Contextual

Blog

  • Reducing Trialler Abandonment: 5 Tips for Product-Led Companies

    Reducing Trialler Abandonment: 5 Tips for Product-Led Companies

    How many apps do you keep on using after the trial period?

    Worry not, you are not the only one who does so. Trialler abandonment is an unfortunate event. Yet it is a natural phenomenon that today’s app-driven world brings with itself. 

    While product-led companies are trying their best with social media campaigns, ads, and other marketing tools, statistics show that between 2010 and 2019, the average app abandonment rate after just one use (session) was 23%. 

    This might sound alarming for companies who rely on their user’s onboarding experience and product adoption. However, despite the statistics, not all is lost.

    If you are a product manager or part of a product-led company and your goal is to reduce the trialler abandonment your app WILL face, keep on reading. We put together a list of tips and tricks just for you!

    1. Invest in Your UX 

    It goes without saying that the interaction a potential user has with your product should be your biggest focus. Look at it as the channel of communication between your company and your future clients. 

    Whether you like math or not, we have a formula for you:

    Positive UX processes = increased loyalty on the customer’s end. 

    Simple, isn’t it? Well, for this to happen,  design of the user’s journey combined with visual economy and appeal are top priorities for product-led teams. By focussing on JTBD and paying attention to details such as functionality, personalized, contextual tips, announcements and notifications you ensure your product stays with a user beyond the initial onboarding. 

    App abandonment often happens because the company fails to invest in their clients first and the product after. Your product’s usability will greatly impact the client’s decision on whether it’s worth going through with the adoption.

    So, improving the app’s interface might help you not just with the initial trials, but will also help your company with a long-term retention rate. What marvelous results! o

    2. Learn How To Balance on The Fine Line of Notifications

    Mobile apps are an important part of the modern person’s life, whether we take its personal or professional aspects. Notifications are a vital tool of these products, as they help the user journey and also with the product adoption. 

    As such, notifications should take an indispensable place in your list of priorities when it comes to product development. So, next time your team discusses user journey mapping and optimization, take time to look at the impact of your app’s notifications throughout the user journey. 

    While notifications have a significant place in every app, there is a fine line between helping with user engagement and frustrating the client with too many push notifications. 

    Trialler abandonment is often caused by notifications that are either too obnoxious or even unnecessary. Making sure that you take time to create meaningful, personalized notifications can increase the chances of product adoption. 

    Connect with the user from the onboarding process. Something as simple as inserting their name in your welcome message can guarantee you a positive first impression.

    Yet, consider the timing of your notifications. Try not to interrupt your user in their workflow, as bad timing can lead to product abandonment. Especially with new clients.  

    You do not want to annoy people, but you don’t want them to forget about you. So, find the balance!

    3. Make Your Ads/Popups Less Intrusive

    How to do that, you might wonder?

    Similar to balancing notifications, pay attention to interuppting the user flow with the ads or other pop-over content (announcements, nudges, prompts) in the app during its usage. Read our posts about JTBD – so many Apps make the mistake of popping up something selflish (like a request for Appstore rating or SaaS NPS question) when the user is trying to get a “job done”.

    Most users are aware that ads are important in a B2C Apps, however, if they appear to be too frequent, occupying a large part of the screen or even interrupting the work of your user, it can easily be a source of frustration, which can lead to an increased app abandonment rate. 

    Users have low patience with new apps: the fewer distractions they have, the better. Especially in the first few uses of a new software product, clients can be more picky than usual, so it is crucial to be mindful of details such as positioning of the ads and their frequency, in order to ensure an increased app retention rate. 

    4. Security Should Be A Priority 

    Cybersecurity and digital attacks are topics that seem to be on the table constantly, especially with the rapid rate at which technology advances today. 

    If you’re part of a SaaS product development company, security should be prioritized within your product. Digital attacks can and should be avoided in order to increase client trust and your app’s retention rate. 

