What Is Activation Rate?
The product activation rate is the number of users who do something specific to extract value out of your product.
But how can the users of your product get value out of it? Well, that depends on your product.
For example, think of users who follow a certain number of accounts in a social selling app. In this case, the number of followed accounts per user would be an activation metric.
You may also think of the product activation rate as an indicator of how well your marketing strategy is doing. Or how successful your SaaS (software as a service) product is.
The Importance of Activation
Following user acquisition, product activation is the most important concern you should have when running your SaaS business.
Most importantly, if you succeed at getting users to "activate", you'll keep them for longer, ultimately lowering net churn.
On top of that, you'll end up having more money to spend on advertising to acquire more users. It's a beautiful cycle!
How to Improve Activation Rates
1. Bet Your Chips on User Research
First, track the actions users take in your product. Next, monitor the sessions of your users to identify the hotspots which cause your customers to drop-off.
Finally, use a combination of qualitative and quantitative research such as interviews, surveys and user test to understand why they’re struggling.
Monitoring user insights is one of the most powerful ways to get feedback you can act on immediately.
After you have user feedback, improve your product accordingly. As a complement, you might create tutorials to exemplify how your product works.
2. Simplify Your Product and Contact Inactive Users
There are many ways to simplify your product.
Fewer Steps to Activation
You can reduce the number of steps in key user flows to increase the odds of product activation.
A very simple example is to use social login buttons to allow new users to signup for your product rather than creating yet another username and password combination.
User Experience and Benefit-Laden Copywriting
A clean user interface reduces visual friction and facilitates user interaction with your product.
Finally, a clear and straightforward copy is a huge means of simplifying your product.
Contact inactive users before they become 'sleeping dogs'
Send them an email highlighting the new features you've released since their last session. This is a great way to reintroduce your product and showcase how it solves their problem.
How Can We Help?
We can definitely help you with getting users to activate your products. Contact us for a free session on how to increase product activation.
And if you enjoy the session, we can work together on implementing the best strategy for you.
