Acquiring a new user is 25x more expensive than retaining an existing one (source: Amplitude). With that in mind, new user acquisition has only gotten harder as company budgets grow tighter. That's why it’s critical to engage and retain your best users through product-led marketing tactics.

We recently sat down with a handful of marketing leaders to learn how they drive product adoption. They shared key tactics to deploy across the customer lifecycle. Effective onboarding, campaigns, launches (and more) is critical – whether for a first-time user or managed account growth. 

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Andrea Saez, Advisor at airfocus

“Product adoption is not a one-off situation. It happens at various points in the customer journey, each with key results that let you to measure progress (e.g. increase sign ups by 10%). There are different ways of achieving retention, increasing adoption, and defining a great onboarding experience — these are all outputs of your overall product adoption strategy.”

👋 Prioritize strong onboarding

User onboarding can make-or-break most product-led companies. First impressions matter – since many users who sign up for a free SaaS plan will use it once and never come back.

The first step to building a strong onboarding experience is to define an activation milestone. It acts as a leading indicator of long-term user retention. An activation milestone is usually described as “X event completed in Y hours/days.”

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Brittany Gulla, Director of Growth Marketing at Jebbit:

“Jebbit’s key activation milestone for self-serve users is to launch a quiz on a site in 30-45 minutes. We have help articles, in-product live chat, and Jebbiversity – a learning portal with badges and awards. These resources empower users to become expert builders and reach activation on their own.”  

Marketing teams usually collaborate with a data team to define the activation milestone. Data teams offer a precise usage metric by running predictive analysis on retention curves. Here are a few more examples:

After you have an activation milestone, the next step is to encourage user activation. You have several marketing channels to achieve this.

Common channels to improve activation

Initial onboarding

Onboarding emails are a go-to tactic for many marketing teams. The best onboarding emails provide paths to quick wins, getting started resources, and a point-of-contact in case the user has questions.

💡 Make sure each email has a single primary purpose or CTA. Ask yourself: do you really want them to watch an onboarding video OR check out your documentation?

Onboarding checklists are also a popular choice. They help kick things off the moment the user jumps into the product. The checklist items should be straightforward and include your activation milestone (e.g. Create a design).

💡 Make sure your checklists dynamically check themselves off after the user ends up doing the action. Positive user feedback like a completed checkbox is key to creating product stickiness.

Onboarding questions are a powerful way to segment your user base. A simple question about their use case (e.g. personal, business) can help customize the onboarding experience. For example, Appcues asked users whether they plan on using the Appcues for their website, mobile app, or both and got a 50% response rate with surprising answers.

💡 Far too many companies set these and forget them, but this is a time when someone is excited and engaged with your product! Keep iterating on the best questions that help both you and them. For example, don’t waste time asking firmographic – get this through enrichment post-signup.)

In-product prompts

Chatbots are interactive messaging tools that help users contact support or access docs. Some of them give you the option to place a resource hub within your product, so users don’t have to switch tabs.

💡 Unlike website chatbots, in-product chatbots are not salesy. They are meant to guide the user as a convenient resource, so avoid being overly promotional and help them accomplish their goals.

Pop-ups & tooltips can work if well-executed. Most people have the instinct to dismiss pop-ups, but relevant ones can help them activate faster. Here’s an example from Pendo:

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Marcus Andrews, Sr Director of Product Marketing at Pendo

“A recent onboarding challenge we saw in our analytics product was a drop-off at installation. To solve this, we built an in-app Install Wizard that walks folks through the installation steps—which has led to a 43% increase in installation!” 

💡 Prioritize your pop-ups using tiers. So a large center pop-up should be reserved for key Tier 1 announcements, while a small corner pop-up works for Tier 2 or 3.

Further education 

Live webinars are typically held on a monthly basis for new users. Depending on how your users like to learn, this can be a great way to expedite their setup with a live Q&A.

💡 For horizontal products, it’s often helpful to teach specific use cases. Airtable has a generic “Getting started” webinar, but they also have a “Get started with your content calendar.”

Tutorials & courses are very suitable for complex products. Mature companies will often establish “academies” and “universities” (e.g. Webflow, Zapier, HubSpot). They usually offer shareable certifications for completed courses, which is another form of marketing. 

💡 Center the certification around career growth. Everyone wants new skills that help build their careers. People should be proud to have it on their LinkedIn. 

With all these marketing channels at your disposal, be careful about giving the user an information overload. Use your channels wisely in order to keep the onboarding flow focused and actionable.

