User engagement with your product tells you a lot about the status of your relationship with them. You can tell if they’re happy and likely to upgrade or if they’re indifferent and closer to churning. But you need user engagement tools to get you that valuable feedback in the first place.

There are many great digital engagement tools on the market. But with so many options, how do you choose the right engagement tool(s) for your company? Consider some strategies for selecting the right ones for your product and team based on the tools’ use cases.

Engagement tools that help you listen to users

We all know that listening to our users is important. But in practice, converting user feedback into actionable insights can be a challenge (and a time-consuming one at that). More often than not, your users aren’t really speaking your language. That’s where user analytics tools come in—the right user analytics tool can help you translate raw user behavior into feedback you can work with.

Here are a few things to think about when you’re choosing between user engagement tools:

Analytics is about more than just counting clicks

Listening to your users is more than just counting clicks—it’s about making sense of their behavior. What pages they visit, where they travel next, where their mouse hovers—your users are constantly giving you feedback, if you know how to decipher it.

The right user analytics tool for your product will depend on many factors, including:

• ‍Depth and diversity of user sessions. Google Analytics is a must-have for every company, and it’s a great place to get started learning how many users are visiting your website and where they’re coming from. If you’re looking to up your game with the next generation of analytics tools, we love Mixpanel and Heap. Companies with more diverse user bases or more complex workflows can also track individual user experiences with tools like FullStory, which acts like a DVR for user sessions.

• ‍Engagement goals and gaps. Once your company identifies its engagement goals, you can work backward to figure out what tools will help you reach them. For example, if you’re getting thousands of hits on your website but no conversions, use A/B testing software like Optimizely to test out a different approach. If you’re losing users a few days into their trial, consider using website engagement tools that improve user onboarding and in-app communication.

• Team skill set. Every team has a different skill set, and you should tailor your tools according to who’s going to use them. If your marketing team needs a little assistance parsing through all their data, choose a platform like Amplitude, which organizes your data into easy-to-understand visuals.

The best way to collect user feedback

Quantitative data can tell you what your users are doing, but qualitative data can tell you why. Surveys are a quick way to get direct, actionable feedback to improve your product experience.

The key is reaching users at the right moment. What that looks like will be different for every product and every user base.

• ‍Channels of user engagement. Users are more likely to open a survey if it’s integrated into the ways they already engage with you. For example, if your users get an update email every week, you can use software like SurveyMonkey to add a survey to your newsletter. For a more contextual outreach, you can use a product like Typeform to seamlessly integrate a survey into your platform or use Appcues to create an in-app NPS survey.

• Stage in user journey. When you ask a question can be just as important as how you ask it. For instance, you don’t want to derail the all-important user onboarding experience or interrupt a critical workflow with a survey. Consider where your users are in their journey, and use page, behavioral, and user ID targeting to connect with the right folks at the right time.

Customer engagement tools that help you communicate easily

Many companies engage their users at the beginning of their journey—with welcome emails, onboarding messages, and customer success outreach—but lack a clear, long-term engagement strategy. User engagement spans the length and breadth of the user journey and should slowly but steadily drive users deeper into the product. Your ability to keep the conversation going with relevant, helpful information can make the difference between customer retention and customer churn.

Here are some tried-and-true strategies for communicating with your users more effectively:

Clear in-app communication

In-app communication is the most contextual way to reach users, but it shouldn’t feel like a roadblock to your offer—your messaging should feel like an extension of your product.

The right in-app communication tool for your product will depend on many factors, including:

• ‍Level of guidance. The key to effective in-app messaging is balance—you want to educate your users, not distract them from their workflow. Keep the number of steps in your onboarding to a minimum, and focus your messaging on user goals, not features. To build in-app flows for user onboarding, feature adoption, support, etc.—without eating up dev resources—try a third-party tool like Appcues, which allows just about anyone on your team to build native-looking user experiences without code.

• Scalability of support. If you have a mature product with a lot of users, you’ll get to know your common customer service issues pretty well. For solving common issues in the most scalable way, pick a customer service software like Help Scout or Zendesk that lets you make a database of FAQs in addition to in-app outreach.

