User engagement refers to how actively and meaningfully users interact with your software, community, or product. It's not just about attracting users but also about providing consistent value that keeps them interested, involved, and returning over time.

Building user engagement doesn't typically happen by chance—it requires intentional strategy and continuous optimization. To effectively boost engagement, you must first understand how your users interact with your product by closely monitoring specific behaviors and actions.

Here are 10 user and customer engagement metrics  that will help you choose relevant strategies so you won't waste your budget on things that don't work.

10 user engagement metrics to track

1. Customer retention rate (CRR)

Measures the percentage of users who continue using your product over a set period (e.g. monthly or quarterly). Think of this metric as the primary force behind user retention. If you can't keep customers, you won't be able to move your product and business forward.

Why it matters: High retention is the ultimate signal behind strong engagement and product-market fit. When a customer comes back, you're well on your way to providing a product more and more people will need.

How to improve it:

• Offer personalized onboarding to ensure a smooth start: The first experience is what matters the most as it sets expectations and can be used to get users familiar with your product's workflows. In fact, one of the things you should do right now is make sure you've got personalized product onboarding flows ready to welcome new customers.
• Use multi-channel engagement to keep users hooked: Use Appcues to deliver a multi-channel messaging strategy. The platform lets you follow up out-of-app when users don’t engage in-app, drive users back into your app with personalized messages, and reinforce in-app actions with out-of-app support.
• Provide proactive customer support before issues arise: Don't wait for people to struggle with a task. Anticipate common challenges and add these (together with recurrent use cases you might not have thought about) to your knowledge base or live chat. Use Appcues and Helpjuice to provide on-demand support so users won't have to wait for a live agent.

2. Churn rate

This is one of the engagement metrics that refers to the percentage of users who stop using your product. If we used the previous customer retention rate key metrics to look at retention, this customer engagement metric analyzes where users leave.

Why it matters: High churn signals poor engagement, dissatisfaction, or unmet expectations. If too many users are leaving or user engagement severely fails within one exit point, it's time to patch it up.

How to improve it:

• Identify friction points in the user journey and remove them: Use your product analytics tool into analytics to understand exactly where and why users stop using your tool or just a feature. You can use Hotjar to get heatmaps on how people use your platform and even understand what popular workflows are (or if users struggle with the way you laid these out).
• Use re-engagement emails with incentives for inactive users: Think about what you can offer to get users back. For this, you'll need to go back to the previous step to see why they left in the first place. If cost is an issue, send an email with a special offer or discount. If they're struggling with using certain features, it's time to focus your re-engagement emails on education.
• Improve customer success strategies by offering better support: Remember a new user knows nothing about your app. That's why you need to provide tutorials and even one-on-one calls to help them set up and use their accounts to the app's full potential.

3. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Among the most important user engagement metrics, CLV refers to the total revenue a business expects from a customer over their lifetime.

Why it matters: A higher CLV means customers are more likely to stay engaged and spend more by either bringing more users or getting more advanced features and add-ons. It's one of the handy customer engagement metrics to keep at hand to showcase customer loyalty to investors.

How to improve it:

• Deliver continuous value through upsells and new features: You won't be able to retain paying customers if what you're offering at extra cost isn't helpful to them. In fact, you actually need valuable upgrades or add-ons to cater to their needs. Use customer feedback to decide what you need to build next for your target audience and existing app users.
• Build long-term relationships with personalized experiences: Lasting user satisfaction only comes if you can listen to every individual. That's why you'll want to focus both your product and marketing efforts on delivering custom experiences and messaging.
• Offer loyalty programs to encourage repeat engagement: Reward loyal customers with points, badges, or exclusive perks. This can happen early on if you give gamified onboarding a chance.

4. Net promoter score (NPS)

Measures how likely customers are to recommend your product.

Why it matters: A high NPS means customers are happy and will help drive organic growth and see business success.

How to improve it:

• Get user feedback and address pain points quickly: You do need to go beyond the NPS score though since it doesn't work like stand-alone user engagement metrics. Look at the qualitative feedback you have too. A low score is just the starting point as it doesn't highlight how user interaction happens, why user churn is high, or how many users struggle with a specific problem.
• Encourage promoters to leave reviews and refer friends: Got plenty of high scores? Make the most of them by asking engaged users to leave a review or recommend your tool to others.
• Offer referral incentives to boost advocacy: Most users won't lift a finger if you can't reward their referrals. Rewards can be part of your strategy even if you're not yet profitable as you can offer free plans, extra features, or special perks that won't cost a lot.

5. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

The customer satisfaction score directly measures how satisfied and engaged customers are with your product or service.

Why it matters: This is one of the metrics to track to gauge customer satisfaction. For one, you'll notice it generates better retention and engagement results. Added to this, tracking metrics like CSAT lets you identify potential problems when it comes to your product or customer service—issues you might have overlooked otherwise.

How to improve it:

• Give customer support the tools for faster response times: Consider a mix of on-demand and real-time customer support as a way of improving ticket resolution time. You'll also want to set up templates for quick replies your agents can use when talking to customers.
• Improve product usability and user experience: The less people have to struggle with finding a feature, the happier they'll be. You can even avoid lots of support back-and-forths by simply fixing your interface and making the app easier to navigate.
• Act on negative feedback to resolve customer issues: No user should continue seeing the same problems they previously contacted you about. Pull all negative feedback into your in-app feedback app and turn these points into tasks based on their urgency.

