14 Ways to Improve Activation Rate in SaaS (+ Real Company Examples)18 min read
Looking to improve activation rate for your product?
This hands-on guide shows you 14 proven strategies you can start implementing right away. You will also see practical examples from SaaS companies that you can copy and create successful onboarding flows.
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TL;DR
- User activation is that point in the customer journey where a new user completes your key onboarding steps and experiences your product’s core value for the first time.
- User activation is important because it helps increase user engagement, find product-market fit, and increase revenue by boosting your free trial to paid conversion rate.
- 14 strategies to achieve a high user activation rate for your SaaS:
- Use a welcome survey to personalize user journeys
- Share key steps to get started with a welcome email
- Add an onboarding checklist to guide users to activation
- Trigger interactive product walkthroughs in the user onboarding process
- Write clear and concise microcopy to guide new customers
- Localize the onboarding process to help all users derive maximum value
- A/B test your onboarding flows for increasing user activation
- Offer self-serve support with a resource center
- Use gamification to encourage users to crush activation milestones
- Drive additional value with live webinars
- Collect feedback from the activated user to identify motivators
- Identify areas of high and low engagement and find ways to boost the number of active users
- Spot friction in the user journey with funnel analysis
- Understand why users churn before activation with churn surveys
Examples of companies that increased their user activation rate and how they did it:
- Attention Insight improved user activation with interactive walkthroughs
- Sked Social tripled conversions with an onboarding checklist
- The Room increased user activation by 75% by upgrading its onboarding process
- ClearCalcs used cohort analysis to gather data and activate more users
- Kontentino increased its activation rate with welcome surveys
- Userpilot helps SaaS companies like yours to improve user activation rates. Book a demo now to begin.
Try Userpilot and Take Your User Activation Rates to the Next Level
What is user activation?
User activation is that point in the customer journey where a new user completes your key onboarding steps and experiences your product’s core value for the first time. When activation happens, new customers move from doubt to confidence about your tool’s ability to meet their needs.
It’s super simple to calculate your activation rate: simply look into your analytics to find the number of activated users and divide that by the total number of registered users.
Why is it important to improve the user activation process
An enhanced user activation process helps you:
- Increase user engagement and customer loyalty: When users understand how to navigate and use your tool effectively from the outset, they’re more likely to explore its full range of features. This comprehensive engagement often leads to a deeper appreciation of the product, fostering a sense of loyalty and commitment.
- Find product-market fit: The user activation phase is an excellent opportunity to test and find the right product-market fit. By analyzing how users interact with your product during the initial stages, you can gather insights into user preferences and needs. This information is crucial for refining the product to better meet the demands of your target market.
- Increase revenue by converting free trial/freemium users into paying customers: Enhancing your user activation process ensures users experience enough of the product’s value proposition during the free or trial period. When a free user sees how your tool helps them achieve goals easily, it becomes a good motivation to upgrade to a paying customer and unlock your product’s full functionality.
14 ways to increase user activation rates for SaaS companies
Now that you’ve learned the benefits, let’s go over 14 proven strategies to improve your activation rates and boost revenue.
1. Use a welcome survey to personalize user journeys
Once a user creates their account successfully, the next thing they should see is a welcome page that greets them and quickly asks about their goals, experience, or preferences. This allows you to collect data to segment users and personalize their onboarding experience.
Ensure to keep your welcome surveys short to avoid fatigue early in the user journey.
2. Share key steps to get started with a welcome email
Personalization continues. Use the data you obtain from the welcome surveys to send personalized emails tailored to the user’s job to be done.
Your onboarding email should contain 3-5 action steps the user should take to engage more with your product. Where possible, provide links that lead the user back to the part of your tool you want them to explore.
3. Add an onboarding checklist to guide users to activation
An onboarding checklist acts as a roadmap for new users, outlining the essential steps they need to take to achieve initial success with your product.
Most people use checklists in their daily lives, so it’s a tool your users can relate to. The fact that checklists are visual makes the onboarding process less daunting.
Users can quickly check the list and see how many tasks they’ve crossed off and what’s left on the list. Seeing it this way provides extra motivation to complete your flows and get activated.
