Product Experience Strategy: What is It and How to Build One [+ Examples]

In SaaS, a product experience strategy provides the building blocks for making customers stay, engage with your app, and eventually become loyal advocates for your product.

So what strategies can help you elevate the user experience? And where do you start?

That said, we’ll review how to build a strong product strategy that delights users and unlocks product growth.

Product experience strategy overview

• A product experience strategy is a set of tactics focused on enhancing user interaction with the product to improve satisfaction, retention, and value.
• Building a product experience strategy is essential for any SaaS business as it increases product adoption, reduces customer churn, boosts customer lifetime value, smoothes the customer journey, and elevates brand advocacy.
• There are five steps to creating an effective product experience strategy:

1. Collect data by tracking user behavior, sending surveys, watching over key metrics, and interviewing power users for insights.
2. Use analytics to monitor feature usage, spot behavior patterns, and identify what contributes to customer success.
3. Define strategic goals using the SMART framework to align with business needs.
4. Implement your product experience strategy by developing an execution plan with a timeline. Remember to involve stakeholders, outline strategies for each customer journey stage, and schedule each task.
5. Select and measure product metrics aligned with your SMART goals and customer paths to refine your strategy.

• Now let’s go over five examples of product experience strategies for SaaS:

1. Personalize product experiences based on customer feedback for quicker value realization.
2. Use interactive guidance to enhance understanding and exploration of the product.
3. Offer contextual help based on user behavior to improve activity and user engagement.
4. A/B test product changes to optimize the experience and increase lifetime value.
5. Increase customer loyalty with reward programs for feedback, reviews, and referrals.

• Instead of relying on the dev team to follow the product strategies you need, why not try a Userpilot demo to see how you can optimize the product experience?

What is a product experience strategy?

A product experience strategy is a set of tactics designed to enhance interactions between a product and its users throughout their journey—making it faster, easier to use, and more effective at achieving goals.

It can involve using targeted messaging, personalized experiences, and interactive guides to cultivate loyalty and encourage active usage of the product. The ultimate goal is to enhance customer satisfaction, retention, and lifetime value by overdelivering on customer expectations.

Benefits of a product experience strategy

Since SaaS businesses follow a subscription-based model, they rely on customer retention and loyalty to survive.

This makes it essential to follow a product experience strategy, as it not only satisfies customers but also creates a strong emotional connection with the brand so they stick around for a longer time.

It brings important benefits on multiple levels, including:

• Increased product adoption: Engaging and intuitive experiences encourage new users to integrate the product into their daily lives with ease.
• Reduce customer churn: Since engaged, customers become loyal customers.
• Increased customer lifetime value: Engaged customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and explore other products from your brand.
• Smoother customer journey: A well-designed user experience eliminates obstacles, making it easier for customers to achieve their goals and progress through the user journeys.
• Increased brand advocacy: Satisfied and engaged customers will promote your brand through positive word-of-mouth.

Steps to build a product experience strategy

Designing a product experience that sticks with users is not so straightforward. You need to follow a strategic approach that’s effective and provides you with feedback.

That said, let’s go over four steps for building a solid product experience strategy.

Collect data on the current state of your product experience

Customer data is the base of an effective product experience strategy.

This process can involve:

• Tracking user behavior through feature tagging and custom events.
• Sending in-app surveys for user feedback.
• Paying attention to key product metrics such as product activity, DAUs, MAUs, and customer churn.
• Interviewing power users to understand their pain points, JTBDs, and needs.

With high-quality data, you can understand how customers interact with your product and find helpful insights that can cement the basis for a high-quality product strategy.

Analyze the data to understand what contributes to customer success

Since your business growth relies on how your users achieve success with your product, product analytics are a must.

With analytics, you can monitor which features are being used, spot behavior patterns in specific segments, and know if users are getting value from your product.

For example, you could monitor the usage patterns and behaviors of power users to identify the happy path, or to compare the effect of a specific product strategy. Then use this information to build a replicable process that other users can follow to achieve similar success.

To do this, you can leverage a tool like Userpilot to:

1. Create a report.
2. Input data from your users for trends, paths, and funnel reports.
3. Visualize the data to quickly identify gaps, friction points, and areas for improvement.
4. Take notes. So if there’s a substantial drop in engagement during the onboarding process, you can immediately know that you need to streamline your onboarding process to make it more user-friendly or interactive.

Establish goals to prioritize initiatives

After collecting data, your next step is to define your strategic North Star.

What are you aiming to achieve with a product strategy? It could range from increasing feature adoption to building customer loyalty.

