How to announce new product features to drive adoption and engagement? Part 2

How to design an in-app feature announcement

Let us zoom in on in-app feature announcements and share a few tips on how to approach it.

1. Refer to your user research data and customer feedback

First of all, you need to understand your customers really well - how do they behave in the application, what do they struggle with, what words do they use to describe their needs and pains, what draws their attention, what matters to them?

Answering these questions will help you highlight the right features for the right users at an appropriate time while using the right tone of voice. This can also help you identify how much guidance and support your users need for a particular feature - for example, a single hotspot with an explanatory tooltip may be enough in this case or maybe it requires a whole product tour.

2. Identify the user segment

Even though you may have a particular target audience for your product, their needs and pains are most likely not exactly homogeneous. For instance, if your target audience is small business owners, their needs may vary depending on their company size, industry, their time on the market, their experience with your product, and much more.

Following this pattern, more experienced users will most likely be discovering and adopting new features faster - they won’t need as much guidance as new users of your product. That’s why it’s worth carefully considering what user segment you’d like to target with your feature announcement and what is the best way to deliver it to them.

3. Map the touchpoints

Take time to map out your customer journey. What are the points of interaction with your product that should eventually lead to your new feature adoption. Think about the multiple communication channels you may use to interact with your user and how they work together. For example, will your target user start their journey directly in the application or will they proceed to a particular page in your application by clicking a CTA in your email? Keep in mind the end result of the customer journey.

4. Design an in-app feature adoption flow

Now it’s time to think about what actions the user needs to take in the app to get familiar with our new functionality. List those steps and think about the information you should provide your user with at each stage. Think about a concise way to communicate helpful hints and context to your user - going through your user guide should feel effortless and valuable, so try not to overload your users and give them only the most relevant information.

Such in-app tours can be done either by using your product’s frontend resources or ready-made digital adoption tools. The latter will require little to no development effort. In most cases, in order to start using a digital adoption tool you only need to paste a code snippet provided by the tool to your application code. The rest of configuration can be completed with no programming skills at all.

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Measure the success of your feature announcement campaign

Whatever channel or user segment you choose, it’s crucial to measure how your feature announcement campaign performs. Not only can it help identify if you achieved a certain goal, but also it may give you some valuable insights into how your users react to a particular form of announcement and what works best for your audience.

Here are a few ways to approach your feature announcement success measurement:

1. Feature adoption rate

Feature adoption rate is a metric that measures how well users receive a particular feature, i.e. how quickly they manage to find it, how much time it takes them to understand how to use it and how to drive value from it. It’s essential to keep track of this metric for your new features since it shows you how fast and at what scale users discover the value you delivered through a certain feature. High feature adoption rate is almost inevitably linked with good retention and loyal user base.

Feature adoption can be calculated for different time periods, typically monthly. To calculate your feature adoption rate, divide the number of monthly active users of a particular feature by the total number of user logins in a given period, and multiply it by 100.

Feature adoption rate (%) = ( Feature monthly active users / Total number of user logins ) x 100

2. Hypothesis testing

Start with the goal of your campaign. Customer journey map, research data and your product goals should be helpful to set a goal. Once the goal is set, proceed to building a hypothesis that you’d like to test for this campaign.

Identify a statement that you assume is right and don’t forget to include a measurable indicator of success. It may sound something like ”We believe that by providing newly-acquired users with a step-by-step product tour, we’ll increase user activation by X%” or “We believe that by sending a mailing campaign containing the newest feature update to X user segment, we’ll increase feature adoption for this segment by X%”.

3. Compare the efficiency of different channels

After you have run a few campaigns through different channels, it’s the perfect time to compare how well each channel works for your product’s audience. It may even turn out that different announcement channels may not perform the same for different user segments. So it’s worth looking into the data to make your future features announcement even more efficient.

4. Collect feedback about the product update

Announcing new features is also a perfect chance to gather more feedback about the feature itself. See how users react to the product update in social media; run a survey to understand early adopters’ impressions of it.

Conclusion

Choosing the right approach to feature announcement is almost as important as building the right feature. It can have a huge impact on such aspects of your product as user acquisition, activation and reactivation, retention, and more. It’s not something that only the marketing department should care about. As the people who build the product and work with it on a daily basis, the product team should also take part in feature announcements, and keep them in mind when working on new features.