5 Powerful User Activation Strategies For SaaS & Products
SaaS and digital products are so hot right now. So much so that I sometimes feel that they are getting overrated. But then, when I see their impact in real life and how they solve problems, I fall in love with them all over again.
For SaaS & product businesses, one critical challenge that often turns into a significant roadblock is user activation.
Most SaaS & product businesses follow the AARRR framework, a.k.a Pirate Metrics.
Image credits: Pierre LechelleI’ve worked closely with the product & SaaS businesses for more than ten years now. And while that may or may not be a lot, I’ve been fortunate enough to work closely with some great minds in the business and learn from them.
Through this post and based on my own experience, I want to explore possible solutions to one of the most critical segments in the AARRR framework — User Activation.
Free Trials & Free Accounts are Essential to User Activation
If your application still follows the traditional way and does not offer a free trial, you should strongly reconsider. Here’s why:
- A free trial enables your users to explore your product immediately without them committing. No one likes to wait around.
- Free Trials put the customer in control as they consciously decide whether to subscribe or not.
- Customers value their effort. The effort put into using the application is something a customer would want to retain. So, they’re most likely to continue.
- Free trials/accounts are not hard on your pocket, either. Your application is already built; the infrastructural costs for accommodating a free user for a limited time are fractional compared to ROI if that user activates.
Of course, there is an exception here for products whose business model mandates keeping product access locked unless bought. But mostly, the more accessible your product is the better chances of getting a paid customer.
The User Journey During The Trial Period Is Critical
This directly relates to point no. 3 above. The more you engage and encourage your customers to use the product during the free trial, the more chances of getting a paid subscription.
By assisting your trial customers in using the product extensively, you integrate your product deep into your customers’ internal processes. At the same time, the impact your product makes on your customers’ goals become increasingly real.
By the end of the trial, your customer is more likely to subscribe as they fully understand the benefits and know how to use your product.
Here are some beneficial strategies you could follow to help customers during the trial period -
- Reach out to customers and assist them in setting up the product. Check up on them regularly and ensure that they can use the product to max juice.
- Offer an extensive knowledge base to customers to find solutions when stuck on their own.
This tip here also helps in website SEO if done effectively.
Integrate the KB in your product UX, so it’s easy to explore.
- Make it easy for your customers to use your product. Interactive product tours & how-to videos in the case can come in real handy.
- Make it easy for them to start a paid subscription during the trial via intelligently placed CTAs & nudges. But don’t be pushy about it.
- Adopt & highlight a transparent refund policy (for example, a 30 day, no question asked refund) on subscription. This provides customers with a strong sense of control.
- Extend the trial period if requested when you see a customer genuinely interested in exploring your product more. You can highlight this information in your trial expiration reminder in the form of a CTA.
Here’s how SQUARESPACE keep its users engaged during their free trial and encourages them to make the most of it.
Make Information Accessible
Information is indispensable. It’s your greatest marketing tool. Let’s explore some lesser-known content strategies that can help you activate your customers.
But before we do that, we need to get deeper insights as to what stops your customers from activating. This bit is specific to each business. Here are some steps you could follow to gather ideas.
- Interview your customers on a call. Directly talk to them and try & understand roadblocks.
- Make it easier for your customers to share feedback. A great idea could be integrating customer feedback software right into your application.
- Deep dive into your product usage analytics to find information that can help you narrow down the reasons.
Some common challenges SaaS & product consumers report (that pose a severe impact on activation).
- The product is difficult to understand.
- No or unclear information as to how to use the product & its features.
- Pricing too steep for the target user base.
- The value proposition of the product is not clear.
While it is possible to address these challenges by optimising your product experience, it’s not feasible to bring about product-level changes overnight.
Enter, Content.
Leveraging content intelligently, you can immediately start addressing these mission-critical challenges while you work on optimising your product experience. Here are some tips you can immediately implement.
#1 Create a product knowledge base (if you don’t already have it).
If you do, make sure it addresses specific requirements and not generalised documentation of your product.
Here are some inspirations for you. I feel these businesses have done a remarkable job with making their KB interactive & practical.
#2 Go a step further and make your KB more contextual.
So that your customers can find solutions to specific features readily when they’re using them.
Using solutions like Zendesk Chat or Intercom, you can embed your support articles in multiple channels like chat, product dashboard and more. You can even automate the entire support workflow.
#3 Make short product how-to videos covering the majority of the features.
Start with the most valuable ones you have.
This tip is straightforward to implement yet immensely powerful. You can re-use the videos you create to:
- Write blogs around them to target more organic keywords.
- Make your product KB more interactive by embedding videos in them.
- Offer customer support to the most common challenges when customers reach out.
- Reach target audience via social media posts.
- Acquire new customers via targeted video ads.
- Provide more information about features in your website landing pages.
#4 Create collateral explaining how your product benefits your customers.
Both in terms of cost and value.
Upwardly, now Scripbox (a mutual fund investment app) uses calculators like this to make benefits more real, so you’d start investing with them.