Emails that enhance the user experience

Whether it’s prescriptive onboarding emails or a weekly newsletter, your emails should provide real value to your users.

When you’re sending emails correctly, they should feel like an extension of your brand. The value you provide to users in emails should supplement and support their in-app experience.

The right email marketing tool for your company will depend on many factors, including:

• ‍Degree of personalization. People hate generic emails, so any email platform worth its salt will let you add a {First name} tag. But marketing engagement tools like Marketo, Mailchimp, and HubSpot allow you to segment your sends for more personalized engagement.

• Deliverability issues. If you’re having trouble with email throttling or if you’re constantly getting marked as spam, your most important priority is getting your emails into your users’ inboxes. Products like SendGrid focus on deliverability by monitoring and combating email throttling and other similar problems. If you want to expand on other email features, Customer.io’s analytics integrations and A/B testing are worth checking out.

To push notify or not to push notify

Push notifications can annoy users and drive them away if you’re not careful. Oftentimes, it’s easier for a user to drag and drop your app into the trash than to dig deep into their settings to turn off the pinging.

Here are some factors to consider about whether or not notifications will end up pushing your users away.

• ‍Urgency and timing. If you can make push notifications an extension of your product, then you should absolutely use them. Could you imagine ordering an Uber and not getting a push notification telling you to come outside when it arrives? Pushwoosh is a good tool for event-triggered notifications, while Twilio takes things a step further with SMS.

• ‍Regular check-ins. If your app tracks data over time or collects information of some kind, then you can send a weekly check-in without blowing up your users’ phones. If you have something useful to share, like a weekly analytics report, a tool like Airship or Leanplum can help you engage existing users.

45 best tools for user engagement

User engagement looks different from product to product—choosing the right tools involves more than simple side-by-side comparisons and depends highly on your product. To make things easier, we researched 45 app engagement tools in different categories to suit your needs.

In-app communication

In-app communication gives your users direction toward your key features and helps them use each one to its fullest potential.

Appcues

Appcues offers targeted in-app messaging for user onboarding, feature adoption, and customer success. Its analytics platform enables your company to optimize product messaging to keep customers glued to your product and improve customer retention.

Wistia

Wistia has a wide range of features to help you use videos effectively for in-app communication. For example, it offers interactive tools that allow you to link to more information right in your video and break up your videos into chapters for easy navigation.

Drift

Drift helps sales, marketing, and customer service teams have personalized conversations with customers. Its AI-powered in-app chatbot allows you to communicate around the clock with customers who need help with your product, whether you’re online or not.

Help Scout

Help Scout allows teams to create, own, and manage their help centers and knowledge bases. It also consolidates every customer’s history across channels into a shared inbox, giving your customer support agents a complete history on one screen.

LiveChat

LiveChat offers live chat on every customer communication channel you offer. It integrates with over 200 tools, ranging from analytics platforms like Google Analytics and Mixpanel to payment solutions like PayPal and Stripe.

Helpshift

Helpshift enables you to give customers all the text-based support they need directly in your mobile app. This means customers can access your knowledge base, help center, ticket system, and live chat in-app whenever they need help.

Zendesk

Zendesk empowers you to offer your customers different communication channels like a ticketing system, live chat, knowledge base, and forums. Its analytics software enables you to access valuable customer insights to effectively modify customer communications.

Sendbird

Sendbird helps you build a conversational in-app chat platform into your channels. In addition to live chat, it also allows you to offer in-app voice and video calling to increase customer engagement.

SnapEngage

SnapEngage enables you to add live chat to your website and app to support your customers. It integrates with help desk software like Help Scout and Zendesk so you can manage customer conversation seamlessly.

Analytics 

Product analytics tools show insights about who your users are and what they’re doing with your app. These 11 analytics tools offer strong data-based insights to help you learn more about your users and your product.

Amplitude

Amplitude gives you insights into your customer’s journey within your product, drivers of retention, and power users. It doesn’t just show you what customers are doing now— its predictive analytics feature also empowers you to predict what they’ll do next and how to boost retention.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel provides product analytics while also tracking and analyzing in-app user behavior on web and mobile. This shows you power users, behaviors that drive retention, and where customers stop using your app, allowing you to double-down on what’s working and stop what isn’t.