    The product should not only be secure, but product-led companies should especially focus on how this feature is perceived by clients who want to protect their personal data from getting hacked. 

    To ensure that your clients trust your product, you can create a sense of security by making sure your app runs well and doesn’t have many bugs, or that it’s user-friendly and easy to follow for your target audience.  

    5. Take Advantage of User Feedback 

    Accepting that not everyone will find your product useful is crucial in order to make sure you and your team can focus on narrowing down your clientele. 

    When you find your niche of customers, it becomes easier to listen to their feedback in order to improve your app for new and potential customers. 

    Take advantage of the onboarding feedback given by users who already completed this process and see what you can optimize for future clients in order to reduce app abandonment in the early stages of user onboarding.  

    Try to measure the effectiveness of different features your product has, pay attention to possible threats, and fix bugs as soon as they appear. 

    You not only ensure that your new clients perceive your product as a serious one (and thus are more likely to go through with the product adoption process), but you also build credibility within your existing clients. 

    If people feel heard, they are more likely to stick around for a longer time. After all, customer service is one of the strongest bridges between a product-led company and its users. 

    Overcoming Trialler Abandonment

    App abandonment in the trialler phases is a common occurrence during user onboarding and in the product adoption process. 

    However, you should not be disheartened, as there are some tricks to reduce these numbers and promote higher retention rates for mobile apps. 

    Some of them, such as investing in the UX, or ensuring product security, are foolproof methods of encouraging product adoption among new clients. 

    Others, such as managing ads and notifications, should also be considered as they help in facilitating the workflow of your users and providing a more pleasant experience when the product is being used. 

    Lastly, by listening to the already existing customers’ opinions, both your product and your company will be seen as reliable. 

    So, what is the next step?

    You are an expert in the theoretical part, congratulations!

    But you know what they say: practice makes it perfect. Would you like to implement these tips smoothly and swiftly into your app development workflow? If you want to learn more about obtaining better retention rates and how to grow your product, get started with Contextual today!

  • Onboarding Feedback: Product-Led Success with Your Mobile Users

    Onboarding Feedback: Product-Led Success with Your Mobile Users

    Product-led companies are praised for pouring their heart and soul into the product that ends up in their customers’ hands. 

    While the product-led approach is known to boost growth and efficiency within a business, to get there, it’s crucial to focus on the first impression your product gives to a potential user. The onboarding experience can best be perfected through the feedback of your clients, which in turn helps with reaching more users and encourages product adoption.

    As SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies are expected to deliver their products both in web and mobile formats for a better product adoption, onboarding feedback is especially helpful with mobile users. 

    Asking for client feedback on their onboarding journey while using the mobile version of a product has great benefits both for the client, as well as for your product and your company. So, why exactly is onboarding feedback important? Let’s deep dive into it!

    Onboarding feedback reduces time spent on perfecting the process

    Although it might sound counterintuitive at first, collecting client feedback on their onboarding experience actually helps your company save time on coming up with ideas for new features, better performance and many more. Especially with mobile version users, time is of essence not just for product development, but also for the client, as their attention span tends to be much shorter than that of a web user. 

    Generally speaking, the first 30 seconds after a potential user downloads your app are the most crucial ones, as your product needs to catch their attention in order to avoid trialler abandonment.

    By asking for feedback after they complete their onboarding, they help your company figure out where the product needs to be improved. 

    With a product-led growth mindset, you must make room for the clients too. Reserve them a chair in your meetings and refer to them as being part of your team. Understanding that their feedback is crucial for the improvement of your product will help you save time and stress when implementing changes.

    It helps with building a rapport with the user

    Product-led growth can be achieved if you have a strong rapport with your clients. With user engagement and communication comes product satisfaction, which leads to company growth over time. 

    Focusing on your clients and listening to the feedback they have to offer upon onboarding with your product is an investment that will always make its return into your product and company.

