Nowadays, the SaaS industry has become too competitive. So much so, that businesses are utilizing numerous techniques to acquire, engage, and retain customers for increased customer lifetime value. 

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On top of that, acquiring new customers is significantly more expensive than retaining existing ones, allowing you to save resources on onboarding new customers and getting them started with your offerings. 

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One of the ways to achieve that is to leverage user engagement tools. By using these engagement tools, you can ensure customers are not only satisfied but also invested in your product for the long haul. 

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Having said that, here are the 13 best customer engagement solutions to retain customers and help them make the most of your product. So, let’s start by exploring user engagement before we dive into specific tools. 

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What is user engagement?

As you might have guessed, user engagement means engagement happening between you and your contacts from the initial interaction till they are using your product. 

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It includes interacting with your customers to enhance customer satisfaction across every stage of the sales pipeline. Streaming customer engagement allows you to retain customers, build strong customer relationships, and deliver solid customer engagement for prolonged business. 

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13 best user engagement solutions for your SaaS business

Customer engagement tools are developed to help you enhance customer experiences and enhance conversations. The primary objective of these tools is to further optimize how quickly you reply back to your customers, onboard new signups, and constantly provide support to let them maximize your offerings. 

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So, let’s take a look at some of the user engagement tools starting with Helloz!

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Helloz.ai

Helloz.ai, as implied by its name, is an AI-powered user adoption and onboarding solution that provides powerful features for optimizing your SaaS onboarding processes. You can craft personalized onboarding journeys and real-time engagement based on actual numbers rather than guesswork. 

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On top of that, with Helloz, you can handle numerous kinds of situations. For instance, the platform will tell you automated action points to engage customers at the right time. This way, you can compel users to perform certain tasks or actions, thereby speeding up the onboarding process. 

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Pricing

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Helloz has just started its journey in the onboarding industry, but that does not signify that its features are less advanced than the platforms available in the market. You can get started with the solution by filling out a simple form and explaining your goals. It will allow us to better understand your needs and provide a tailored experience to help you maximize your ROI.

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Hotjar 

Understanding how your users interact with your offerings allows you to better align your products or services with your customers’ expectations. And Hotjar is the tool that lets you do just that. 

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With Hotjar, you can observe what your customers do and uncover the reasons behind their actions. It allows you to obtain honest feedback from your customers via heat maps, buttons, and customer behavior analytics to optimize your products the way to drive more conversion and retain customers.

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By utilizing Hotjar’s key features, you can easily identify customer engagement, examine both positive and negative interactions, and get a deeper insight into how they act. Additionally, Hotjar offers various integration functionalities and a robust feedback system to gauge customer interest in making necessary changes.

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Pricing

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Hotjar’s pricing model depends on the number of sessions you want to track and the features you want to access. 

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The Basic plan is free to use but allows you to track a maximum of 35 sessions/day. Similarly, the 

Plus, Business and Enterprise plans cost $32/month, $80/month, and $171/month, with each of them supporting up to 100 and 500 sessions per day.

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Intercom

Intercom is a well-known engagement tool, frequently used by promotional and sales reps to engage with future users via communication channels including chat, in-app texts, and forms. With time, Intercom has grown its offerings to include customer service features. For example, it comes with a unified inbox and knowledge base editor, turning it into a full-fledged user engagement solution.

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Beyond standard engagement features such as real-time conversations, Intercom also provides capabilities to streamline your user engagement. With functions like no-code product guides and in-app help, it is especially useful if you don’t have much technical expertise. On top of that, you can take advantage of tailored bots to automate problem-solving and engage with users in their native language. 

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Pricing

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Intercom is one of the more pricey tools on this list. It offers three pricing plans that are as follows: 

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• Essential - $29 per user/month ($348/year)
• Advanced - $85 per user/month (1,020/year)
• Expert - $132 per user/month ($1,584/year)

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Zixflow

Zixflow is an ultimate customer engagement platform that is designed with the aim to empower you to implement a multi-channel engagement strategy and maintain a presence across various channels. 

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With Zixflow, you can run outreach campaigns within minutes. By leveraging its code-free campaign builders, you are able to initiate RCS, WhatsApp, email, and SMS campaigns to provide an all-around engagement to your customers. 

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Furthermore, Zixflow comes with advanced automation capabilities to autopilot your engagement and nurture customers from the get-go. For example, after you onboard a new customer, you can start sending helpful messages over the channels they prefer. This way, you can keep them engaged while also providing tips and tricks to utilize your offerings to the fullest.

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Pricing 

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The starting plan for Zixflow’s Marketing module is free, where you get access to the email and SMS channels. But to unlock WhatsApp, you have to get the Starter plan which costs $39/month (for 3 users). Additionally, if you want to enjoy more advanced features, you can go for the Growth or Enterprise plans that start at $74/month and $159/month respectively.

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Help Scout

Help Scout provides a comprehensive range of analytics that enable you to keep track of your customer-facing reps’ performance and enhance customer interaction. For example, you can track key engagement metrics, such as new chats and everyday messaging volume. Over various outreach avenues like phone calls or email. It also allows you to pinpoint the most hectic durations for customer support activity. 

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With Help Scout, you have the option to evaluate those metrics during particular dates and measure this data for multiple timeframes. Moreover, you can apply different triggers to build a tailored report view in order to focus on things that truly matter to you. 

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Pricing

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Help Scout's pricing depends on the number of contacts you want to accommodate every month. It has three paid plans starting from $75/month and going as high as $850/month. These plans are set for 100 contacts per month and you can change this number according to the size of your customer base. 

