In a perfect world, we’d like to see all provisioned users become loyal users—but the reality is that even getting a majority of users to adopt (let alone become loyal users) can be a struggle. At the same time, reaching majority adoption is critical to renewing a customer.
So how do you tackle this adoption challenge? Through user nurturing. You need to make sure that every user is contacted at the critical stages in your onboarding process—with training, best practices, and (of course) reminders. In fact, even a simple login reminder can have a significant impact on adoption. But you can do even more.
Consider the situation of one SaaS company from our data. The company defined users into three categories of adoption: loyal users, occasional users, and no-shows (i.e., users who never logged in).
The distribution of provisioned users across these categories after 30 days was 33% loyal users, 37% occasional users, and 30% no-shows. The company’s goal was to have the majority of users be loyal users after 30 days—so they were a good bit off the mark.
The customer success team responded with a user-nurturing campaign that sent an automated login reminder to all no-shows after the first two weeks. But the reminder had a twist: In addition to login information, the e-mail also included a list of the top users in the recipient’s organization who could offer assistance.
This simple user-nurturing campaign created an amazing 21-point lift in loyal users. The diagram to the right illustrates the campaign’s impact, with a new distribution of 54% loyal users, 28% occasional users, and 18% no-shows.
The customer success team attributed the growth to three things: First, the simple reminder helped with issues such as a lost or deleted introduction e-mail. Second, the list of top users indicated that the recipient’s manager would be aware of who was or was not using the system. Third, the list of top users also provided a peer resource and gave the recipient more awareness of usage across the organization.
The Implication
User adoption is directly correlated with customer retention and revenue growth—but adoption drops off dramatically after 90 days. If you can intervene early with effective user-nurturing campaigns, you’ll get in front of user adoption and have more time during those 90 days to foster adoption. You can also drive user loyalty even higher with more advanced user nurturing based on personas, which personalize interactions at each stage of adoption.
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