How To Increase Your Product's Engagement With Triggers

Note: This post is from August 29, 2021

The other day, I was browsing a cool new website and made a post.

Then I waited...

And waited...

No responses.

I checked the site again and see that someone actually responded.

But, why was I not notified?

A simple notification would have me back browsing the site, engaging, and commenting.

Triggers are part of the process that builds habits. In this case, an external trigger never fired off and lost me as a repeat user.

Triggers are serious business

So serious, that LinkedIn has over 160 baked in external triggers to get people to come back.

Triggers are super powerful. They reduce your cost of customer acquisition and set up the stage for viral growth loops.

Social networks have mastered triggers. And you can too!

Triggers can come in many different shapes and forms, here are some examples:

Activity Notifications

Community Digests

Comment Replies

Product update emails

Desktop notifications

Share links

Win-win referrals

Skip the line by inviting friends

Persistent features that encourage engagement.

The (infamous?) LinkedIn message window stays visible at all times. This allows people to engage one another and pull themselves back into the platform

Mobile Notifications

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Triggers through integrations already used by your customers

Loom integrated with Slack. People could now share videos faster with co-workers:

Social interaction prompts in emails

Stat summaries

Self-opt in alerts

Chrome plugin notifications & interactions

Check out Loom and the complete viral loop from extension notifications...

Team invites and permission settings

Couple of things to keep in mind:

Don’t overdo it. People may get annoyed.
Align triggers with user’s goals. The action should make the user’s experience more useful.

Acknowledgments

Nir Eyal’s book “Hooked, How to Build Habit-Forming Products” had a lot of influence on this post. Read it if you haven’t already. Andrew Chen’s work is also awesome!