How to drive feature adoption for SaaS?

Launching a SaaS product is one thing.

But that's when the battle starts.

How do you get users to use the feature, help the feature reach more users, and become an essential aspect of how users interact with your product?

As with most things, we can elucidate that with a real-life example. Let's take the example of Chargebee.

Chargebee has a strong base of ~3000 paying customers with an NRR of 150%.

How do you approach creating adoption for key features within Chargebee that help increase retention by driving customer value? The key ask is a framework that'll guide your decisions around prioritization among 100+ features and a way to make adoption programmatic.

Objective -

Create a programmatic and dynamic framework for -

1. Decide on prioritization of features (old & new) for pushing user adoption
2. Increasing adoption of identified features by the user base

These goals contribute to the overall post-acquisition funnel by increasing the value customers find in the product — -> increase retention —-> reduce churn — -> creating higher NRR.

Assumptions -

1. No implementation of any product adoption strategy in any aspect till now.
2. The product is as mature as it is now.

Big Picture View

Do a product-wide feature audit. 

Using any product analytics product, create a matrix with (1) the number of users on the x-axis and (2) the frequency of usage on the y-axis.

Placing the entire suite of 100+ products with usage measured over the past year gives a very bird's eye view of each feature's adoption rate. These users are cohort, demographic, psychographic, and technographic agnostic.

With this matrix, features fall into four buckets -

1. Quadrant I — High number of users, high frequency of usage
2. Quadrant II — Low number of users, high frequency of usage
3. Quadrant III — Low number of users, low frequency of usage
4. Quadrant IV — High number of users, low frequency of usage

Each of the four features will need different strategies to increase its feature adoption rate.

Note- Feature adoption rate over a specific time = (Number of users using the feature/total number of users) X 100

Small Picture View

This section aims to understand how to benchmark and measure increments in the adoption of each feature (quadrant agnostic)

Such a measurement needs to be on a cohort basis (monthly cohort).

1. Exposed — Users who exposed to the feature button or the messaging of the feature
2. Activated — Users who hit the aha moment of that feature and take the leap
3. Used — Users who use the feature in its entirety at least once.
4. Used again — Users who use the feature at least a second time.

To measure the success of product adoption strategies over a particular feature, you need to measure the conversion rates over different funnel layers and ensure that they see an x% increment in each cohort.

That means the conversion rate from Exposed to Used again needs to be improved x% cohort-on-cohort due to the strategies used for feature adoption.

The conversion layers between funnel layers can be used as additional metrics internally to understand what's working and what's not and the point at which failures are happening either in the product or the messaging.

The Actual Strategies

In terms of tactical implementation, each strategy can figure into two types -

• On-Product — Things done on the product (messaging, tooltips, feature announcement, etc.)
• Off-Product — Things done off the product (email announcements, webinars, social media, community, customer success touchpoints, etc.)

Overall Strategies

On-Product

A strong onboarding tutorial

• A new user should be asked a couple of questions which get more data on their use case and demographic. Using these questions, we can create more customized walkthroughs.
• Each new user should be guided through the most basic features which enable the user to set up their account.
• The tutorial will secondarily focus on features in Quadrant I as they are the most popular features, and it makes sense that new users will find them useful and engaging.

Tooltips

• Tooltips help create clarifications for buttons and features during a feature usage workflow.
• If a product is in Quadrant II, tooltips can be helpful here as the features are useful, but fewer people use them — maybe because their usability is not instantly apparent.

Modal Announcements

• They help announce new feature releases.
• They can also be used to inform logical next steps. Analysis of the user's usage of the product till the previous login can give insights into creating this. 

Slideouts and Pop-ups

• Used like tooltips
• Used for doing quick surveys and ratings of features and their usability

Off-Product

Weekly Email Newsletter

• For new feature releases
• For highlighting inspiring use cases of the product by other users
• For highlighting more straightforward ways to achieve objectives by using inherent features rather than taking a circuitous route

Automated newsletters

• When a trigger occurs for a particular feature, but the user falls off before the 'used' layer of the funnel - newsletters can be helpful. 
• Newsletters can give a quick view to the user to help them understand what the feature they were attempting to use can do.

Webinars

• Engage existing customers to come on bi-weekly webinars to highlight their most helpful use cases of the product
• Have engaging Q/A sessions to trigger conversations around feature usage

Communities

• Building an active community on slack, discord, or Facebook groups can enable many organic conversations among product users.
• Users can gain inspiration from the usage of the product by other users and drive specific feature adoption.

Academies

• Build courses and certifications for different demographics of the users
• Academies will enable users to get trained with adequate exposure to all features.
• The certification course will also add to the brand value of the product as such.

Customer Success calls

• Coordinating these efforts with 1:1 touchpoints on customer success can help round off all product adoption efforts.
• They also serve as excellent mediums to garner feedback for products, and it's messaging.

Quadrant specific strategies

Quadrant I -

1. These are the most popular features, hence don't require active campaigning for the adoption
2. We should elucidate on these features right on the onboarding walkthroughs
3. Subsequently, we don't need concentrated efforts to increase the adoption of these features. 

Quadrant II -

1. Here the number of users is less, but they use it frequently.
2. It implies that the feature is inherently valuable for particular segments of customers, but discoverability or UI/usability is an issue.
3. These are low-hanging fruits to drive adoption quickly.
4. We can drive adoption with quick tooltips, pop-ups, and a focus on these features in the off-product strategies.

Quadrant III -

1. These features have lesser users and less frequency of usage.
2. It makes the case that these are not useful.
3. We should make less effort to drive adoption of them, and it should be left organic.
4. If the adoption rate doesn't improve even after some time, we can consider removing these features altogether. 

Quadrant IV

1. Here most users use the feature but very infrequently.
2. We need to do further analysis if this is due to the inherent nature of the feature — for example, reporting, which probably only has a monthly usage. 
3. If not, then the case might be similar to Quadrant II, and we need to make similar efforts for it (except that discoverability is not the issue)

Rounding Up

1. A feature audit as part of the Big picture view at the beginning gives a clear idea of each feature's status as it is now.
2. It enables prioritizing features to be pushed for adoption and helps answer whether some features even need adoption effort.
3. Upon feature identification, the funnel measurement outlined in the 'small picture view' comes to the fore.
4. Benchmarking x% improvement for conversion in the funnel helps measure the output of the adoption campaigns.
5. Feature audits must be done monthly to show how the granular effort adds up.
6. It will give input to plan the subsequent activities and provide an idea for feature addition/deletion to the larger org.