10 Ways to Improve Your Activation Rate

For SaaS companies, an important process is to ensure that all consumers benefit from the product. So your goal is to enable consumers to achieve their promised value as they move along the consumer journey.

To increase the activation rate, you need to show user value as soon as possible. Growth hacking can speed up the process by motivating consumers to take action now, not later. You can experiment with different growth strategies to discover what works for your business.

Imagine making your marketer’s dreams come true. Their products and marketing are amazing, so they attract hundreds or thousands of customers every day. Your team, spouse (or Tinder partner), and family are excited to make your business more valuable every day. However, it doesn’t matter if you ignore the key measure, activation.

For any SaaS company, the Activation rate is one of the most valuable metrics. It is a measure of how many consumers are taking specific steps to take advantage of a product. For Twitter, this action can follow 6 additional accounts or send 2 Tweets.

Activation Rate: What Is It?

SaaS activation rate shows the percentage of users who have reached a specific milestone in a company’s onboarding. It can be any type of event that encourages the person to reopen the product and continue with its use. The milestone mostly occurs during a user’s early experience with a SaaS product, or a few weeks into onboarding. 

Based on business and product goals, the milestone differs between companies. For example, a streaming platform will calculate the percentage of users who add to their playlist, while a social media SaaS company might see the creation of a profile as the milestone. 

So the important thing for SaaS activation is that event, which encourages a person to engage with the product or become a paying customer. To see what percentage of users are reaching set milestones, you can take advantage of tools like MixPanel and Google Analytics. The former even has case studies to help you know if your SaaS activation rate is on par with similar companies using the same milestone as a benchmark.

Another option is to use industry benchmarks to get an idea of your activation performance. When taking this route, make sure to analyze companies that are using similar oboarding events and are likely in the same industry as you. However, internal engagement data would be a better option if you’re using a niche or unique activation milestone. 

Top 10 Ways to Improve Activation Rate

  • Concierge Custom Development

Concierge onboarding provides users with a personalized experience when browsing products. Some companies offer a high-level commitment to this service via responsive email, while others call and call consumers.

This kind of responsive solution helps to dispel consumer suspicion and build brand trust. To increase conversions, give your users quick returns and communicate on a personal level.

  • Ideal customer flow plan

The first thing past companies have done to improve activation delays has been to measure the behavior of their most successful customers.

Airbrake is a bug management tool that developers use to identify possible bugs in their software. So, for our customers to get the most out of our products, we had to keep track of their mistakes!

  • Start an online community

Building an online community is important to developing relationships with people. Whether it’s Facebook, Slack, or GrowthHackers.com, it allows consumers to ask their team questions and read other reviews about consumer products.

To participate actively, we provide members with valuable content that responds promptly and solves problems. Also, don’t forget to set guidelines for the group and encourage participation in interesting industry facts.

  • Consumer Engagement Using Gamification

Adaptation is not limited to severity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. People don’t want to be forced to do the job. Otherwise, include the game in the process so that you can enjoy learning product features.

Motivate consumers through activation funnels with rewards, progress bars, and leaderboards. These gamification factors reward consumers’ efforts and market them through the use of products. Duolingo rewards lessons learned at the end of each short lesson. It also encourages consumers to reuse products and maintain series.

  • Adjust the onboarding process

Consumers have different needs and goals. And if the amazing experience doesn’t live up to their expectations, they may think it’s not worth buying this product.

Custom handles specific user segments directly. When customizing the experience, you can take into account the total amount of time the user has spent on the platform or the specific steps taken by the app. Pinterest has improved the user experience by providing Pinner with locally relevant content in more countries and languages.

  • Take advantage of self-service product demos

Free trials are common for SaaS products, but often don’t work with products that have a lot of features, require installation and input from other coworkers, or don’t have state restrictions.

Creating a self-service demo of your product and using it as a free trial will help testers evaluate the value of your product with much less effort. This strategy also frees up time for your sales team to communicate more effectively with potential customers who know your product better.

  • Build trust with personalized welcome messages

Welcome messages have an important purpose to complement the user experience and create a brand atmosphere. The welcome message is a great place to chat with new users.

By personalizing the message with user data, it creates a real connection that serves the recipient, and as a result, users believe that emails in the future will provide similar value.

  • Introducing trial refresh tips

Customers are managing projects, attending meetings, and many other tasks at the same time. And sometimes they don’t have time or forget to participate in exam offers.

Send trigger emails suggesting a renewal of probationary periods to measure consumer interest. This simple approach separates consumers who still support the brand from those who may not buy the product.

  • Create targeted ads

Click-through is an effective way to get interested users back to your site. By catching the consumer’s attention, teams can encourage consumers to use the product.

Adroll is a well-known redirect platform that allows companies to run ads and customize their campaigns. One of the AlienVault CTR customers has 53% more clicks left than the industry average.

  • Increase sales by using a scarcity strategy

FOMO (Fear of Miss Out) is a real phenomenon for those who feel disconnected from what others are doing. Using scarcity as a business tactic can turn reluctant consumers into active buyers.

Get more paying customers by promoting limited availability, out-of-stock notifications, and selectivity. In particular, a simple campaign that only 50 customers can benefit from will attract people’s attention.

Also Read: Saas Product Selling Tips

Some More Improving Steps

  • Set up the right analysis. Learn more here and here. It is impossible to measure what cannot be improved!
  • Track the different stages of the hopper. If you don’t have a clear idea of ​​the steps that will point to an active consumer, take a look at your best (or most profitable) customers. What steps have you taken after registering? What steps have you taken before becoming a respected customer? These are the things you want to attract other users too.
  • Create an activation pipeline like the one shown above for Bingo Card Creator and mark the platform with the highest discount rate.
  • Use some of the above techniques to develop an A/B test that improves your activation.
  • See how the test affected your activation number. If your activation has increased, improve it and start a new test!
  • Rinse and repeat until the activation rate is at the desired level (at least 60% or more).

Conclusion

Most companies are (correctly) interested in acquiring consumers, but they don’t pay enough attention to activation. Few people know that activation plays an important role in attracting consumers. But now you do, and you can take steps to improve it. Besides using the tips above, make sure to simplify the process of taking action for customers. Use a simple UX to bring clarity to your audiences’ thoughts. And make sure to use clear and actionable language so that people know what steps to take.

Imagine that you (and your competitors) could spend $10 on Facebook to register users and you could earn $20 for each customer. Also, let’s say that only 50% of the prospects enrolled in the test are active. Speeding up activation is an ongoing process for your product and it’s important to know what’s working fast. By participating in one or more of the growth experiments described above, your team can deliver value to consumers faster, double the amount of what works, and grow your product.