After you launch, users may or may not convert at certain points in the process.  These are called ‘activation points’.  You’ll need to learn them as users are navigating the product experience.  Once you learn them, you’ll know what other information you’ll need to improve the effectiveness at which they convert.

I’ll share an example of what I’m doing currently for another product I just launched.

Hotjar – https://www.hotjar.com/

Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is how to better understand your activation points and gather feedback in particularly around the why. I’ll explain more, but what I mean by that, in order to figure out how to get your prospects and your users to become paying customers as efficiently as possible now, so I’ve launched another B2B SaaS application this past week.

There’s some things that I probably would’ve really liked to have upon launching or with the launch, but didn’t wanna slow down the launch, and I really wanted to see how effectively what I had built was converting as such. It didn’t include like a free trial, which these days is pretty uncommon for a low-touch micro SaaS product.

However, upon launching it, I did get about 10%. Once I, once I launched, I had a, you know, built up an email list from the, from the inbound, uh, lead capture that I had set up. I blasted that list to let them know we launched products available. Here’s where you can register for an account and get started.

About 10% of that list immediately went to the site and attempted to create an account. Most of them did not convert to paying customers. So that’s what gave me the initial indication that probably not going to, most of them probably will not convert into paying customers without a free trial access to the product.

So I knew I needed to do that, but. I didn’t know, you know, for sure I had suspicion, I should say, at least that was the assumption. Uh, from there it was doing what I needed to do to figure out why people potentially weren’t making it past that activation point because they were getting to the product, they were registering the user.

Then I was looking for billing information to see if they would to using a ping to basically converting their count to paying right away. So I was really measuring the strength and the intensity of the pain of the problem. My product was intended to solve for them. So anyway, long story short, most people had not converted.

So I, I wanted to do multiple things. Number one, I wanted to figure out what it was gonna take in order to convert them. And number two, I wanted to try to find out why they weren’t converting. Maybe that was the reason, maybe it wasn’t. My suspicion was that they wanted access to test the product for themselves before they ultimately paid for it, which is again, become more common.

I leverage a tool called HotJar. If you’re unfamiliar, you could find more out about it@hotjar.com. It’s an analytics tool. I think it’s great. It does everything from screen recording to heat maps, to allowing you to inject surveys right into your application and also at certain steps in the process.

And that’s what I find to be really valuable is I can create a specific type of survey. In this case, I created a feedback survey. At that activation point where I was expecting to gather some billing information from the users, that’s when they were expected to convert. If they would, in order to learn more about why they maybe were or were not converting.

So if they weren’t converting, there’s a possibility that I could start to collect feedback at that. At that point in the experience for them by including that survey there, and really what you’re looking for is the qualitative feedback. Like people can click on buttons for surveys and stuff like that and answer the closed ended questions, but I really wanted the open-ended text and I’m looking to get some now in order to get a better understanding.

Why people at that point aren’t converting. Now, either way, I’m implementing a free trial anyway, cuz I also wanna see whether or not that moves the needle here. But I wanted to share with you a couple things. Number one, upon launching, its figuring out where your activation points are, as in what gets your prospect perspective.

Customer end users moved from one stage to the next stage in the process. And you’ll map it out in your head essentially in the beginning, but then you’re gonna have. Measure the effectiveness of that and figure out if the process may be broken or not. Converting all that effectively at some point in that process.

And then you’re gonna wanna focus in on that one just like you would a bottleneck and a process to figure out how to alleviate or eliminate it. So I’m sharing with you also some ideas in terms of how you can gather more information to try to find out why they are or are not converting. Uh, so I use both email with some of the users that I know had attempted.

Access the system as well as Hot Jar, which I think is a really great tool, and I’ll include a link to it in the show notes as well.