Customers might pay for your product at first. But often it is the case for product-led companies that they do not use the product at all or might use a minimal part of the product. These customers are at the risk of churn. This is more serious for the products who charge annual subscription charges. Customers might not understand the value but if they have paid for an annual plan it would lead to a great frustration and eventually a negative image of your product in the mind of the customer.
This can be because customers might not have activated your product. Customer activation is the time when a user realizes the value of a product. It is when a customer learns the benefits of the product and goes ahead in the process to actively engage in it.
The goal of customer activation is to move customers from a passive state to an engaged state.
How to define customer activation?
Activation is different for different products. Companies define activation based upon their product use case as every product provides a different value to customers. Here’s how you can define customer activation:
Define Key Activation Metrics
Identify the core actions that represent activation for your product. This might include creating an account, completing a profile, initiating a trial, or reaching a certain level of product usage. Establish measurable metrics that indicate successful activation. For example, you might track the percentage of trial users who convert to paying customers within a specific timeframe.
Understand user journey
Define the onboarding process for new users. Consider the essential steps users need to take to experience the full value of your SaaS product. Measure the completion rates of key onboarding steps. A successful onboarding process increases the likelihood of user activation.
Establish funnel
Understand the funnel towards the completion of the activation. Analyze the step wise performance for the activation funnel. Act upon the steps which have the highest drop in the funnel.
Examples of customer activation
Activations will be different for different types of product.
1. For a messenger app, like whatsapp, it can be when a user sends first message
2. For a CRM, like Salesforce, it can be when a user adds their first lead
3. For a payment software, it can be when a user completes their first payment
4. For an ecommerce product, it can be when a customer makes their first purchase
Common strategies implemented to increase customer activation
Onboarding
Providing a frictionless and most obvious user onboarding process helps realize the value to customers easily. Once the value has been realized quickly it is highly probable that the customer can stick to the product.
Promotions
By promoting or by offering discounts or added incentives can motivate the user to sign up to the product and explore.
Education
By educating the users about the product and the value it offers helps understand the user clearly about the product. This helps build a smooth frictionless experience for the user. Guides or education materials when kept at the right places inside the product also helps the user, as they get to know about the feature when they are actually trying to do it.
Personalization
With personalized user experience, a user better understands how to use the product based upon their preferences. For example, an onboarding process designed for a particular industry.
Support
Customer support is one of the most important touchpoints in a product. When a customer is stuck at a point and does not know what to do, it is a highly probable thing that he or she might contact support.
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