What is a SaaS product with non/poor customer activation tools and rates? Practically non-existent.

A successful SaaS product should be able to drive customers to the next stage in their journey so they fully experience all your product has to offer, stick with it, and even recommend it to others.

But to achieve said success, you have to first delight customers with solutions they seek. This is where a customer activation strategy helps. To make the journey smooth from one stage of the funnel to the next, you need tools that help automate the process and optimize certain actions for the best points/use cases that guarantee conversion.

This blog post is going to show you the best tools to aid customer activation for your SaaS.

On to it!

Customer activation tools – all you need to know:

• Customer activation is that critical point where a customer gets to experience the value or benefit of your product.
• This is different from the AHA moment because an AHA moment is when a potential customer can identify your product as a possible solution. But activation is when they try it out.
• Activation is also to motivate customers or get existing customers who became less interactive, to come back and move further along in the customer journey.
• Activation is an important metric every SaaS company should monitor because getting more people to the activation stage and converting them into becoming repeat customers has the highest impact on your MRR.
• Userpilot is the best-recommended activation tool on this list because it’s a no-code easy to use tool that comes with all necessary features/elements needed to build a personalized customer journey to help activate customers. It is also affordable.
• Appcues is the oldest of the customer activation tools here. It has a large library of UI elements and segment cases that beginners can use. But its features are limited based on price plans and it doesn’t allow for vast customizations except you use CSS; a poor feature for a supposedly no-code tool.
• Pendo is best for customer onboarding on mobile. Its large data management and in-depth analytics help companies convert customer data into insightful information. On the flip side though, Pendo is highly expensive and also very limited for building onboarding experiences.
• UserGuiding is the cheapest tool here but is the least recommended because of its limited and difficult features.

What is customer activation in SaaS?

A customer activation strategy means that customers are willing to pay to use your platform after experiencing the value of your product. To make the customer journey smooth from one stage of the funnel to the next, you need tools that help automate the process and optimize certain actions for the best points/use cases that guarantee conversion.

Overview of customer activation tools for SaaS

• Customer activation is that critical point where a customer gets to experience the value or benefit of your product.
• This is different from the AHA moment because an AHA moment is when a potential customer can identify your product as a possible solution. But activation is when they get to try it out.
• Activation is also to motivate customers or get existing customers who became less interactive, to come back and move further along in the customer journey.
• Activation is an important metric every SaaS company should monitor because how many users you can get to the activation stage and convert into becoming repeat customers has the highest impact on your MRR.
• Userpilot is the best-recommended activation tool on this list because it’s a no-code easy to use tool that comes with all necessary features/elements needed to build a personalized customer experience. It is also affordable.
• Appcues
• Pendo is best for customer onboarding on mobile. Its large customer data management and in-depth analytics helps companies convert customer data into insightful information. On the flip side though, Pendo is highly expensive and also very limited for building onboarding experiences.
• Userguiding is the cheapest tool here but also least recommended because of its limited and difficult features.

What is customer activation in SaaS?

Customer activation refers to the moment in the customer journey where they get to experience the core solution/value of your product. It’s the point where they use your SaaS product to accomplish a task and see its benefits for themselves.

Using SurveyMonkey as an example. One of the core features of SurveyMonkey is getting its users to create online polls or surveys. The customer activation point for this tool will then be the point where a user actually does just that. Not when they visit their site or sign up for an account, but when they use the tool to create a survey.

It is different from the “AHA! moment” because while AHA moments are points of them realizing your product as a possible solution, activation points are when they test/try it out. An “AHA! moment” could be via your landing page value proposition or case studies that motivate customers to sign up. Activation occurs only after the product has been used and can mark the difference between churn vs. a repeat customer.

Customer activation isn’t only a metric for new users though, it also focuses on your existing but dormant customers. Still using SurveyMonkey, it’s possible a customer signed up and initially created a few polls but after a while stopped. The purpose of activation in this case will be to remind such customers of the value of your product, find out why they dropped off, and increase customer engagement rates.

Why is a customer activation strategy important for SaaS?

If people never try your product, they’ll never know how good it is. And if the majority of your target audience doesn’t recognize your product as a solution, they have no reason to. convert, and sooner than later, you’ll be out of business.

No customers = no revenue = imminent company failure.

Of all the Pirate Metrics, activation also has the highest impact on MRR. According to research by Fairmarkit on how each metric affects MRR, activation had the highest at 34%.