4. Trigger interactive product walkthroughs in the user onboarding process
Interactive walkthroughs provide step-by-step guidance, helping users experience the value of your features.
Set your walkthroughs to be triggered based on user actions, ensuring users receive timely, relevant guidance. By making learning intuitive and hands-on, walkthroughs can significantly boost user confidence and competence, leading to higher user activation rates.
5. Write clear and concise microcopy to guide new users
Effective microcopy makes the product more approachable and easier to use, encouraging continued engagement.
Every product team understands that, but it’s easier said than done. Sometimes, you’ll have to spend minutes or even hours thinking of the best ways to avoid technical language while making the copy clear and concise. How about some AI help?
You can use Userpilot’s AI writing assistant to create an effective microcopy in seconds. As in the gif below, the assistant can help you make the writing short or long, depending on your needs.
6. Localize the onboarding process
Translate your interactive walkthroughs, in-app messages, and other content types in your target audience language. Going the extra mile this way makes your product more accessible and relevant to a wider audience, enhancing the user experience and increasing the likelihood of activation.
7. A/B test your onboarding flows for increasing user activation
Test variations in UI patterns, content, structure, and calls to action to identify the approach that maximizes user activation rates.
The kind of test you conduct boils down to the data you need to gather. Let’s quickly go over the different types and what they help you achieve:
- Controlled A/B test: This is a basic form of A/B testing where you compare two versions (A and B) of a single variable. Use it when you want to see the impact of a single change on user behavior—e.g., a long welcome survey vs something shorter.
- Head-to-head A/B test: This is similar to a controlled A/B test but specifically focuses on comparing two distinct strategies or approaches directly against each other, rather than just different versions of the same strategy. Choose head-to-head tests when there are two fundamentally different approaches or ideas, and you want to see which one is more effective. A good example is testing a tooltip-based onboarding flow vs an interactive walkthrough.
- Controlled multivariate test: This method tests multiple variables simultaneously to see how different combinations affect the outcome. It’s more complex than an A/B test as it can involve several variables and their permutations.
8. Offer self-serve support with a resource center
Self-serve support allows users to learn and explore your platform at their own pace. This is crucial for customers who love getting things done on their own without contacting support.
Enrich your support portal with all the resources new and existing users need to master your tool. Include different content formats to make the experience engaging. You can have FAQs, help docs, short tutorial videos, case studies, and any other content type you choose to add.
9. Use gamification to increase user engagement
Gamification taps into users’ intrinsic motivations, encouraging them to explore deeper and complete key activation steps.
Common gamification elements you can use include badges, points, progressive disclosure, etcetera.
10. Drive additional value with live webinars
Be strategic with your webinars. Segment users who interacted with a core feature but haven’t adopted it yet.
Then, invite them to live webinars where you showcase how to use the feature and explain the benefits they will derive from it. If possible, share use cases or have an existing user explain how they used that specific feature to drive results.
11. Collect feedback from activated users to identify motivators
Don’t stop at activation. Survey your activated users to understand what motivated them to continue using your tool, what features they value most, and the challenges they faced.
The best time to trigger this survey is immediately after the user completes your onboarding process and gets activated. The experience is still fresh, so you’re more likely to get accurate and detailed feedback.
Once done with the surveys, analyze the responses and distill insights to refine your user onboarding strategy.
12. Identify areas of high and low engagement for new users with trend analysis
Use tools like Userpilot to conduct trends analysis and pinpoint the features or steps in the user journey that are most effective in driving activation, as well as areas that may be causing users to lose interest.
For features having a consistent high engagement, ensure to prioritize them during onboarding to shorten the time to value for new customers.
If you find a feature with consistently low engagement, dig further to see if it’s a key feature. If the answer is positive, create or refine your interactive in-app guide to show users how to use the feature. However, if it’s not a key feature, it’s probably time you consider sunsetting it.
13. Spot friction in the user journey with funnel analysis
Analyze the free trial user journey to see where most users drop off. Couple your analytics with session recordings to get a better understanding of friction points and roadblocks keeping users from progressing.
