Triggering the “aha” moment for your product can be difficult.
Many SaaS businesses struggle to trigger these moments even after users have signed-up or gone through a sales demo - resulting in missed revenue opportunities.
An "Aha!" moment is when a user experiences a sudden realization or significant understanding of your product's value. This experience creates an emotional connection with the user, and helps them recognize the benefits of using your product.
In product marketing, it is important to consider how users perceive the value of a product and help them recognize it. You should always look at value from the user's point of view and make it readily apparent to him.
Triggering an “Aha!” moment doesn’t have to be difficult - and now, can even happen directly on your website turning website visitors into paying customers.
Users who are successfully engaging with your product may experience an "Aha!" moment, although the outcome of these moments can be difficult to predict.
To properly reinforce this feeling and increase user engagement, it is important to have an understanding of when and why such moments occur.
The customer's journey is composed of three distinct stages, in which a number of "Aha!" moments typically take place. Through an analysis of such moments, businesses can increase the efficacy of their product marketing efforts.
Try identifying the moments that make users feel that your product is what they need:
Triggering the aha moment even before a website visitor becomes a prospect or user can be extremely powerful.
And now, that’s possible with the help of using interactive product demos.
Interactive product demos are a great way to allow all of your website visitors to actually experience your product, and to trigger the aha moment before they even sign-up, or request a demo.
The faster you’re able to trigger the aha moment from your users, the quicker you can term them into long-term product advocates.
This is the power of leveraging interactive product demos within your marketing strategy.
As with turning website visitors into customers, the aha moment also occurs often times after a user has signed-up.
As users interact with your product they form ideas about the ways your product is valuable to them.
At this stage, the “Aha!” moment happens when a user internalizes the value of your product and decides to convert.
During their journey from acquisition to activation, users may experience this moment without realizing it, but even when they don't notice, you must identify it to enhance its effect.
Here are some ways to make users realize the value of your product during this stage:
When new users enter the system, they face an important choice. To ensure the users understand the value of your product, it is important to provide a simple and instructive onboarding process.
This allows them to become acquainted with your product while also providing guidance on their first steps.
Look at Pinterest for example. When new users sign up, the Pinterest app asks them to choose the topics they might be interested in.
Doing so fills up the feed of the new users with pins that interest them. This call to action instantly makes the new users perceive the value of using the Pinterest app.
It is essential to promote user engagement and provide users with the opportunity to effortlessly incorporate the product into their habits or routines in the long-term. As users continue to use your SaaS product, they are more likely to recognize its value.
Motivating users to move from basic to advanced features can increase loyalty and engagement with the product. This could result in upgrades to advanced plans or plugins, which have beneficial features, as well as more “Aha!” moments.
In the ever-evolving SaaS industry, standing out means constantly improving products. Each time new features or improvements are launched, there is a risk of users not noticing them. For long-term success, feature discovery by the users should be an essential part of your product marketing campaigns.
To locate the 'Aha!' moments in user interactions with your product, you need to determine the actions of those who have been retained and compare them to those of churners.
Identifying correlations in user behavior can help you to improve the effectiveness of "Aha!" moments. To do so, track, analyze and compare user behavior, then make adjustments and tests accordingly.
Here is how you can do just that.
To start, look at the data to gain empirical evidence. As you monitor your users' interactions with your product, you can identify moments that are key for activation and churn.
Analyzing correlations between trends enables you to identify key steps in the user journey. Testing modifications can measure their effectiveness on activation/churn ratio, providing active feedback on the efficacy of your strategy.
Gathering user feedback is an important part of assessing how valuable a product is and why users choose to stay or go. To accomplish this, feedback can be gathered in several different ways.
Evaluate user feedback regarding your product, both current and previous and see where you might have missed an "Aha" moment.
Users may say something like the following:
To get a better understanding of user experience, you can review comments and reviews on your SaaS product. Additionally, surveys can be sent to customers to gather insights on the moment they felt your product was the right fit for them.
Remember that having a correlation between factors does not necessarily indicate causation. Even when extensive research has been conducted, it is not possible to be certain of the outcome until it has been put into practice.
Data trends can indicate that there is a common pathway to conversion or that churn rates have increased at certain times. To better understand the situation, it is necessary to carry out testing in real-life scenarios.
Whatever methods you choose, ensure that they lead to those "Aha!" moments. For instance:
While we may know the details of a project, there is more to consider in order to create meaningful outcomes. The approach consists of leading, reinforcing, and prompting.
When a user first encounters a product or new feature, there may be confusion. To ensure successful adoption of the feature and an improved user experience, it is important to guide users to the features you want to highlight, and any associated value opportunities.
Ask yourself, how do your users know what to do with your product?
The answers may include:
By identifying the path to discovery you are creating potential “Aha!” moments for the users. Moving them from an unfamiliar environment to a familiar one allows eureka moments to happen and that is what effectively conveys to them the value of your product.
In order to facilitate a successful "Aha!" moments and create the intended experience, reinforcement is an important factor.
Here are some examples of reinforcement behavior to enhance the user's experience with a blogging app for instance:
It is essential to communicate to users how your product leads to tangible and desirable results. Consider what users need from your product, and make sure they are aware of how your product helps them meet their goals.
Users may not perceive the value of your product right away. The “Aha!” moments may occur when they get the results of their efforts.
You can regularly send emails or reports to your users detailing the improvements resulting from their product usage. Monitoring progress on a weekly basis, measuring metrics on a monthly basis, and comparing trends can significantly help increase the perceived value of your product.
For SaaS, an "Aha!" moment should be regularly planned and improved upon over time. This assists in increasing user loyalty, reminding them of the value of the product and serving as a backup to any lackluster discovery moments.
Measure, plan, implement, assess, and revise. Enabling this approach will make successful experiences with your product more frequent.