Essentially, customer activation is important for your SaaS because it is directly responsible for a large chunk of your revenue and longevity in business.

The long and short of it is that you need to take a customer-centric approach to the entire user journey.

How can you increase customer activation in your SaaS?

Now that you know why customer activation is an important metric, the next step is to find out what you can do to increase this in your product. There are several methods, like the use of email notifications and efficient customer support. But for the sake of this article, we’ll focus on just primary onboarding.

The primary onboarding process is how you help a first-time customer know and understand what your product is about. The end goal here is to get them to perform the key feature most important for their success. To make sure they get maximum value from this process here are some things to do:

• make sure you use a welcome screen on your website with a microsurvey to segment based on customer data. This will help you discover the different activation points for the different use cases and also help create a more personal customer experience in-app to drive engagement.

• Knowing your users well (role, use case, etc.) allows you to personalize their onboarding experiences. You can then build a checklist meant to guide customers to perform specific actions and engage with relevant features for their use case.
• Next, push your customers to adopt the key features that are important for their use case. This will get more users to the activation point and increase user activation.

A great example of how to trigger activation is this Postify checklist screen. Using the welcome screen example above, here’s what the checklist for a marketing manager in a small business would look like. For them, scheduling their first post means they get to see the tool in action and experience value.

Best SaaS customer activation tools

When it comes to robust functionality (the different UI patterns and experiences you can build for your users to increase customer activation) – we do believe Userpilot offers the best value for money. So we’ll start from that, and then work our way down to more user-friendly and cheaper tools if that’s what you are after.

#1 – Userpilot

Userpilot is a product growth marketing platform that allows you to build beautiful user adoption experiences code-free. It helps you automate the onboarding across each stage of the user journey ( primary onboarding, secondary onboarding, tertiary onboarding)

Compared to the other tools we’ll look at in this article, Userpilot has the most robust functionality for customer activation:

Robust functionality

It allows you to build in-app onboarding and in-app marketing experiences without coding, with 4 actions and 5 UI patterns available in its flow builder, including Welcome Screens and Checklists that we mentioned above.

Track and analyze customer engagement

You can set a goal for each experience — or task in a checklist — and track how users engage with each. This data management can help you break down the behavior of each existing active customer.

Advanced segmentation and targeting

• Userpilot lets you create advanced user segmentation, demographic information, and engage with your users in a personalized way. You can create segments of users based on user identification/customer data, custom events, in-app behavior, or responses to your in-app microsurveys. Here’s an example of a segment you can create:

• You can then use this segment to target an in-app experience like a checklist for example and have it triggered until all tasks are complete and the user reaches the activation point of their journey.

• Tailoring your messaging to specific target audiences is especially important when you’re advertising on multiple channels. All customer touchpoints — whether in-app, on social media, or paid media — should be relevant if you want to see a customer turning into an advocate.

Interactive guiding to the activation point

Replace long and boring product tours with interactive walkthroughs that guide customers on how to engage and use a specific feature. These are personalized based on user actions – customers don’t see step 3 before they have taken step 1. This makes it helpful and relevant for the user and increases key feature engagement that is essential for customers to reach their activation point.

A/B test in-app experiences

Many marketers can benefit from creating experiments with A/B tests to see which experiences lead to a positive impact or have the highest goal completion. Split testing your marketing in this way can help you optimize the messaging you use to promote your business to customers.

Build in-app experiences with no code

With Userpilot you can build in-app experiences for customers without having to write a single line of code. You will only need the help of a developer to install Userpilot and set custom events. Apart from this all experiences can be built and customized using the Userpilot builder. Here’s how customizing a welcome screen will look like:

#2 – Appcues

This is the oldest product adoption/digital onboarding tool. It does more than just onboarding, it also helps monitor and creates experiences across different stages based on the customers’ lifecycle for increasing engagement.

It consists of a variety of UI elements such as checklists, tooltips, hotspots, and slideouts that boost customer engagement on the product website. Although access is limited based on your price plan. You can definitely get great results from using this tool, and here’s how:

It has a large platform for creating smooth experiences

You can track entire customer journeys across multiple touchpoints and create different onboarding processes for different segments of your buyer personas — ensuring everything stays relevant to various customers demographics.

Excellent UX and UI

Appcues UI is smooth, and their experiences are easy to build and work mostly as you’d expect them to. This helps you create experiences for customers without going through a steep learning curve.

Has some pre-defined segments

This will help you in the case where you’re new to building onboarding flows and product tours. These existing segments could serve as a template to follow when running in-app marketing efforts.

