating timely and relevant messaging that's more likely to resonate with the user's context.
Take this raw product usage data and develop triggers that are actionable, valuable, and connected to specific outcomes. Triggers include a user's first login, inactivity, milestone usage, or similar.
You shouldn't neglect inactivity triggers either. Use these to send a slight push to have the user come back to see what's new in the app.
In-app messages are great for delivering real-time, contextual engagement, such as taking a user for their first login into a short tutorial popup before they are immersed in the experience.
Email, though, works best for broader communication or for less urgent updates, such as reinstating inactive users from a week's inactivity with a recap of all the newly added features.
Push notifications also have a distinct role as they do best in grabbing attention for time-sensitive, immediate prompts, such as celebrating a milestone in their use of your product, but they will need to be within reason.
The sweet spot for maximum impact is using a thoughtful blend of these channels. You can create a multi-channel messaging flow that feels helpful instead of annoying by leveraging frequency. Do this by first considering the intent of the channel based on the trigger. Then, observe the user's response by looking at aspects such as message open rates or opt-outs.
You can design your first workflows with a no-code tool like Appcues, which relies on behavioral triggers or activities. Appcues will allow you to map your entire user journey, create triggers, and set up messages specific to each user journey.
The best part? You'll be able to launch and change workflows quickly and easily, without relying on developers and design resources.
Once you have your workflows, you need to start A/B testing to see how effective these are. For example, you can test two versions of a congratulatory milestone activity message against each other to see which message has a higher click-through rate.
Try Appcues to conduct your first A/B tests, analyze data, and then refine your work based on the results!
Once your behavior-triggered workflows are live, it's time to start tracking your engagement metrics to evaluate how well they're performing:
Using product analytics tools like Appcues you get this data in real time. All that's left for you to do is to iterate and optimize based on feedback and user preferences. For example, if your users say your inactive push felt intrusive, responding to the low CTR, you simply have to turn down the tone.
We get it. You've probably already tried automation to some extent but likely fell into some common traps. We're here to tell you just how to avoid them.
When you send generic or irrelevant messages (not to mention when you pair them with poor timing), the user has a poor experience. Instead of sending something to everyone, create custom messages for distinct personas and send them when specific triggers occur based on product usage data.
Failure to align messaging with user behavior or lifecycle stage leads to inefficient (and quite frankly often useless) engagement tactics. Just imagine sending onboarding best practices to advanced or inactive users. Complete irrelevance.
Look at what triggers certain behaviors and actions to use that data to ensure that it aligns in a way that makes the messaging feel easy and accurate, rather than disconnected or out of touch.
Too frequent touchpoints can induce messaging fatigue among users, leading to opt-outs or churn. Consider capping frequency (like sending a push notification just one time and/or an email once a week).
At the same time, try to promote the highest value channel as much as possible for every trigger. In these cases, you might want to prioritize in-app messaging for onboarding or email in case inactivity happens.
If you're not measuring the impact on your business goals, you'll fail. Before you even start automating, define your metrics to measure around and then track them through analytics while linking each workflow to a specific outcome.
Below is a summary of important customer engagement tools to help you simplify workloads, personalize interactions, and increase user engagement without overburdening your team or users:
Appcues stands out as a no-code platform you can use to automate user engagement efforts based on behavioral triggers such as a user’s first login, inactivity, or product milestones. The tool also helps you build onboarding flows, tooltips, or NPS surveys to drive users without any developer support.
But Appcues isn't limited to what's going on within the app. It also supports you with out-of-app messaging by integrating through email or push notifications so you can deliver a consistent messaging experience for every user, across all touchpoints.
The results?
Take out-of-app messaging further with CRM and email automation tools, like HubSpot or Customer.io. You can connect both to your product data so your emails and messages will match the user activity at every life cycle stage.
Analytics platforms like Mixpanel and Amplitude support you with understanding everything about how people use the app. For example, Mixpanel records specific events you can use to put into place trigger systems. Amplitude offers cohort analysis and predictive trends for more in-depth reporting.
Zapier lets you automate workflows across thousands of apps so you can connect almost any third-party tool you're using to another. For instance, you can send Appcues survey responses to HubSpot or send an email via Customer.io when a user triggers certain events in Mixpanel.
So what really defines smart automation? The main thing is to use behavioral triggers and the right timing for your messaging. This means you'll also add relevant, well-timed, thoughtful touchpoints to the user's journey.
Automation lets you anticipate the user's needs and build a relationship rather than just a quick, one-off interaction. True personalization becomes even more valuable when you can rely on quality data to send targeted, useful messages.
Tools like Appcues help you with that and more! After all, solid customer engagement comes through a mix of understanding user behavior, personalizing communication, and A/B testing it all to adapt to user demands and trend shifts.
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