“With the shift to a SaaS model, the connection between your customer’s success and your success is much more direct.” — MindTouch
As a SaaS company, if you’ve successfully passed the onboarding phase, you’ve won the battle, but you haven’t yet won the war.
Now your focus needs to shift to optimizing adoption. Optimizing adoption means that you want the customer to use the product as frequently as possible. This requires that you work on understanding the needs of your user, gauging whether users are realizing the maximum benefit from the features of the platform, and build a relationship with your user so that they stick around for years to come. Set milestones that need to be hit and work with the user to help them get there. Regularly make sure that the user is getting the most value out of the platform. How do you do this? Follow these four expert – recommended strategies for user adoption.
1. Monitor Account Health with Metrics:
Using the right metrics is extremely important for SaaS companies because a jumble of data is not enough when it comes to gauging account health and user engagement. Monitoring the right actions and behavior patterns of clients allows quantification of the actual ‘value’ of the user to the business. Some important metrics to track are:
- Product Data Usage: Companies can analyze data on two levels: the individual user and aggregate data for the entire business. The individual account allows close documentation of individual ease of use and the latter gives a bird’s eye view of the usage of the business as a whole. Information about total number of active users is an aggregate metric that tells CSMs how close a particular business is to complete adoption.
- Feature Usage: Customers need immediate value realization or an ‘Aha’ moment to encourage product adoption and reduce churn. This is possible only when the right features are leveraged repeatedly. Keeping a check on Features Usage can reveal whether clients are reaping optimal benefits from the platform.
- Volume and Type of Support Tickets: This key metric can be broken down into three sub-sections: the volume of support tickets which tells SaaS companies exactly how user-friendly and intuitive clients find the software solution. The type of support tickets is indicative of friction areas. The time-to-resolution for support tickets is one measurement of the quality of the support extended to struggling users.
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2.Personalize Marketing to Boost Software Effectiveness:
SaaS platforms need to capitalize on the trend of personalization in marketing. They should be able to provide their users with laser-focused helpful content that can take businesses to new highs. CSMs should know enough about a user’s struggles and triumphs to be able to send them personalized training videos, demonstrations and other interactive media. When the approach is personalized, user-perceived value for their money shoots up.
3. Welcome Users into the Fold:
Users who feel like they are a part of the family rarely think of changing vendors. Give them this feeling by keeping them “in the know” by sending out newsletters and giving them access to behind the scenes news depicting the highs and lows, ups and downs and breakthroughs of the business. Customers feel privileged when they receive updates and this sense of exclusivity and community is an asset to adoption as it stimulates accountability in buyers.
4. Offer Loyalty Rewards:
Incentives works wonders to promote user loyalty. The trick is to encourage users to invest themselves in the SaaS platform to such an extent that they can’t contemplate a shift to an alternative provider. Bulk discounts, gifts and awards or special mentions all trigger the human need for “more” and stimulate expectation which is a powerful motivator to not only stick to a platform but also rave about it.
After you’ve trained your customer, make sure that your customers are engaged so that you can rely on them to keep subscribing and make sure that your recurring revenue streams don’t dry up!