While Appcues is a great customer activation tool, it isn’t the best for reasons like:

• Its most affordable plan (at $249) has limited features that make it difficult to create useful smooth adoption/activation experiences. With limited segments, no checklists, no custom CSS, and no localization (for apps that operate in more than one language), this plan is mostly useless. You’ll require a lot more cash to get more value here.
• It’s almost impossible to build a truly interactive walkthrough using Appcues. This is because the tool doesn’t support non-linear user journeys/experiences – which is how most people navigate through products. Your walkthrough guide should follow users wherever they go in your product but Appcues doesn’t let you build such experiences.

You can read more about the shortcomings and best alternatives to Appcues to help you make a good choice.

#3 – Pendo

This is another popular product experience and digital adoption tool. They help your customers ‘adopt your software more successfully across web and mobile.’

Amongst all Pendo competitors, it’s highly recommended for customer onboarding on mobile. Their main product is their Product Cloud aiming to bring customer feedback, analytics, and onboarding in one tool:

‘After extensive due-diligence research we settled on Pendo. Although not cheap, it’s the most complete product on the market that ticked all the boxes for us. Especially the union of customer data with research (surveys, NPS, etc.) is a huge advantage, allowing you to target specific users who did (or did not) use specific features or screens of your product. Let me know if you need any other input, happy to assist. – Vincent van Scherpenseel from ContentKing’

To add to Scherpenseel’s analysis, NPS metrics can also show a customer turning into an advocate or detractor which will speak volumes on how your app is evolving (for better or worse.)

Here are 3 reasons why your SaaS should consider this tool:

• In-depth analytics: Pendo helps you track customer behaviors and help people go through the customer’s lifecycle faster. This customer data lets you know what people think about different features of your product and can help you optimize for adoption and activation.
• Customer segmentation: Pendo allows you to segment your customers in a variety of ways. Segmentation helps you see how different groups interact with your product and will enable you to engage users by creating a more personalized experience for each user segment based on their behavior.
• In-app guides and messaging: Pendo helps your customers get the most out of your product (and easily too). You’re able to create contextual and personalized guides/support to help users quickly discover relevant features and put them to use in order to drive activation rates.

However good Pendo is, it still has its shortcomings like:

• Limited onboarding elements and basic styling options: to create the best onboarding experience, you need a mix of features like checklists, tooltips and slide-outs. Pendo has limited elements and only allows customization when you use CSS; a problem if you want to build an easy no-code flow.
• It’s also expensive: although their prices aren’t publicly accessible on their website, you can request a quote. Reviews show that their starting price ranges from $2,000 to $5,000 for a single product per year and $12,000 for the lower-tier package, per year. For early-stage or small startups, this pricing could be a huge block.

#4 – UserGuiding

Some onboarding is better than no onboarding. But unless you are really not able to spend around $100 extra on Userpilot or even Appcues, then don’t go for UserGuiding. You will get so much less for your money than with the previous two. But since there may be some early-stage SaaS companies reading this, I felt I should also include the cheapest option.

Here are the reasons I think you may want to consider this tool:

• It’s a simple tool with a fairly intuitive UI
• Affordable for small startups
• Also easy to understand.

The shortcomings, on the other hand, are quite more than reasons to use this tool. Here are some notable ones:

• Very limited UI patterns in the guide builder.
• No actions available for the next step – you can only build linear step-by-step product tours, which most users hate.
• Can get a bit buggy – e.g. I didn’t get how I actually change the UI patterns in the next steps, or how I link things like next experience or URL change to the buttons in the builder:

• Checklists: has a checklist, but it’s more difficult to build one than in Userpilot/Appcues.
• Limited segmentation options meaning your guide won’t be that interactive.
• The pricing has also increased a lot recently – from about $99 to $166. I don’t think it’s worth it anymore, simply put.

Conclusion

Customer activation is a very important metric your SaaS should take seriously because if you don’t take advantage of this stage, it means visitors/new customers can’t turn into repeat customers/loyalists. And if customers can’t smoothly transition from a stage of the funnel to the next, that poses a big problem for your product’s revenue and success.

Activation tools help make this easier by enabling you to build experiences that educate and ensure your leads don’t become a one-time customers. Good tools aren’t limiting, but rather they empower you with accessible features to help your users adopt your product and increase activation rates.

The digital world is full of potential customers so why not get a comprehensive customer activation tool? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can start building engaging experiences for multiple touchpoints in your product.