super timely post as this was something i’ve recently been thinking a lot about… we are about to launch our app, so not as far along (more so the first stage you mention about proving value to small number of users).

so we decided to pull onboarding out of the release version. at this point, it seemed more like a nuisance for the user. something we thought we needed, as opposed to something the user would value.

so we’re launching with just an anonymous login and zero friction to getting into the product.

but thinking about how and when we integrate onboarding. pocketing this post for later 🙂

Great post, Ben, especially the point about not all users being the right users. Companies get too excited about signups without paying as much attention to engagement and retention, spending money and effort on a leaky bucket.

One thing I’d add is that sometimes quantitative data doesn’t tell the whole story – things may be correlated without having a causal relationship. I’ve found that talking to/interviewing users can add another layer of meaningful data.

Great post. We had a huge aha moment when we realized that we were missing a big data point in our conversion funnel. It wasn’t about turning leads > into trials > into paid users. It was about converting leads > into trials > into users who “clicked on certain buttons” and spent a certain amount of time exploring the app. It’s amazing how that behavioural model correlates almost 1 to 1 to our activation rate.

Engagement and the customer experience IMHO is one of those areas of product management and marketing that too often falls through the cracks until it’s too late.

Great post, Ben!

I really like your point on waiting to understand your best user actions before building out the onboarding experience. A lot of people miss this and create an onboarding experience on their intuition alone.

I wrote about a process for discovering what these WOW moments are. Essentially you want to talk to a lot of customers (brand new users, well adopted users, and especially churned users), and relate what you hear back to user data (hopefully with an event tracking setup like Mixpanel or Kissmetrics). Check it out, may be helpful: http://appcues.com/academy/wow/

hey Ben – much enjoyed this post (and your Traction Book http://tractionbook.com/).

Reading your post reminded me of when we were shifting from our free Beta to a paid subscription last year, which I thought I’d share with your readers.

We expected that shifting from our free Beta to a paid subscription would be an event: “Yesterday free, today paid.” but that was so far from the truth. Instead we went through a period of around 4 weeks, engaging individually with each user, and understanding their *precise* needs (i.e. the exact features they needed in order to be happy to move to a paid plan). We systematically removed every objection (that was related to our core product – we didn’t veer off target with non-core features).

The interesting thing is this… During those weeks, we developed a deep understanding of these users, and worked specifically to enable them to get the best form our product. When we finally put up the payment gate, we were (almost) 100% accurate in our predictions of who would convert and pay.

And the reason, clearly, was the engagement, and that through the engagement we had built not just understanding of our users needs, but also a real relationship. Since those days, we’ve often seen that its the users we engage best with that become paying customers.

QUESTION: I’m curious to know what “tactics” you (and your readers) use to “engineer” user engagement?

cheers,
@paulmboyce:disqus
CEO & CoFounder,
http://PopcornMetrics.com