The activation success rate is one of the most important digital product indicators, responsible for the vision of revenue/saving losses and the impact of the digital product to the brand.
With Digtial Growth, you can create a series of experiments to remove all obstacles to activate the customer. But before talking about how we can use Growth for that, and if you don’t know what it is and want to know more about it, you can check this Article: Digital Growth, a new approach to digital product development.
Activation concept
A lot of people get confused with the differences between activation rate metrics and active product users. Both are related to each other, but the calculation is different and there are specific decision-making actions to be performed.
Onboarding – from acquisition to activation in the digital product
When the Marketing area, the Growth hacking area or even specialized companies in these areas do that wonderful job and bring the customer into the product, that is when the onboarding process begins.
The onboarding starts when the customer accesses their product, for example, in the case of an application, when they download the product from the mobile stores and access its first screen, up to the moment they can access the product features. Some products have activations in more than one step, when the user makes a more simplified registration and then he must complete the activation to use some more specific features. It all depends on the strategy used when creating the product.
The big challenge during this long process is to encourage the customer not to back out. Whenever a client come to us with an application, given our experience in the development of applications, one of the main reasons for complaints when analyzing the shop is about customers who can neither finalize their registration nor log into the application. Then we begin to study all the data to find out the reasons for such problems during the process.
In Practice
When analyzing store reviews of 5 applications from different segments, from April to June 2020, we could identify 5 main reasons for common complaints.
The second place of those complaints, 23.53%, was related to activation. From that number, 94.25% of Androids users and 97.29% of IOS users rated the store 1 or 2, making the store general rate dramatically fall, that harms the company’s image and discourage potential customers when they access the application.
Discovering these problems and what the biggest offenders are, we begin to see a number of opportunities that will lead us to our chances of solution and consequently the experiments that we will develop within the product.
Recently, in a study at the activation funnel of one of the applications we developed, we discovered a big problem in one of the steps. A change in flow resulted in a 43 to 86% increase in the activation rate. A small action was able to double the activation rate and there was no visibility of the problem before the study was carried out.
The most important of all this process is measuring the activation rate to know if the experiments we are performing are improving it or not. There’s a saying that says: Your worst mistake is not knowing where your mistakes are at, or what you did right for that matter. Consequently, it is essential to have a clinical look at the data and then make decisions that will guide us on helping the customer find the product so interesting that they will wish to become an active user.
Digital Growth: Growing your Product Revenue and Savings
And what is the relationship between revenue and savings with the activation success rate?
The answer is very simple, how much your product may be losing when we don’t carefully look at the whole process.
As we know, an active user is the one that generates revenue, a monetary value for your company or even savings when we talk about how much you lower the operating cost, everything depends on the purpose of that product.
Making your product attractive and finding out the behavior that leads a customer to do something within the product is a matter of survival in today’s market, it is a job that must be thoroughly analyzed. We can learn the right moment when the customer is prone to take action and start at that point, making the flow easier to use, not only in the onboarding process but in all its use.
For the revenue/savings to be generated it is essential to remove all obstacles for the customer so that the product engagement is constant. The general idea is not to let that opportunity of increasing your company’s revenue slide simply because what happens at the stage of the activation with the digital product is not crystal clear yet.
This is one of the approaches we work on Digital Growth, focusing on growing the activation indicator and number of active customers, using the data to drive the strategies we will create to leverage these actions within the product, and then further expand the company’s customer base.
By: Ana Cristine Veneziani – Head of Growth Product
