The Ultimate Guide to Customer Activation for SaaS: Strategies, Tools & Examples

If there’s one critical skill for product managers to nail, it’s customer activation.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll break down underlying customer activation strategies and actionable strategies, specific onboarding tools and techniques, and tangible examples to learn from.

All of that will help you nail customer activation in your own SaaS.

What are you waiting for? Dive in and let’s get going!

What is customer activation?

Customer activation describes the touchpoints in the customer journey- typically during the primary onboarding process – where your users begin to experience value from your product.

The key driver behind any customer activation strategy is this: how do you devise the most effective customer journey in pursuit of releasing value?

Customer activation vs AHA moment

You might be familiar with the term ‘Aha moment’.

It’s an important part of customer activation: it describes the moment a user realizes the value they could get from your product. The key distinction here is between the expectation of value and actually delivering on that expectation.

Customer activation vs minimum viable onboarding

If activation is all about value realization, then minimum viable onboarding is the strategy or playbook for getting there.

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

It focuses on the various angles of customer engagement. From the very beginning of the in-app journey for new customers, changing customer interactions and customer behaviors, all the way through to the activation point.

You can watch our quick workshop on building a minimum viable onboarding below.

Why is customer activation important?

But let’s refocus.

SaaS owners and product managers are busy people. Why should you build a customer activation plan? Because it has a massive impact on a range of metrics:

• Boost revenue: Customer activation is proven to have the highest overall impact on earnings than any other KPI.
• Drive adoption: Higher activation leads to increased product adoption and greater usage.
• Keep hold of users: An effective activation strategy will help you boost product retention.
• Capture new customers: Activation will demonstrably lower the cost of acquisition.
• Lifetime value: Demonstrate value consistently and watch your customer lifetime value skyrocket.
• Upsell and grow: Activation gives you more opportunities to upsell appropriate features to valued customers.

How to create an effective customer activation strategy?

We know activation is important. So now let’s get into the crux of the article.

How can you craft an effective customer activation strategy (and start motivating customers)? You can’t just hope you’ll transform new customers into repeat customers.

You need a plan.

Know your target audience

You’ll struggle to demonstrate value to your customers unless you have a deep, robust understanding of their needs, pain points, and jobs to be done.

Conduct interviews, analyze surveys, and create buyer personas: these will help to map out the distinction between different user groups (and tailor your customer activation strategy accordingly).

Define new customer activation points for each persona type

It’s a mistake to treat your customers as one homogenous group. Each distinct persona will need to engage with a different combination of your product’s key features.

You’ll need customer touchpoints for each persona, that closely map and align with their individual jobs to be done.

Build personalized customer activation roadmaps

The best way to map that course to value is through a proven playbook, setting out your desired outcome, specific tasks, and the UX patterns you’ll look to deploy along the way.

Here’s an example of an Activation Playbook you might want to adapt to your use case.

Customer activation metrics to track the success of your activation strategy

We’ve covered how you might go about building an effective customer activation strategy.

But if you fail to map and understand the in-app and online behavior of your customers, you’re leaving a huge amount on the table.

Measuring results is critical to evolving your activation strategy.

You’ll want to start with the user activation rate itself. Sometimes known as product activation rate, this vital metric will help you understand the proportion of users who’ve reached a specific activation milestone.

Here are some other metrics to consider:

• Visitor-to-trial sign-up rate: This metric will help you understand the ratio of current customers who’ve visited your site and decide to sign-up for a trial.
• DAU (Daily Active Users) to MAU (Monthly Active Users) ratio: A useful proxy for customer stickiness.
• Trial-to-paid conversion rate: How many of your customers are successfully completing trials and choosing to upgrade to a paid account?
• Feature adoption rate: Similar to the product adoption rate, but helping you dive into adoption for a specific feature.

Customer activation strategies to implement for your SaaS

Now we’ve broken down what customer activation is all about, we’re going to unpack how to build one within your SaaS (and create engaged, loyal customers).

Prompt customer engagement from the start

Engagement is the lifeblood of your business. If you can’t spark your users’ interest, what chance do you have of building a product they’ll love (and want to pay for)?

A great way to do that is to populate empty states. You can shorten the time to value by personalizing screens with user details or offering relevant content to get started with.

Encouraging users and prompting them to take action is key here. You don’t want them starting at an empty page.

Loom uses educational videos to showcase the product and prompts users to take action with a relevant CTA.

Use a welcome screen to collect customer data for personalization

When it comes to personalization and trying to target onboarding flows to specific buyer personas, you’re probably thinking: where do I get this customer information from in the first place? Welcome screens are a great place.

Surveys provide a seamless mechanism to collect data without appearing intrusive throughout the customer’s lifecycle. And any customer activation strategy will benefit from a greater degree of personalization.

Use onboarding checklists to drive new customers to the activation point

Use checklists to clearly set out the specific activities a user must complete before moving on to the next phase of onboarding.

And in doing so, hopefully, they’ll start to see the value of your product. Checklists are a proven way to influence customer online behavior.

Use interactive walkthroughs to enhance customer engagement

Activation is all about tilting the customer experience and creating interactions that boost value.

There’s no better way to do that than to take them – step by step – through the exact process they’ll need to follow. It’s a surefire way to help your users reach the activation point at greater velocity.

Track product engagement to identify and remove friction

Without data, you’ll be powerless to make effective product decisions.

Track engagement and product usage to help understand trends in behavior – you can drill down into specific pages and identify friction points.

Ask for customer feedback and act on it

There’s no such thing as bad feedback. Even if it hurts to hear at the time, it’s only going to help you improve in the long run.

Collect it in-app (making sure you only ask for it when appropriate, not in the middle of a critical business interaction).

Offer self-service support to provide on-demand help

Helping customers reach the activation point is never going to be completely smooth sailing. There’ll always be issues to tackle and problems to solve.

That doesn’t mean they all need to land with your support team.

You can implement a knowledge base and provide on-demand support to help your customers solve their own problems.

Conclusion

That just about wraps things up!

Hopefully, this comprehensive guide to the world of customer activation has left you better equipped to craft an effective customer activation strategy in your own SaaS.

Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can build engaging in-app experiences to help your loyal customers reach the activation point quickly today.