What Are the Most Effective Ways of Increasing SaaS Activation Rates?

Every business wants its users’ attention.

In this cut-throat competition, companies can forget the preferences of the users. Moreover, users have their priorities, and companies can’t pigeonhole users into their products’ functionality.

Frequently, during the first-trial experience, new users get overwhelmed quickly and give up before discovering the value of the product’s services.

You must know the challenges that frustrate customers that motivate a customer to purchase your product.

And making sure your business speaks the customer’s language.

When Does User Activation Happen?

User activation first happens when the product can demonstrate to the user the value of your product’s services for their priorities.

Businesses can fail to achieve high user activation simply because the user experience is too difficult to get through without a guide or tutorial that will lead them through.

Furthermore, many one-time customers will never return without simplifying the user experience because they can’t see how this product will serve their immediate and long-term needs.

Improving User Experience

Secondly, although one of the goals of any SaaS product is to make the user become deeply ingrained in its usage as soon as possible, it will be futile if your product doesn’t deliver what it promises to the user during the sales process.

The best UX (User Experience) is to deliver what you’re promising to the users. Without this, no amount of email promotion or product guidance can help.

And you make customers more ingrained into the usage of your product by helping them achieve their outcomes and objectives as quickly as possible.

That said, here are some strategies you can use to improve your SaaS activation rates:

Delay Email Activation

Reduce all unnecessary work on the user and forget about the confirmation emails. At least in the beginning.

The truth is that users are too lazy to sign up and do all of the extra steps.

As a company, do you need all of that information about your users right from the beginning?

User activation happens when users feel they have received immediate value from your service.

And you can provide immediate value to your users by dropping someone in your service as soon as possible, through a trial period or an essential service.

You bring the user to complete one core step that can demonstrate an immediate value delivered from your product.

This way, the user can quickly perceive the substantial value that your product features can provide that helps them overcome their present challenges or frustrations.

Once users understand what results they can achieve with your product, they will be more than happy to activate their email to receive more guidance.

Providing Unlimited Service

To improve SaaS user activation, another feature you can have is in-product tutorials and a chat function that assists whenever they encounter issues or difficulties.

Furthermore, with specific smaller scale B2B SaaS business models, you might consider having a project manager give phone calls to the client to help guide them through.

Using Email as Guidance

You can also increase the activation rate with a series of well-designed emails connected to the customer lifecycle.

And this feature is called lifecycle emails, a series of emails sent to the customer at critical points in their experience of your product.

Customers go through a progression of steps points like on a journey when discovering how to take the right action to use a new product and its different features.

You can focus the client’s attention on specific core actions that show them immediate value from your product through email guidance.

Furthermore, it will increase the activation rate throughout the user’s trial by answering certain questions that many users may have during specific points of their product journey.

A short email can tell the customer the benefits of taking the next step. Using email guidance will also increase user motivation by pointing them straight to the value they will get through using a critical feature of your product.

Using Email Digest for User Retention

Besides improving user activation, retention of existing users is also an essential part of any SaaS business.

And one way you can increase user retention is by using an email digest, which is simply a single email that summarizes or gathers together a series of emails published during a specific period.

The first benefit of an email digest is that gathering a collection or summary of posts will make it easier for your reader to read.

And secondly, it allows the users to quickly catch up on new information or any progress for the product.