Asana (a PM software) makes strong use-cases by teams & usage to help highlight the value of the software for each.
Basecamp (another popular project management software) explains why to use their software right on their homepage.
#5 Create a comprehensive “Getting Started” guide.
This can be in the form of a PDF guide (like an eBook). You can also break it down into bite-sized training videos. Share these with your customers as soon as they start their trial.
Following the point above, leverage marketing automation to start a Getting Started email series for all your new customers. Feed-in your getting started guide and videos that you created. This acts like a mini-course that helps your customers understand how to start using your product right.
ActiveCampaign (a marketing automation software) provides a one-stop Getting Started destination where you can opt for training courses to learn the software better.
MailJet (an email marketing software) sends a straightforward yet very engaging welcome email on new signup. The focus on product engagement is spot-on.
See the full version of this email
#6 Run recurring webinars around specific features with your customers
To provide detailed walk-throughs which in turn should improve product usage.
#7 Build success stories and use-cases specific to customer types & verticals that you’re targeting through your product.
This helps your potential customers and your trial users find more confidence during decision making.
#8 Marry features and benefits.
Make cracking cases for your most valuable features by educating your customers about the features, how to use them effectively and what benefits they bring to the table.
Whether it’s about the product directly or educational content around pain points that your product solves, make sure your content is widely spread, easily accessible and easy to understand.
Breaking the SaaS Conversion Cycle
SaaS has a relatively shorter sales/conversion cycle. That’s one of the reasons why product startups are on the rise. All you need to figure out is how to growth-hack your sales cycle to reduce it even further and then base your marketing around it.
Now, this is where it gets interesting. You don’t need to create anything new if you’ve taken account of the last point.
If you’re guiding your users through product usability, benefits and values well, you’re already optimising your conversion cycle.
That’s the beauty of content. It hits so many layers of growth in such critical ways without you even knowing about it. And that’s why content is the king.
The only thing that you may need to do besides (which is going an extra mile) is to link your most critical collateral with your conversion cycle.
An excellent way to do that will be to look at your time-to-activation analytics and then analyse how different collateral you share with customers impact this metric. This should give you clear answers to prioritise your content assets for better conversion cycle optimisation.
This is not a one-time activity that one could perform just once and keep reaping the benefits. It requires going back to the drawing board with data and continuous innovation.
Keep Your Active Customers, Activated
As per Gartner research, recurring revenue accounts for 80% of your future sales.
Often when talking or thinking about customer activation, we push relationships with existing customers out of the scope.
While from the stat above, we can quickly gather that it is equally important to keep your existing customer engaged as trying to activate new ones.
I call existing customer engagement a shadow tactic when it comes to user-activation strategies. While all our focus is on activating new customers under the shadows, building effective engagement strategies with current customers helps us prevent leaks in our future sales pipeline, thereby ensuring reduced user churn.
Taking good care of active customers also means better customer referrals, which significantly impacts new customer acquisition and activation.
While customer engagement is a whole different segment in product marketing, from the perspective of a shadow tactic to customer activation, here are three simple yet incredibly powerful customer engagement strategies you can try:
#1 Regularly reach out to your customers and keep them informed about product updates.
Don’t stop there; educate customers well on how to use them effectively. This, in turn, will keep your customers hooked to your product.
SQUARESPACE (one of the most popular website builders out there) does a brilliant job educating its customers on benefiting from its offerings through a very well-designed drip email series.
This, in turn, gives customers a reason to keeping logging in and be engaged with the product, thereby reducing churn rates.
#2 Ask for feedback.
You can easily integrate a customer feedback tool with your product. Most such software enables you to capture crucial customer satisfaction metrics like NPS, CSAT and CES. Doing this has three critical benefits.
- You get to improve your product experience based on your customer feedback. There’s no better way to enhance a product.
- Because you’re addressing your customers’ feedback, you’re in turn also reducing user churn.
- You get to leverage NPS ratings to:
- Build a strong referral program with your
promotersto acquire more qualified users. - Engage
passiveusers to convert them intopromotersand pump up your referral program. - Identify
detractorsand then optimise your user targeting in marketing & sales campaigns.
If you’d like to understand more about NPS and other CX metrics, here’s a well-written article about it.
Here are some customer feedback software that you may want to consider integrating with your product:
#3 Help your customers solve challenges they face
In the form of detailed guides, articles, eBooks, videos and more. Send newsletters that offer value to them. Be a thought leader in your domain. This way, you build relationships with your customers. And this, in the long run, contributes to critical success metrics like:
- Lesser user churn.
- More brand recall.
- More customer referral.
In conclusion, while there are many more strategies around user activation, I feel these 5 core strategies can start driving immediate impact if done right.
These user-activation strategies that I covered are from the intent of getting you started. You can scale them to much more advanced workflows & use-cases with every iteration. And therefore, iterations & continuous innovation is not only necessary but pivotal to achieving peak performance.
If you have your own tips and tricks, please do share them in the comments. I’d love to learn.
