For every SaaS company, the ultimate objective is to enable customers to achieve their desired outcome when using your product.
This is where the SaaS activation rate comes into the picture. As a B2B SaaS company, you need to showcase your product’s value to your customers promptly. If your customers can’t see your product’s value within a specific timeframe, it can increase customer churn.
But how can you increase your activation rate? We’ll cover an activation rate and a few strategies you can use below.
What is a SaaS activation rate?
SaaS activation rate, in simplest terms, refers to the percentage of SaaS product users who have reached a specific milestone in the onboarding process, which varies from company to company. Milestone for different companies differs based on their business and product goals. For example, a streaming platform like YouTube may calculate the percentage based on users who add to their playlist. On the other hand, a social media SaaS company like Facebook might consider profile creation as a milestone.
So, the essential thing in calculating the SaaS activation rate is what encourages users to engage more often with the SaaS product. Various analytic tools like Google Analytics can calculate what percentage of users reach that milestone. Certain companies also use industry-specific benchmarks to measure their performance.
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Tips to improve the SaaS activation rate of your product
Develop a good onboarding process for your new customers
If you want your customers to meet your set milestone and improve their Time to Value (TTV), you need to develop a good onboarding process. Creating a good onboarding process can include, but isn’t limited to, a welcome email series that actually feels, well, welcoming.
The welcome series can be utilized to reaffirm the value your product offers. Besides your welcome email series, you can also make the onboarding process simple with the goal of just helping your customers complete one small step at a time. And with each small action (win), your customers will become more familiar with your product, and it’ll be easier for them to see the value your solution provides.
Create an online forum
Another way you can increase your activation rates is by creating an online forum for your customers. They can use this as a safe place to connect with other users and your customer success managers. But you can also use this as a place to get real-unbiased feedback on your process and product. And with this insight, you can focus on testing and optimizing your onboarding strategy to help customers with their TTV.
Share customer success stories
Your customer needs to feel they are not the only one using your product. To validate their decision to use your product, customers need to know that other people have used it before them and have had a wonderful experience with it.
To achieve this, you need to narrate customer success stories to your new customers. This will help them see that you’ve worked with (and successfully helped) businesses similar to theirs, which allows them to proceed further in the onboarding process.
The easiest way to get customer success stories for your new customers is to ask your existing customers to share their experiences with you through testimonials and feedback. You can also pick up customer success stories from the interactions on your online community (with permission, of course).
Test, analyze, and optimize
As we briefly mentioned above, the most crucial way to increase your SaaS activation rate is to test, analyze, and optimize. The only way to know what will work will your customers is to perform tests, analyze the results, and optimize based on those results.
Concluding Thoughts
While most businesses might want a quick solution to an increased activation rate, it’s not that easy. Just like everything in business, you’ll need to find that sweet spot that’ll improve activation rates and decrease churn. And with these tips, we hope you can get a solid headstart to seeing the activation rates you envision.
Surojit has over 15 years of experience in quality and implementations. He is a promoter of an extremely light and efficient Agile process to fit business needs. In his prior role as product owner, he built a robust product in a very short span of time.
Published February 11, 2022, Updated September 21, 2022