    As we mentioned above, clients have limited attention for your product, especially when it comes to the mobile version, where it takes a couple seconds to lose a potential user. Mobile versions allow for companies to have highly targeted interactions with their clients. By involving the user in the creation and improvement of your product, they are more likely to go through with the product adoption, as they feel that their opinions are valued by your company.

    Getting to know the client’s needs through their feedback

    As your mobile product’s time from the start of the onboarding process is limited, knowing your users’ needs is critical. With a broad clientele of new and returning users, you have to make sure you implement their feedback for a successful product adoption.

    Learn from previous feedback: returning users expect possible bugs or errors to be fixed, their needs concern reliability, while new users need to be engaged fast enough to continue using your product and complete the onboarding process. Paying attention and anticipating their problems will result in a happier client, a smoother user journey, and a better app engagement.

    Continuous onboarding equals continuous feedback

    Consider the concept of continuous onboarding to keep user satisfaction at its maximum. For example, when introducing a new feature to your app, ask the returning users to give you feedback on it. 

    The initial “Aha!” moment they had when completing the onboarding for the first time is a rewarding feeling. By helping the client achieve it again through feature discovery (and then asking for their opinion on it), you are keeping the user in a continuous onboarding state, and they will offer feedback with more enthusiasm each time. 

    If the users see that their opinion is valuable in the development process of your product, they will feel included and are more likely to take their time giving feedback on their experience.

    Mobile is the future – except it’s happening now

    Understanding that the mobile version of your product is a key feature of product-led companies will help you prioritize what’s truly important for your team and efforts. By relying on onboarding feedback from mobile users, you’re doing a huge favor for your future self and the future of your company. Involving the clients and asking for their feedback should be a top priority, as their opinion helps with optimizing your product.

    Besides the positive impact of their feedback on your product, interacting with your users through their onboarding feedback also builds a bridge between them and your company. Having returning users who rely on you, and who you can rely on is a true advantage in a sea of product-lead companies.

    To conclude, the relevance of onboarding feedback is undeniable, especially when it comes to mobile versions of SaaS products. By involving the client in perfecting your product, you gradually build a rapport with them, which has as its main benefit the mutual reliance between company and user. Moreover, you get to know the client through their feedback, which helps you predict their needs moving forward. 

    Lastly, if the users feel heard when it comes to feedback implementation, they are more likely to continue using your product, which will lead to continuous growth, which is already the goal for product-lead companies.

    Do you want to learn more about how to better capture feedback and how to make use of it in your future business procedures? Book a demo and get started with Contextual!

  • Onboarding guru Hulick on JTBD

    Onboarding guru Hulick on JTBD

    If you are a Product Manager, Designer, you have probably heard of onboarding guru Samuel Hulick. Even Customer Success people are aware of his tear-downs of early experiences in mobile and web apps. We’ve even emulated his approach with a few posts on this blog. 🙂

    In his latest “Value Paths” podcast, he laments a  misconstrued use of JTBD.

    “it is mind-boggling to me how much of Jobs To Be Done is sales and marketing-oriented rather than product-oriented”. 

    Contextual agrees with Hulick that the role of JTBD is most profitable when designing user experiences in your product. To read some of our other posts take a look, here, here and here.


    Situation, Motivation, Expected Outcome
    Source: HBR

    Hulick and his co-host (Yohann) attempt to refine JTBD with into Value Paths:“Path Design is how you get users from where they currently are all the way to the results that they care about.”

    It’s an interesting approach that attempts to corale many of the UX tasks that Product Teams undertake. Often when disciplines are new, they are a collection of activities and example-based approaches that people attempt to copy and reproduce in a cargo-cult like manner. Some activities become perennial best practice and others are just hacks that work for a short time or in a specific eco-system.

    A classic example of a hack in customer acquisition is spam – it works for a while but burns a lot of prospects and email filter systems constantly improved to stop the spam.

