saas adoption zen - muhive
DESCRIPTION
In this deck we showcase some tips and tricks on how we increased adoption on our SaaS application muHive. We share everything from how we built instant gratification to how we leveraged email as a channel to bring users back to our application. Feel free to share this deck with anyone you think will benefit from it.TRANSCRIPT
Adoption Zen Increasing adoption and usage of SaaS applications
Problem
using the product everyday returning to the product trying new features
Visitors were signing up for our service, but they were not
But why?
Product setup involved
a lot of sequential steps
For a new customer, our app
was hard to understand
The best features were
hidden or hard to get to
The experience did not compel
visitors to return to the app
How did we
fix this?
Account setup
Account listening
Public data listening
Customers need to integrate social media and email accounts for inbound conversations
Customers need to specify keywords, business
categories and geography to fetch public conversations
There are two facets to a muHive account
Account setup
We added a setup wizard. Good!
But there was a problem. There were 8 steps. terrible!
Terms of use Plan details Setup Keywords
Setup trackers Setup social accounts Setup email accounts
Invite other users Thanks & Support
Let us introduce the muHive
SaaS adoption Zen
(禪) Tips to help increase adoption of your SaaS
application
禪
“The path to completion
is only a FEW STEPS
away”
Very few customers were
completing the wizard
Clearly 8 steps were too many!
Fixing account setup
We chopped it down to 3 steps!
But what about all the other inputs?
禪
“Always DEFAULT to a
position of INTELLIGENCE”
No customer liked adding too
much data
So we added defaults for optional features with large
callouts
Onboarding
For a new customer, our app was hard to understand. We needed a way to urge and coax our customers to come onboard the product
For our early customers,
we conducted personal/online
walkthroughs
We would follow this up with onboarding guides post the walkthrough.
But, - It was difficult to scale once we started public signups - Onboarding sessions packed too much information
Few customers would come back to the application even
after the session
Simplifying Onboarding
Started educating customers about one feature a day, gradually over 5 days, using email.
Day 2 Day 1 Day 3
#WIN: one of our customers saw our day 3 mail and tried signing up again!
Simplifying Onboarding
We also added a new product documentation portal docs.muhive.com
#WIN: Till date 160 customers have visited more than one article on this page
Linked our app to this portal to act as a quick guide
禪
“You might capture a man
but can you capture his attention?”
Capturing interest
Onboarding mails helped create initial customer interest but … Customer visits would eventually decay. We needed something more to keep their interest alive for longer.
Daily digest emails
We started sending daily digest mails to our customers about their activities.
It didn’t generate as
much interest as we
expected
Interesting digest emails
The trick? Change the email! Dynamically altered the subject line based on the state of the account on that day
禪
“One must not simply
expect change.
CHANGE must be
DELIVERED”
Let’s introduce our automation engine!
Our customers loved using this … but wanted to consume information via email.
Forward as Email
We added a forward as email endpoint to the automation
Which would notify the customer on a successful result each time
Which brings us to ...
禪
“Interest is like that … blink and its gone”
Why let the user go?
An auto-updating number in the title bar tells customers how much new data they have (a la Twitter)
#wIN The average visit duration on our app is 19 minutes
禪
“a VIDEO is worth a
thousand images and a
million words”
muHive automation is THE feature.
But despite being designed as an intuitive drag-drop workflow, none of our customers could use it
Dealing with complexity
What, a video?
During our public launch, an automation we created in 30 seconds got massive audience interest (in a literal sense. We ran an impromptu public contest)
Clearly, there was a gap in how we used the automation and how
the customers tried to ...
Automation DIY series
We created (blog + video) demos of scenarios that our automation engine could address
#wIN A customer from Italy was the first to create an automation rule by using these
禪
“An empty application
makes no noise”
Lastly ...
Avoiding empty screens
Remember these 3 mails that welcomed you to Gmail?
If you don’t have data, show a mock of how the data or analysis might look in the future
Do not show an empty first screen
muHive enbox
Upon finishing sign up muHive would take customers to an empty Enbox …
… we added default get started messages for people to experience the Enbox right away!
That’s it!
We hope you will use all these tips in your adoption initiatives
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Team
Sagar Vibhute
Co-founder at muHive
Technology interests:
databases, information architecture and evolving role of social tech
Twitter: @biggfoot
Ritesh M Nayak
Co-founder at muHive
Technology interests:
social software, information retrieval, distributed systems and ICT4D
Twitter: @itsmeritesh
Photo credits • Slide 1: Olgierd via Compfight cc • Slide 4: ian boyd – CC licensed • Slide 5: |Chris| via Compfight cc • Slide 6: maxgiani via Compfight cc • Slide 7: Photo-Fenix.com via Compfight cc • Slide 8: katerha via Compfight cc • Slide 18: tonyhall via Compfight cc