Implement immediate solutions once you’ve found what’s causing friction—this can be anything from a simple tooltip for extra guidance to more demanding changes like a complete UI design.
14. Understand why users churn before activation with churn surveys
Trigger your churn surveys the moment new users try to cancel their accounts.
Ask a simple question like the one below and try to provide immediate solutions to retain them. For example, if users are leaving because of a missing feature, you can ask them what features they expect to see and then recommend something similar if you have.
Analyze your survey responses over time and identify recurring themes. Then implement solutions to keep future users from churning before activation.
Examples of companies that increased their number of activated users
To show you that these strategies work, here are five examples of how SaaS companies like yours used them to increase activation.
Attention Insight improved user activation with interactive walkthroughs
Attention Insight struggled with low user activation rates among its free trial users.
To solve this problem, the company implemented Userpilot’s interactive walkthroughs to hold users by hand and show them how to use key features. This approach led to a whopping 47% relative increase in user activation, contributing to higher trial-to-paid conversion and boosting the company’s revenue.
Sked Social tripled conversions with an onboarding checklist
After implementing an onboarding checklist, Sked Social observed that users who completed the checklist were three times more likely to convert into paying customers compared to those who didn’t complete it.
The checklist comprised a few key tasks designed to be straightforward and achievable. It employed psychological techniques like a progress bar and ‘endowed progress’ (where the first task is already checked off) to encourage completion.
This approach not only simplified the onboarding process but also effectively guided users toward key actions, leading to a substantial increase in conversions.
The Room increased user activation by 75% by upgrading their onboarding flow
The Room, a platform connecting tech talent with global employers, faced an issue with new members not uploading their CVs after signing up.
To address this, they created an onboarding flow using Userpilot. The new onboarding prioritized using the right UI patterns to encourage users to upload their CVs.
As a result, within just 10 days, the company saw a 75% increase in CV uploads, from 200-210 to 300-350 uploads per week. The onboarding flow achieved an 88% engagement and a 7% completion rate.
ClearCalcs improved user activation with cohort analysis
ClearCalcs faced challenges in guiding new users to find the right content quickly.
To solve this problem, they used Userpilot to segment users and track the behaviors of each segment. This allowed them to understand user needs and preferences at a granular level.
All they had to do next was provide personalized onboarding flows for the different user segments, leading to improved user activation.
Kontentino increased its activation rate with welcome surveys
We gave the Kontentino example earlier, but not with much detail.
This company used Userpilot to create welcome surveys and collect customer data upfront. The data obtained helped them personalize the user onboarding experience, leading to a 10% increase in activation just after a month of implementation.
How Userpilot can help improve user activation
Userpilot is a product growth platform with features to help companies improve new user experience and enhance overall engagement.
Here’s a breakdown of what you can do with Userpilot:
- Create effective onboarding flows: Userpilot allows you to customize the onboarding flows to the look and feel of your brand. In addition, you can collect or analyze existing user data to gather insights for personalized onboarding.
- Access multiple UI patterns for in-app communication: From tooltips to modals, banners, and slide-outs, Userpilot lets you trigger different communication patterns tailored to the user’s context.
- Funnel analysis: Analyze the steps users take to achieve key conversion goals. Spot drops off and investigate further to find the reasons.
- Path analysis: See how many users stick to the happy paths and what percentage is deviating.
- Trend analysis: Examine user behavior over time and identify patterns or shifts in how users interact with your tool.
- Cohort analysis: Group users based on shared characteristics and observe how specific user segments respond to changes in your features or onboarding process.
- Resource center: Create a fully customized support center to help users troubleshoot issues independently.
- A/B testing: Test different onboarding strategies to find the most effective.
- Feedback widgets: Collect user feedback to inform improvements.
- New user activation dashboard: Monitor key metrics to track onboarding success and user activation rates.
Conclusion
Start implementing the strategies you’ve learned in this article. Over time, track your results and make iterative changes to your overall onboarding game.
Userpilot can make the process easier. Book a demo now to discuss your needs with our team and see how you can analyze and improve your activation rate code-free.
Try Userpilot and Take Your User Activation Rates to the Next Level