A best practice for this is to follow a goal-setting framework like SMART (that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) to align your goals with the results your business needs.

For example, a SMART engagement goal could be: “Increase in-app customer interactions by 25% over the next quarter by implementing targeted email campaigns.”

Plan and implement your product experience strategy

Now you’re ready to plan your product experience strategy.

For this, you need a timeline, and an execution plan, involve stakeholders (such as executives, the customer success team, product teams, or even customers), allocate human resources, and assign tasks.

This can involve breaking down each stage of your customer journey, outlining the product strategies that best correspond with each stage (e.g., creating personalized emails or loyalty programs to reinforce customer retention and advocacy), and scheduling its implementation for a specific period.

Once the tactics are planned, scheduled, and assigned, you’ll get a solid product strategy you can execute immediately.

Measure and iterate results to refine strategies

To complete your product experience strategy, you need to carefully select product metrics to measure your success.

These metrics should align with your SMART goals, as well as fit with your customer’s path. For instance, metrics like feature engagement rate and product stickiness are a good fit if your goal is to increase product adoption.

You can use product analytics tools like Userpilot to track user data and identify areas where product engagement is high or low at a glance. Then, you can improve and iterate as needed.

Examples of product experience strategies for SaaS

As you go through the process of creating a product experience strategy, you may feel lost at step four as you run out of initiatives to follow.

That said, let’s go over 8 product strategy examples that you can apply to your SaaS company:

Personalize product experience based on customer feedback

According to a McKinsey study, 76 to 78% of consumers are more likely to purchase, recommend, and make repeat purchases from companies that personalize the customer experience.

That’s why offering a personalized product experience is required to make users experience the value of your product fast since:

• It’s more engaging for the user.
• It leads to a shorter time to value.
• Unlike generic product tours, it’s less likely to be skipped.
• You can provide in-app experiences that are valuable to the specific user.

For example, you can take advantage of welcome surveys to collect data and segment users based on their needs, use cases, JTBDs, and goals. Then, use said data to implement interactive walkthroughs and onboard users contextually, making it intuitive for users to understand how to make the most out of your product.

Utilize interactive guidance to streamline the customer journey

Interactive guidance is another way to elevate the product experience. It helps users understand your product better and enhances their experience by encouraging exploration.

For example, Attention Insights leverages Userpilot to introduce its product core features through interactive walkthroughs. So instead of showing a generic product tour that users are likely to skip, they trigger an in-app flow that:

• Hand-holds users step by step with progressive onboarding.
• Responds to in-app behavior in real time.
• Avoids overwhelming users with information they won’t retain.
• Enhances their learning experience.

Offer contextual help based on user behavior

Targeting contextual guidance is a simple yet powerful tactic to elevate the product experience.

To do this, you can use product analytics tools like Userpilot to identify dropped-off users and customize an in-app help flow that’s relevant for them. So if, for instance, a user becomes inactive because a core feature didn’t “click,” then they’d receive a special in-app tutorial to master it the next time they decide to give it another shot.

This, along with personalized on-screen messages, onboarding tooltips, or push notifications, can present your users with contextual help that increases their chances of becoming active users.

A/B test product changes to increase customer lifetime value

One effective way to optimize your product experience strategy is by A/B testing the timing, messaging, and design of your in-app experiences.

This means creating two different versions of in-app content (announcement, onboarding tutorial, etc.) and then testing them with your user base to see which one resonates better.

For example, let’s say you need to optimize feature usage in your onboarding process. Version A can include a series of video tutorials, while version B includes interactive walkthroughs.

With A/B testing tools that support in-app flows (like Userpilot), you’ll be able to analyze the engagement performance of those versions, such as time spent on each version, completion rates, and feature usage—as well as continuously test and increase customer lifetime value.

Increase customer loyalty with a reward program

One way to elevate the product experience is to reward your customers for leaving feedback, writing reviews, and bringing in referrals.

This could involve setting up a loyalty program in which customers are awarded points each time they take a desired action, and those points can be exchanged for credits, free months, etc.

To encourage participation, communicate clearly about what’s in it and ensure that the process is straightforward. Also, don’t forget to follow up regularly to remind them what they can get with their points, current offers, etc.

Conclusion

A product experience strategy involves more than just tweaking the user interface of your app; it’s about the relationship it builds with users.

With this guide, you can hopefully design a product that works and makes your business grow.

So, instead of relying on the dev team to follow the product strategies you need, why not try a Userpilot demo to see how you can optimize the product experience?

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