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Typeform

Typeform is a little different type of sales engagement solution that provides a distinctive way to collect user feedback and enhance interaction through aesthetically pleasing forms. With it, you can design captivating surveys that collect meaningful data, enabling you to refine your offerings to better match customer demands.

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In addition to that, it comes with a user-friendly UI, making it super easy to craft forms even if you don’t have enough coding know-how. 

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Plus, you can effortlessly integrate with external applications such as Zapier or Google Sheets, simplifying data transfer and collection. Its adaptability makes it ideal for a variety of use cases, whether it be acquiring new prospects or retaining existing ones by asking for feedback and implementing it into your product. 

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Pricing

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Typeform comes with four plans that you can pick from based on your requirements. These are:

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• Basic - $25/month
• Plus - $50/month 
• Business - $83/month 
• Enterprise - Custom plan with tailored pricing. 

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Baremetrics

Baremetrics is a SaaS platform designed to help you boost customer retention by streamlining data analysis and offering you practical insights to scale your brand. With its suite of features, you can get significant value by monitoring and assessing customer data. 

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This way, you can develop strong customer retention programs and ensure long-lasting customer relationships. 

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Pricing

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Baremetrics’s pricing model is divided into different categories that revolve around various aspects. For example, the plans are tailored based on metrics, recovering lost customers, cancellation insights, and forecasts. You can check out its pricing page for more information about each plan.

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Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a renowned email marketing solution that lets you ensure that you constantly engage with your customers, leading to building solid connections for long-term success. 

With Mailchimp, you can expand your marketing lists and connect with your contacts via drip email campaigns. For example, you use its email template builder to craft eye-catching emails that can be sent for a variety of purposes, be it promotional, informational, or newsletter. 

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Pricing

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Mailchimp offers a free-to-use plan with a limited number of contacts and emails that you can add to the platform. However, to increase this limit, you can upgrade to a paid package starting at $9.13 per month (billed annually.)

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Customer.io

If you are seeking a customer engagement platform that encourages customer retention, Customer.io is a great choice. It simplifies the process of creating and personalizing automated SMS and email initiatives specifically designed for driving business success.

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It enables you to divide your contacts into groups and reach out to them with the relevant content types for enhancing engagement. Not just that. With its powerful contact management features, real-time updates, and instant triggers, you can ensure you make the most out of your engagement campaigns each time.

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Pricing

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Customer.io offers straightforward pricing plans where you can choose a plan out of the three available ones. The Essentials plan costs $100 per month (billed monthly) and the Premium one starts at $1,000

per month (billed yearly.) There is also an Enterprise plan if you are a large organization, where you have to talk with its sales team to get exact numbers. 

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Zendesk

Effective user engagement is impossible without strong customer support. When excellent customer support is essential, choosing a solution that is tailor-made for it is critical.

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Zendesk stands out as one of the top options if you want to take a comprehensive approach to providing quality and timely customer support. It offers features such as knowledge bases, chatbots, and live chat, making it a complete customer service platform for your unique requirements. 

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A major advantage of Zendesk is its seamless connectivity with external apps, enabling you to build a smooth workflow. You can link your customer help resources, product guides, or help center articles with one another, streamlining the self-help aspect of customer support. 

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Pricing

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Zendesk has divided its pricing into two sections: customer service and sales. The customer service plans are as follows: 

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• Suite Team - $55 per agent/month 
• Suite Growth - $89 per agent/month 
• Suite Professional - $115 per agent/month 

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All these plans are billed on a yearly basis. 

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HubSpot

If you have ever worked in the marketing or the engagement industry, then it’s hard to miss HubSpot. HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM and sales engagement solution built for you to strengthen and expand your customer connections. It includes a wide range of native tools and features covering marketing, sales, customer service, and CRM functions. HubSpot aims to equip you with resources to engage and retain users for the long haul.

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Pricing

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Since HubSpot offers so many features and tools, it has separate pricing for each use case. For example, the plans for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service are all separate and priced at different rates. To learn more about the exact cost of using the solution based on your business needs, you need to check out its pricing page. 

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Twilio

Twilio is a platform for customer engagement that enables you to create custom communication experiences. With its cloud-based infrastructure offering a variety of communication APIs and features, you can connect with contacts through voice, WhatsApp, SMS, email, and video.

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By using this broad set of communication APIs you can interact with your customers across the channel of their choice. In addition to that, since Twilio is mostly an API-based platform, you can integrate it easily with other tools for streamlined user engagement. 

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Pricing

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Pricing for Twilio varies depending on the channel and functionality you want to use. So, it would be better if you visited its pricing page and looked at the specific plans that best match your communication needs.

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Heap

Heap provides numerous tools designed to monitor customer interactions, past communications, and attributes, allowing you to get a comprehensive idea of how customers use your product and engage with its various elements.

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For example, Heal lets you monitor customer sessions and sort the raw data by date or other criteria. Additionally, you can export this data to an Excel sheet for effective management. With Heap, you can divide your customers into separate groups and handle their data in a much more effective manner.

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Pricing

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Heap allows you to sign up to the platform for free and start using it to track your user analytics to boost customer retention. However, to access advanced features, you can pick from three paid plans. But again, there is no pricing information available on Heap’s website. You will have to reach out to its sales team for more information about the cost.

Use these tools to start improving your customer retention today 

Customer retention is one of the most critical factors for SaaS growth, and with the right user engagement tools, you can significantly improve your retention rates. 

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Whether it is through personalized communication, behavioral analytics, or in-app guidance, these tools can help you keep your users engaged and satisfied. 

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Investing in the right tools not only reduces churn but also increases the lifetime value of each customer, thereby helping you build a more sustainable SaaS business. So, if you haven’t decided on which to go for, sign up for Helloz and ensure you don’t lose your hard-earned subscribers.