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Andrea Saez, Advisor at airfocus

“The best onboarding flows strike a balance between too much information (numerous pop-ups, checklists, and chatbots) and too little information to get started. Allow the user to drive the action - once they interact with a feature, give them some time before you pop up another message that distracts them from the current experience.” 

B2B SaaS companies on average have an activation rate of 34% (source: Lenny’s Newsletter). Marketing teams can increase this rate using the tips mentioned above. They play a big role in helping new users quickly find success in the product. 

🗺 Run highly personalized campaigns

Once you have a healthy amount of active users, the next step is to run campaigns. One of the best ways to personalize campaigns is through product data. These aren’t the typical demand generation campaigns that most marketers are used to. Product-led marketing is all about tying product actions to marketing activities.

Unlike, traditional demand generation for enterprise deals, product-led sales works with smaller initial deal sizes (which grow overtime), so unit economics and customer acquisition costs should always closely monitored.

Brittany Gulla, Director of Growth Marketing at Jebbit:

“We run paid ads on LinkedIn, Google, and Shopify App Store. The challenge is showing ROI against those channels when you are driving new users to try out the product for free. What’s helped here is crystallizing our exact ICPs and what they care about so we can run highly targeted ads for the ICP we know will have quick product adoption and see the value in upgrading as soon as possible.”  

Common product-led campaigns

With marketing’s shift from supporting traditional TOF acquisition to conversion and growth of an existing user base, there are many strategic campaigns they can now run in partnership with sales and success. 

For example, marketers can help sales prioritize and target qualified users through a free-to-paid conversion play by targeting top free users and offering compelling reasons to upgrade. The campaign can offer incentives and speak to how users will get more benefits alongside what they already have.

Alternatively, when you have a paying customer that has potential for higher ACV, marketing can help run an upsell & expansion play. These campaigns depend on your business model. You may want to grow the number of seats, existing feature adoption, or add-ons that the user hasn’t tried before.

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Sarah Bond, VP Marketing at Lucky Orange

“We know users who view website heatmaps or Session Recordings want qualitative data on why a visitor took those actions. We then cross-promote our Surveys feature via in-app announcements, emails, and blogs – doubling the amount of users on our Surveys feature (40% vs 21% adoption rate).” 

🚀 Create valuable product launches

Product launches are another way to engage new and existing customers. Customers appreciate using a product that’s always improving. Launches increase product adoption of new features and keep your product sticky. If the launch is for a paid feature, it also gives free users more reasons to upgrade.

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Marcus Andrews, Sr Director of Product Marketing at Pendo

“Driving product adoption requires developing and maintaining a consistent rhythm of interesting, valuable product launches. These launches expand customer’s use cases and give you an opportunity to continually upsell and cross sell your users.” 

In-app announcements have become a popular channel for product launches. There’s lower friction to try out the new feature given that users have already logged in. However, it’s important to not disrupt the user experience for users that are trying to accomplish a task.

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Sarah Bond, VP Marketing at Lucky Orange

“We've rolled out an announcements feature to keep users informed about new features and updates, and it's been really well-received. However, the marketing team needs to watch it closely because different teams want to use it. We collaborate to ensure that we're not bombarding users with too many announcements.” 

↕️ Bonus: test new industry verticals

Let’s say you’re in a high-achieving team that has gotten stellar onboarding, personalized campaigns, and a steady stream of great launches. If so, you likely have many power users in your product 🎉

In that case, you may want to expand your user base into other industry verticals. For horizontal products, going deep into multiple verticals can drive higher product adoption. Develop strategic partnerships and content that reaches and appeals to this new audience – and lean into new channels if necessary.

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Brittany Gulla, Director of Growth Marketing at Jebbit

“Early on, marketing focused on determining which verticals our self-serve motion was best for. We learned that eCommerce had great potential for SMB and mid-market customers. So we built an app on the Shopify app marketplace that now sources roughly 50% of our SMB customers” 

During the pandemic, many companies have experimented with new verticals. Vidyard’s GTM team decided to offer free signups to sales reps. Zoom’s Founder & CEO Eric Yuan famously said he couldn’t have predicted the number of schools and universities using his product. Having multiple verticals is especially helpful given current economic conditions. It helps you diversify the types of businesses that use your product. 

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Shanee Ben-Zur, Chief Marketing & Growth Officer at Crunchbase

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. You should create redundancy in your business so that if there is softness in one market (i.e. tech) you still have other markets or verticals that can bolster you.” 

Marketers sit in a unique position as they continually adapt to a changing product and market landscape. But as long as they strategically nurture users and grow self-serve revenue, their companies will weather tough market conditions.

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