Heap

Heap captures customer behavior on your website or mobile app. These data enable you to understand where, how, and why customers immerse themselves in your product. It has over 100 integrations to help your company communicate with customers at the appropriate time in their buying journey.

FullStory

FullStory helps your product team optimize customer journeys with its user session playback and real-time analytics. It allows you to see how customers react to any product updates, features, and releases.

Segment

Segment integrates customer data into your favorite tools to foster personalized customer communications and a deeper understanding of customer journeys. It connects with and allows you to export data from other sources like Amplitude, Mixpanel, and Zendesk to provide robust analytics solutions.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics tracks every customer’s activity on your site to help you understand what’s driving engagement and where customers are coming from. This allows you to gain insights into how to improve engagement for different users and enhance the overall customer experience.

Hotjar

Hotjar uses heatmaps and session recordings to help you visualize your product’s pain points. This enables product teams to improve their products and the user experience by extension.

Optimizely

Optimizely provides A/B testing and experimentation on your digital products so you can determine exactly what your users want. It offers AI-powered recommendations to give users real-time personalization with little manual input.

Woopra

Woopra shows you people’s actions on your website to enable you to craft personalized messaging and connect with them. Its suite of over 50 integrations enables you to sync data across different departments in your organization, so everyone has a consistent source of truth.

Contentsquare

Contentsquare offers heat maps, session replays, and experience analytics to help you troubleshoot the performance of your web and mobile apps. It connects data to customer behavior in your product to help you improve engagement and deliver better experiences.

Treasure Data

Treasure Data connects data from marketing, sales, and customer service departments to create a map of your customers’ journeys. It also integrates with analytics tools like Amplitude, Google Analytics, Segment, and others to give you consistent data everywhere.

Push notifications

Users have a love-hate relationship with push notifications. Send them at the right time, and you will spur action. Send them at the wrong time, and they’ll feel disruptive. These tools will help you get the best results with your push notifications.

Twilio

Twilio’s customer engagement platform powers SMS, voice, video, and web push notifications through a single API to improve customer engagement with your product. 

Leanplum

Leanplum focuses primarily on increasing user engagement in mobile apps using multi-channel notifications. These include push, email, in-app, and SMS notifications.

Airship

Airship helps you to get the best possible ROI from your apps through multi-channel engagement campaigns. It supports segmented, interactive mobile push notifications, in-app messaging, and SMS to boost user retention and aid efficient monetization.

Iterable

Iterable powers SMS, mobile push, email, web push, and in-app notifications to help you boost user engagement with your product. It allows you to tailor your messaging on these channels based on how customers engage with them.

Pushwoosh

Pushwoosh connects you with customers via event-triggered web push, in-app, SMS, and WhatsApp notifications. It supports multilingual content and allows you to continue customer conversations on different channels without starting from scratch through its omnichannel messaging capabilities.

Localytics

Localytics gives you data-driven user insights on where customers are abandoning actions in your app. This enables you to understand users’ interactions with your app and send personalized messages via in-app, web push, SMS, and email notifications to re-engage them and prevent churn.

User feedback and survey tools

The task of building an excellent product is a continuous one—customer needs will evolve with time and changes in your industry. Thankfully, customers are willing to tell you what you should do to align your product with their goals if you ask them with the right tools.

Appcues

Appcues enables you to build feedback surveys into your onboarding flows. This will give you qualitative insight into improving in-app user engagement and user experience. It also helps you to send these surveys at times when your users are more likely to complete them and give valuable feedback.

Typeform

Typeform offers engaging templates for surveys and feedback collection to increase completion rate. It integrates with apps you’re already using to improve your workflow and minimize context switching.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey helps you create customizable surveys for many scenarios and offers templates with pre-existing sample questions for inspiration. You should also tap into SurveyMonkey Audience, a pool of over 175 million people from around the world, to send surveys to your target demographic.

Qualaroo

Qualaroo supports in-app and on-site integration to help you send surveys to users based on predefined actions or triggers. For example, you can ask for product feedback based on user engagement or when a visitor is about to leave without buying a product. Advanced targeting allows you to send surveys based on geographic location, time on page, and even browser cookies.