6. Daily & monthly active users (DAU & MAU)

The number of unique monthly and/or daily active users interacting with your product.

Why it matters: A high DAU/MAU ratio signals strong engagement and stickiness from your daily active users and, respectively, weekly active users.

How to improve it:

• Use behavioral nudges like in-app reminders and personalized emails: These are the perfect solutions to promoting user interaction within your app. Simply remind users about a task they didn't complete or a unique feature and outcome that awaits them in the app.
• Create habit-forming features: The best apps make users interact with them every day. Kind of like you eat breakfast, go to the gym, or simply call your family at the end of a long day. Some methods to get more active users include setting up daily challenges and giving rewards. Even providing a feature that will make a user's tasks five times easier can be a good reason for them to return every day.
• Offer time-sensitive promotions to encourage frequent logins: Flows, banners, pins, you name it. Use both in-app and out-of-app messaging to get your message across, no matter where a user is.

7. Time spent in product

Measures how long users spend engaging with your product either within one session or over a period that can best reflect their in-app behavior.

Why it matters: More time can indicate engagement, but too much time could signal frustration. That's why you need to pre-test the app with beta users to understand what typical timeframes look like and what qualifies as "too much time".

How to improve it:

• Remove unnecessary friction points: Whether we're talking about onboarding or everyday app usage, users should never struggle with basic tasks like finding a feature or completing a task. Make your onboarding quick and clear, simplify in-app navigation, and speed up load times as starting points.
• Introduce gamification elements to make engagement fun: Gamification can also improve time spent in an app. Use gamified elements to prevent excessive app usage with break reminders or session limits to prevent overuse as well as checkpoints that can help users better organize their in-app activity.
• Ensure users spend time on valuable tasks: Give users only what they need. As soon as they open your app they should be able to tell what they need to do next. Want them to start a project? Add a prominent "Create project" button. Need them to introduce themselves? Set up a screen with a couple of introductory questions for them.

8. Feature adoption rate

This metric represents the percentage of users actively using a specific feature.

Why it matters: User engagement metrics like feature adoption rate help you gauge whether users engage with your product’s full value. In particular, you'll understand what features get the most/least interest so you can dig deeper into what you need to work on more (or if you should drop a functionality altogether).

How to improve it:

• Use in-app onboarding walkthroughs to highlight key features: Analyze these 8 examples of effective SaaS onboarding experiences to find some inspiration for new onboarding flows.
• Add tooltips and guides to educate users: Users interact with a feature only if you show them how. That's where Appcues comes in to help you add nudges on where they can find a feature, show how a functionality works, or recommend the next steps a user might want to go through.
• Track feature usage and refine based on feedback: This is super straightforward. Look at how people use a feature and get in touch with them to understand their reasoning behind not using a functionality or why they're relying on a feature for a different purpose than it was intended.

9. Customer effort score (CES)

Measures how easy or difficult it is for customers to complete an action based on a scale like 1-5 or 1-7.

Why it matters: The easier your product is to use, the more likely users will stay engaged. You'll want to improve your CES to create better first impressions and remove friction early on.

How to improve it:

• Simplify onboarding and remove unnecessary steps: Use onboarding to only ask for information that will help you deliver a more personalized user experience.
• Improve UI/UX design to create a smoother experience: A clean UI/UX will make users more likely to find features and handle in-app actions without having to reach out to your support team.
• Provide self-service help centers for quick problem-solving: Users want to fix issues quickly. Even better, they want to do it alone. Plus, this is a great way to reduce support burden.

10. Email and in-app message engagement

This is one of the user engagement metrics you can use to track open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and response rates for all your communication channels.

Why it matters: High engagement means users are interested in and interacting with your brand. In turn, this tells you how your relationship with customers is, if brand awareness efforts are working, or if your latest community launch is showing results.

How to improve it:

• Personalize messages based on user behavior: Haven't seen your user in a while? Send them an email. User liked a certain product? Recommend similar ones. Item stuck in a cart? Time to pull out the cart abandonment emails.
• Optimize send times to increase open rates: Don't look for general industry benchmarks for this. Look at when your users are most active in the app and use similar time frames to test out in-app and email messaging too.
• Use A/B testing to improve email and in-app message performance: Test every message you send out in terms of positioning, CTA, incentive, and even design.

Next steps for using user engagement metrics

Take the next week to set up the tools you need for these customer engagement metrics. Sure, it will take at least two weeks (depending on how your number of users) before you can start using these, but they're everything you need to improve stickiness.

Start today to take action from your insights as soon as possible in three simple steps:

• Use an analysis platform like Appcues that offers a no-code way to capture data about what users are doing with your product. Combine this with traditional analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or Zendesk for a complete picture.
• Segment your data. Organize your insights so you can compare new versus returning users, free versus paid plans, or regular versus casual users.
• Keep a close eye on patterns and trends. Go beyond metrics that mark certain moments by looking at the big-picture insights that represent a certain period.

Get started with Appcues and watch your engagement metrics bring out the best in your app!

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