    In onboarding a more subtle “hack” is to try to capture ALL  the user’s details (do you really need their phone number?) at registration time before they can evaluate the product.

    Hulick: “Because if the user goes from the marketing website, to the onboarding third party plugin, to a sales survey, and then finally gets into the dashboard of your product, they might feel like they’ve gone through like seven different products along that way, where for the user it should feel like one continuous thing.”

    We’re Building Processes, Not Products

    This is a key insight: As product designers we are fixated on the features and functions of a particular module in the product. Per the example above “user registration”. All your attention and discussions about design “crowds out” that the user has a journey to achieve a result. Their trial of your product is a several A-to-B processes to assess if they “hire” your product, they will get their needs met.

    The podcast is worthy of your attention – here are some other powerful takeaways:

    “The key to path design is clarity on the end outcome (what the path results in). Every time the user engages with the product, it is within the context of the end outcome; so every interaction should be framed against it.”

    “There are infinite paths between “where users are” and “where they want to be.” Thinking of the critical pathway (the actions or stages the path must contain by necessity) is a compression algorithm — it compresses that near-infinite, unordered information into a single hierarchy.”

    You can find the Value Paths podcast:

     

  • “Slow” is a dangerous place for products

    “Slow” is a dangerous place for products

    This paragraph caught my eye:

    “Slow is a dangerous place for a product company to be. Slow product teams tend to be outcompeted by fast ones. We complain about how Figma and Slack don’t feel native, but why are most of us using Figma and Slack? We’re using them because they outbuilt and outcompeted their native competitors. There are so many things that could improve in these products, but they’re the best tools yet built for their purposes.”

    For product teams, releasing and syncing the features across your IOS, Android and Web platforms is a mammoth task. You release a new feature and then nobody uses it. You release on one platform and users complain its not on the other platforms!

    With Contextual we allow you to not only announce new features but also test different engagements or interest in a feature PRIOR to building.


    Lets say you’ve received some feedback from your customer success team, or using interview products like https://greatquestion.co/ or https://dovetailapp.com/

    You want to drill in and get a sense if other users would value this. With Contextual you could:

    a) ask for feedback with a question – a simple popup message targeted at a specific audience segment lets them single click answer to “take their temperature”

    b) Do a mock announcement for a feature:

    1. Users who click thru on the announcement can be measured.
    2. After clicking thru, you may ask the users for their level of interest.
    3. Promise to get back to them when its released.

    This time-tested launch-hack from that lean startups have been doing for a decade. It may appear a but scammy or disingenuous but inApp you already know the user and if they arn’t interested, they will just click away. No harm done but valuable data to be gained.

    This animated GIF shows how to do this with Contextual in a few minutes.


    The starting quote comes from an excellent post by Allen Pike, (the owner of Steamclock Software) on when/why product teams should prefer to use Native or Hybrid app development. The main point being – the more code platforms you support, the:

    • greater cost to your team to implement
    • greater cost of co-ordination
    • inability to iterate and test fast

    These are absolutely the problems Contextual helps try to solve – both because we provide libraries for ReactNative, Cordova, Ionic, Capacitor and of course Native IOS, Android and Web!

  • Calm App: What’s New Announcement

    Calm App: What’s New Announcement

    Some time ago, I posted a review of a few meditation App’s onboarding experience. One of those was “Calm” which I believe (along with headspace, now a unicorn startup). 

    I recently found an updated writeup from Really Good UX. Its a nice post that covers the psychological elements of onboarding and making sure when they are asking permission that you are still reminded of the “calm” journey.

    An interesting element in the post is how they’ve handled the Apps re-organization for existing users: “Calm also offers an overview of changes to the app navigation for existing users, giving them an option to check it out with a “See What’s New” button.”

    Specifically the proactive handling of user’s aversion to change is key here – keep the users informed but with positive messaging and re-inforcing the Apps mission. 

    “By offering a tour, Calm reduces the likelihood that users will become confused by the app’s updated navigation. “