Now you have a SaaS product live, but how will you know if it works and if your customers are satisfied? And maybe a more significant question is 'how do you define success?' in the first place? This post will help you answer these questions by covering a few metrics and features that can help measure the success of your SaaS products.
Start by setting a goal.
Setting a realistic yet ambitious goal will help you get started. What is something that can be realistically achieved in the next 3-6 months? Here are some examples of goals:
- "Our product needs to achieve a 90% or more customer satisfaction rating by Q3."
- "We want our product to solve at least 80% of our customer's problems by the end of this year."
- "We want to increase our user engagement by 30% in the next six months and identify what specific features are driving this growth; this will enable us to focus more on these features and grow further."
Use the right metrics to track progress.
Identifying the right metrics will help you understand how your product is doing and where you can improve. You can track these at different milestones:
- You'll want to see if people are using the product at launch.
- After a month, you'll want to know if they like it enough to keep coming back.
- After six months, you'll need to know whether people would be willing to pay for it.
To track all of this, keep a close eye on three kinds of metrics: usage (how many people are using your product), satisfaction (are they returning? do they like it?), and engagement (do they recommend others use it? are they willing to pay for it?).
Measure your product's performance across all platforms.
The next thing you'll want to do is start measuring your product's performance across all platforms. There are many tools for measuring your product's success along with various metrics (we recommend KISSmetrics, Chartbeat, and Mixpanel), but once you have these tools in place, you will find that it can be surprisingly tricky to compare metrics across platforms. For example, iOS and Android have different definitions of sessions, making it difficult to compare their respective performance. Make sure the tools you choose allow for comparison across platforms.
Also, ensure that you are consistent about which metrics you are tracking for each platform. For example, if your goal is brand awareness, make sure all your platforms measure this in the same way - if one platform uses Apple App Downloads and another uses Google Play Installs to measure brand awareness, it's going to be hard to assess how your mobile app is performing compared with other efforts at driving brand awareness. Don't forget to keep a record of this progress!
Create a checklist to ensure that you don't miss any updates.
Make a checklist of everything you have to do immediately post-launch, such as updating your landing page, adding new testimonials and success stories to the website, and crafting emails to customers who trialed but did not buy the software.
If you've created or marketed several products, it can often be easy to miss important updates if you don't develop checklists. A checklist will help you stay organized and on track for everything that needs to be done post-launch.
Keep talking to your customers.
As a product marketer, one of the most important things you can do is stay in tune with your customers. This helps you understand how the market perceives your company and its products. It is an ongoing effort that continues long after launch.
There are many ways to stay in touch with your customers. One way is by creating a community for your product. It allows users to:
- Get help from other users or staff members
- Post ideas and feedback on how to improve a product
- Provide support and information for new users
Another way to keep in touch with customers is through email newsletters. They provide customers with news about the latest updates and new features of their subscription. Keep them short, sweet, and informative!
Analyze your data regularly.
As tempting as it is to keep adding more and more features to your product after its initial release, you need to resist that urge and instead focus on improving what you've already built. Revisit your data every month to see what's working and what's not working. Take advantage of the tools available to you to track your data. There are plenty of tools out there that will allow you to do this, such as Google Analytics (free), Heap (free for up to 5 million users), Segment (14-day free trial), Mixpanel (30-day free trial).
To keep tracking your product's success, you need to set a goal and measure the right metrics post-launch.
Now you know what steps to take before launching your product. You have learned about the different tools to track your product's success, and you are probably ready to start measuring KPIs. But here is the most important thing to keep in mind before you define metrics and measure them:
You will not be able to track the success of your products post-launch if you do not explicitly state what a successful outcome for each of your products is. You need to set goals!
It does sound obvious. Yet many companies start tracking metrics without setting goals for their products first. They lose their way and end up with confusing and useless data because they don't know where they want to go with it.