GetFeedback

GetFeedback, a SurveyMonkey company, focuses on collecting mobile app and website feedback from users, visitors, and customers. It provides a drag-and-drop survey builder, real-time analytics, and fully branded mobile-optimized surveys so you can collect feedback to improve user experience across your products.

Alchemer

Alchemer works with your business intelligence apps, analytics tools, and sales software to give you dependable data analysis after feedback collection. This enables you to use customers’ opinions to build valuable products.

Zoho Survey

Zoho Survey allows you to create and send surveys on mobile and web. It offers several ways to distribute your surveys, including QR codes, so your customers can conveniently complete them.

Checkbox

Checkbox offers not only online but also on-site survey options if you want to host surveys on your cloud servers for greater data privacy. It supports email reminders to boost survey completion rates and show respondents their answers to survey questions.

Google Forms

Google Forms gives you a drag-and-drop builder for creating online surveys accessible to users on any device—desktop or mobile—via a link. You can integrate images, text, and videos in your surveys to explain your question to respondents. These make your survey engaging and increase the accuracy of responses.

Email platforms

Email solutions predate other forms of communication on this list, but they’re still a useful medium for user engagement. These 11 tools will convince you that email automation is still a powerful way to engage users. 

HubSpot

HubSpot provides tools for creating and designing personalized emails from dozens of templates or from scratch via its HTML features. It lets you offer people the chance to opt out of certain topics or take a temporary break instead of completely unsubscribing from your list. This allows you to re-engage them later.

Customer.io

Customer.io supports emails, SMS, mobile push notifications, and Slack messages. This enables you to connect with customers on different channels via one platform instead of paying for several tools. It also syncs with CRMs, customer data platforms (CDPs), and data warehouses to help you personalize your messages based on customer data.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp’s generous free plan allows you to send up to 10,000 automated emails a month to 2,000 subscribers and create opt-in forms for user sign-ups. Its paid Inbox Preview feature lets you see the possible look of your email on 40+ web, desktop, and mobile email clients. This helps to ensure that your emails look good on any device, and customers won’t have trouble engaging with them.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign empowers you to create email automations for every stage of your customer’s journey. From sign-up to conversion, you can set up timely email and SMS automations to nurture, convert, and onboard new users.

Marketo

Marketo gives you the ability to personalize your emails based on user intent and CRM activity. It doesn’t have a built-in CRM like other tools, but it integrates with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics to enable the personalization and segmentation of emails for better engagement.

Twilio SendGrid

SendGrid supports creating and running email campaigns, but where it really shines is email deliverability. It offers detailed analytics that gives you clarity on your emails’ destination—you want them in your subscribers’ inboxes, not their promotions tabs or spam folders. That increases the chances that they’ll see and engage with your emails.

Klaviyo

If you run an ecommerce business, Klaviyo will help you integrate with the ecommerce apps you use to send customers and visitors personalized emails and SMS. Its advanced segmentation features enable you to target visitors with your emails based on their purchase history, predicted lifetime value, order value, and other types of data.

Vero

Vero uses customers’ data to help you personalize your emails and push notifications, and it integrates with Segment to enable data collection from 200+ sources. It also works with several email service providers like SendGrid, Mailjet, and Mailgun to improve your email’s deliverability.

IBM Watson

IBM Watson excels at advanced email automation. It can automate an email series that would require different user inputs based on predefined triggers. This streamlines your workflow and ensures users get prompt responses. They’ll also act on your emails while you’re still top of mind.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact lets you set up autoresponders, run triggered campaigns, and manage abandoned cart campaigns on WooCommerce and Shopify. It’s one of the only email solutions that allows you to handle event registrations, invitations, and tickets to engage with your users.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a comprehensive suite of products like a CDP alongside marketing cloud personalization and engagement platforms. These collections of tools sync to build a trustworthy customer database so you can send relevant, personalized emails and messages in real time.

Take charge of the conversation

User engagement is a 2-way street, but the responsibility for keeping the conversation going is on product owners. While users may reach out occasionally to give you feedback, it’s your job to make sense of user behavior before you have a churn problem on your hands. The right tools will make taking charge of this conversation easier.