What Are the Most Effective Ways to Drive SaaS Application Adoption?

It seems like every software-as-a-service company is still chasing the same end goal that they’ve been chasing for years: securing new customers and increasing user adoption. Because that goal is never really met, companies tend to feel like they’ve exhausted every possible option. “We’re still struggling with adoption, so I guess we’ll always struggle with adoption,” they may think. However, all too often I find that they’re overlooking one of the most tried-and-true ways of giving your product a much-needed edge when talking to new customers and driving adoption: introducing embedded analytics to their product.

What does product adoption mean?

Product adoption is not only about acquiring new users. Product adoption simply means that your product is being used as much as possible and in the way it was designed for. Knowing your personas and providing a good user experience across the entire user journey is obviously a key part of designing a good product adoption process and all our user adoption strategies. But let me skip that part (we’ll talk about personas and user experience in another blog post) and focus on how an embedded analytics platform can help you achieve your product adoption goals.

Can embedded analytics really solve my adoption problems?

Embedded analytics, really? Honestly, yes. Today, your end users rely on your software to help them get their jobs done day in and day out. Analytics doesn’t change the fact that your users interact with your product on a daily basis, but it does fundamentally change how they interact with your product—for the better.

Analytics helps your users perform better and faster

Consider the pressures your end users are facing. Competitors are coming out of the woodwork, and your users are under pressure from management to make the right decision in a fraction of the time previously required to avoid losing business to another company.

When you introduce embedded analytics, you’re essentially helping your end users perform better, making them much more efficient and effective than they would ordinarily be without forcing them to change all that much about the way they work. They’ve gone from simply using your software to truly mastering it, understanding the kind of actions they need to take and how a certain decision could give them the edge they need in their own jobs.

Second, data analytics—and, more specifically, benchmarking—enables your customers to see how their performance stacks up against their peers, and it keeps your users coming back to your application to see how they’ve improved. It’s human nature to want to compare oneself to someone else, and benchmarking capitalizes on that inclination while still delivering useful information on employee performance. Thanks to benchmarking analytics, your users can see just how much better they could be performing—and they can use analytics to help them set goals and take tangible steps to get there.

Embedding analytics makes your application “sticky”

When it comes down to it, analytics deliver the kinds of benefits that can help make your product “stick.” That’s because the more effective, efficient, and all-around good at their jobs your SaaS product makes your users, the more they’ll want to actually use it. That “stickiness” leads to greater adoption, higher revenue, and better conversion rates. Not too bad for a “simple” solution like introducing analytics, right?

Ultimately, savvy product owners should be considering embedding analytics in their product to more effectively drive SaaS adoption, but they’ll need to approach the process carefully if they want to reap these kinds of rewards. If you’re looking for an in-depth look at how you can begin to implement embedded analytics into your product, I recommend reading through our recent ebook “Does your product need analytics?” It explores how you can define clear business goals for your analytics, begin introducing analytic capabilities in phases, and use the right methods and best practices to achieve your goals.