How to Find the Right Triggers for Product Growth?

The market accepts the fact that unless the pain is unbearable or the pleasure is inevitable, changes don't appear.

As a product manager, to drive such changes you need to think about how you can make the customer habitual of your product? Habits are built over time, but the chain reaction that forms a habit always begins with a trigger.

So what's a trigger? 

Triggers must create "an itch we need to scratch”. A trigger is the actuator of an action. They’re of two types: Internal & External (It's again of 4 types: Paid, Earned, Relationship, Owned. While the first three can tap new user acquisition, owned triggers with the user's permit to enter his attentional space, help prompt repetitive engagement.) 

After successive cycles of external triggers, users need no further prompting. They've now formed habits & can be driven by internal triggers. This is the actual aim of all marketing when users themselves reach out for the products to soothe their itch.

So let's see how these triggers work in tandem.

HOW TO IDENTIFY THE RIGHT TRIGGERS FOR YOUR PRODUCT?

1. Understanding the target audience, their needs, habits- Collect demographic user data like their age, gender, education, occupation, annual income.
2. Analyze how your product can solve their problem(s), why should they use it- 

"The ultimate goal of a habit-forming product is to solve the user's pain by creating an association so that the user identifies the company's product or service as the source of relief."

Identify the pain points of the user in emotional terms, rather than product features. Wanna know how?

"We often think Internet enables you to do new things. But people always want to do the same things they've always done."

- Evans Williams, the Cofounder, Blogger & Twitter

Here's where you need to peek into your user's life. Analyze what activities engage him in daily life. Use human psychology, think about such common, universal needs relating to your product. It can help you identify the source of pain and its possible relief. 

3. Hunt down deeper what internal triggers the users undergo in this pain & which can pull them to your product. Use Taichii Ohno's “5 Whys Method”, for this as explained by Nir Eyal in his book ‘Hooked', in the image below:

Using this method, find out the trigger-habit pairs for your different sets of users. It means which internal triggers, say, boredom, loneliness, FOMO etc, hit your users frequently and what habit(s) you want your users to form under the effect of this trigger.

4. Analyze for different user sets what could be the first possible actions of this intended habit & what your users might be probably doing before this first action. 

5. With this narrowed cue, find out what places, platforms, or time you could use to send an external trigger. 

Say, a Flipkart user added a product of choice in the cart but didn’t complete the buying cycle, say, maybe due to lack of the desired discount as in his estimation he prices the product differently. But with multiple external triggers like push notifications, email reminders, you can entice him for conversion with repetitive engagement.

6. Lastly, analyze how closest you can implant these external triggers in the user’s physical environment so that these surface as soon as the user is fired by internal triggers. Focus the easiest call to action these external triggers can offer.

for instance, https://zapme.in/ (a new chrome extension) notifies through WhatsApp message when the price of the desired product goes down.

Zapme Chrome Extension Popup:

This extension is not owned by a specific e-commerce product but came into existence since there is a huge market for similar e-commerce products and it can work as an owned trigger for most of them.

Conclusion:

Once you hit the right internal triggers this way, users won’t need an explicit call to action. Then it can be said that your product is addictive & users have got hooked to it.