#7 Shorten the user's journey to value discovery
All your marketing activities will fail if a newly signed up user can not discover the value of the product within minutes.
You write blogs, tweet useful tips and free offers, participate in discussion on Facebook groups and submit posts on forums to bring prospects to your website. Some of them leave immediately while some visit ‘about us’, ‘how it works’ and ‘pricing’ pages and make a mental note for future. Only a fraction of total visitors really signs up. These visitor turned users have trusted you but more than half of them are going to leave your site within few minutes, never to come back again!
Most of the newly signed up users are interested in using your product right away. Either they have an immediate need or they are just too excited about it. They want to use your product….only if you let them to.
Will you let them use your product? I don’t know. I wish you do.
But I know a lot many SaaS companies do not let newly signed up users use their product easily. They actively design user journey to hinder usage, confuse users with multiple options, annoy them with popups and frustrate them with lack of hand-holding or irritate them by bombarding too much information too soon. Within minutes users find themselves going nowhere and wasting their time. Feeling stupid to signup at first place, they leave with a vow to never come back.
Right from a point when prospects come in contact with your product, its name and message, it is your duty to escort them safely and proactively till they experience the key value of your product. Once the value is experienced you have them.
You must have heard the term ‘On-boarding’. I am not talking just about it.
I am talking about a complete user journey to value discovery, end-to-end.
It starts when a user first experiences a problem and decides to take action to solve it. It is your duty to be present there at this moment of decision, help them and hand-hold them.
User’s journey to value discovery:
1. Confusion: How can I solve my problem?
2. Search: What are my options?
3. Decision: Ok! this one.
4. Action: Signed up.
5. Anticipation: Is it what I thought it to be?
6. Achievement: Oh Wow!
Help the users to move from step 1 to 6, with least friction.
Now this is a multi-domain problem. To successfully move a user from step 1 to step 6 you need a team with skills like marketing, copy-writing, UX, product and tech.
However even without all these skills, simple steps and gradual improvements can make the user journey to value discovery very efficient for your SaaS business.
Decision Making: Help prospects to make informed decisions and win over their confusion. Your messaging and landing page should be designed in such a way that they make prospects feel understood and answer their most pressing questions. This will require research into their confusions.
We are at a time in SaaS industry when there are multiple solutions available for every problem. You can not claim yourself as the only landing page builder any more. However if you can understand prospects confusions and address those than you have battle half won.
Keyword search tools are a good way to discover prospects’ confusions. For example, once email service provider Sendingblue understood that people are trying to figure out how they are better than Mailchimp, they built a resource ‘sendingblue vs mailchimp’ and made it easily accessible as a footer link. Such resources not only help prospects to win over their doubts but also enable the company to come across very forthcoming and build trust with its users.
Similarly, Convertkit built resources for those who wanted to shift to Convertkit from other platforms.
Such contents help prospects take decisions. Making them easily available among footer links help prospects develop trust. Who doesn’t like forthcoming people?
Action: Make it very easy for prospects to take action. Your website should be easily reachable either directly from google or from social media accounts. Make signup process very simple, cut down on unnecessary fields and speed up the users to experience tangible value.
Aha Moment: This is where you make it super easy for users to take action for which they have signed up. Build features to get them started in a few mouse clicks, create GIF showing how to use product and prominently display help links. For example, Python web hosting service provider PythonAnywhere enables its users to launch a new Python web app in just few clicks.
Once a user has successfully experienced the core value of your product, he/she is not going anywhere!
I will take up these topics individually in future editions and discuss them in detail. Today’s aim was to introduce the concept of ‘user’s journey of value discovery’ to you. Consider it as a complete end-to-end process and look for methods to make it friction-less for your users.
🎁 For Early Stage SaaS Startups
If you are a founder of an early stage SaaS startup, I’ve have a gift for you 🙂
Mindset
Growth is a mindset game. Building a business is not for the faint-hearted. Growth requires keen observation, careful planning and pro-active actions.
Two founders with access to same amount of money and same skill set, go on to build businesses with different level of success. It is not about the resources, it is about the mindset.
This is the reason that I have included a section on growth mindset in this newsletter.
Here is this week’s mindset pinup:
You can download a print friendly pdf version of this growth mindset pinup here.
❤️ Thanks for reading Issue #07. I’d truly appreciate it if you help me spread the word on Twitter by Clicking Here.
We’ll talk soon.
Until then,
Ankur
Founder, Thoughtlytics
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