A common trap in product development is to keep on building features without ensuring these are actually being used. If you make this common mistake, you run the risk of building a complex product that nobody wants. In this article, we are going to discuss the importance of feature activation for your SaaS.
Feature Activation
What is feature activation? It’s a practice of raising awareness in your software of your features and ensuring that they become an integral part of your user’s workflow.
A guiding principle for feature activation is to make sure that you activate each feature that you’ve built before moving on to the next one. In this way, you validate every single feature and your product development becomes more customer-led. It also avoids the danger of building a feature graveyard.
So, how do you activate features? Here are a few methods you can use.
1. In-App Activation
What you can do is use great design to make sure that your features are actually promoted and very easily accessible within your product. So, for instance, you could design a nice onboarding flow using checklists and progress indicators that walk your new users through the product. Additionally, you can design announcements, bars at the top of your dashboard or pop-ups that make your users aware of updates and new features.
2. Educational Content
The next area that we like to focus on is educational content. These are typically things like your knowledge base, tutorial videos and content that helps to make sure that users know how to do things and use your product. Another thing that we’ve seen that’s been working recently is webinars. Announcing webinars that show the best parts of your product or how to make the best use of certain features helps immensely with engagement.
3. Product Marketing
The last area that we’re going to discuss is product marketing. Whether you’re running paid ads, doing content and email marketing, these strategies increase engagement with both new and existing users. Again, raise awareness of features and make sure that your users are getting the most out of your product. These are the three main areas that we like to focus on for feature activation.
I hope that you can use these to make the most of your features and also ensure that you increase utilization and save cost by making sure that each feature you build has great uptake.
If you need help with UX, please reach out to us at UserActive.io and in the meantime, remember that feature activation is just one of those tactics you can use to improve your product, get more users and grow!
