Product-led growth is launching SaaS companies to success faster than ever. Unfortunately, if you’re a product leader or manager who’s in charge of building your product-led growth strategy from scratch, you may feel overwhelmed.
Enter product analytics, the secret to building your own product-led machine. Ready to launch your product-led growth plan? Strap in for a full look at the role of product-led strategies along with how to use analytics to drive product-led success.
What is product-led success?
Product-led success means you’re excelling at a strategy that uses your product to grow the company. Even if you haven’t already decided to pursue a product-led growth strategy, you’ve probably heard some buzz about it in SaaS circles. Here’s a quick look at why product-led growth is becoming so popular:
The SaaS market has morphed.
The days of selling one-off discs or software packages are over. Now, the SaaS industry has moved on to subscriptions, trials, and freemium models. With customers testing your product out right away and competition on the rise, delivering value is a must. Product improvements are essential to selling your product and keeping customers on board.
Positive user experience is paramount.
The consumer’s experience is more important than ever. One study by Dimension Data found 84% of companies that worked to improve customer service saw an upswing in revenue. Product-led growth focuses on user experience and improving the way they enjoy your product.
Success metrics have shifted.
In SaaS, it’s not enough to measure metrics such as revenue or units sold. Because the industry relies so heavily on recurring revenue models, you need to zoom in on KPIs such as net dollar retention and time to value to grow. Product-led plans make it easier to track and improve these metrics.
What are the benefits of product-led success?
In addition to pushing your team forward in an increasingly saturated SaaS market, product-led success also can benefit your organization on a deeper level. Here are a few reasons why:
- It deepens product connections by lining your decisions up with the user’s needs.
- It lowers acquisition costs by focusing on product qualified leads and servicing existing customers.
- It improves the user experience, keeps users engaged, and increases net dollar retention.
How do analytics play a role in product-led success?
There’s one tool product leaders and managers can use to crank out rapid product-led success: product analytics. Here’s how analytics can drive success in the most critical areas of your product:
Improve onboarding.
Product-led success requires swift, effective onboarding. The faster your time to value is, the sooner you’ll see your efforts paying off. With behavioral segmentation informing your plans and behavioral data in front of you, it’s easy to see how to nudge, encourage, or educate users in order to move them toward a quicker onboarding experience.
Encourage adoption.
Adoption is critical to both your product’s success and your team’s morale. After all, there are few bigger momentum killers than working tirelessly on a product or feature only to have it ignored. With in-product analytics, you can track how long and to what extent users are interacting with your features. Ultimately, digging into the data reveals how your efforts are paying off or where you need to make tweaks.
Increase retention.
You probably already know how critical retention is to your product’s success. One report found 59% of SaaS leaders believe customer renewals are a high priority. With analytics, you can track retention, set up alerts for customers who need attention, create milestones, and monitor customer success. The more in-depth insights you have at your fingertips, the easier it is to measure and improve retention.
How do you use analytics to fuel your product-led strategy?
Wondering how to use analytics to power your product-led strategy? Here are a few tips:
Embed customer feedback loops into your product.
Customer feedback loops keep you in touch with your user’s experience. And they act like a flywheel, generating better results the more they’re perfected. When you embed feedback loops into your product, you use analytics to find friction points, gather feedback, and use ongoing reporting to improve.
Retrace user paths.
As you dig into your user’s path, you’ll notice they don’t always journey through your product the way you want them to. One quick way to improve their experience is to add in-app engagements or guides at strategic points within your product. These engagements will help educate users at key moments or give them a chance to report their issues, shining light on what you can improve.
Open the door to sticky features.
Every product has golden features hiding that are just waiting to be uncovered. By examining your in-product metrics, you can spot these sticky features and pave a clearer path to them. Pulling the most out of these sticky features will trim down time to value and supercharge your product.
Spot and smash friction points.
As you monitor the steps your users are taking toward their objectives within your product, watch out for any friction points slowing them down. In addition to revealing these weak spots, analytics also will show you how the changes your team makes are paying off.
Discover more ways to find product-led success.
In-product analytics will make it easier for you to identify user needs, map out improvements, and measure the effects—a recipe for rapid product growth.
And there are more ways for you to become a product-led success pro. Download our free “Product-Led Success: Professional’s Handbook” now and learn how to become a product growth expert.
