Stop struggling to convert free users into paying customers. There is a better way!

It can be difficult to turn free users into paying customers. This puts a lot of pressure on the sales team to make deals and prove their worth. To solve this problem, Product-Led Growth (PLG) makes the product the main engine of growth. When a PLG approach is implemented, the product offers outstanding value. This inherently motivates consumers to upgrade. 

The creation of a product that successfully markets and sells itself will be covered in this article. PLG will lessen your reliance on conventional sales techniques and promote sustainable growth.

TL;DR

• Product-led growth is a business approach where an organization leverages its product as its primary means of customer acquisition.
• PLG turns your product into a customer acquisition machine by offering free trials, seamless onboarding, reduced CAC, and more.
• How to build a self-selling product: Define your ideal customer profile, design a frictionless user experience, Implement key PLG features, Optimize for User Activation and Engagement, and Integrate Data-Driven Insights.
• Checklist for a self-selling product action plan: Determine and comprehend your target audience, develop a user-centered product, create a seamless User Experience (UX), Implement Free Trials or Freemium Models, etc.

What is Product-Led Growth (PLG)?

Product-led growth involves utilizing the product to drive acquisition and retention. Customers won’t need to get demos or contact sales representatives. They can just request a free trial of the product.

It is much easier for users to decide if they want to subscribe to a paid plan after receiving value from the product through a free trial or freemium model.

PLG strategy allows SaaS companies to maximize the value of each product iteration. They make it easier for customers to discover product features. This boosts the utilization and income you get from each user.

How PLG Turns Your Product into a Customer Acquisition Machine?

PLG transforms your product into a client acquisition machine by making the product itself the primary driver of growth. Here is how PLG accomplishes this transformation:

1. Offering Free Trials: 

By providing free trials of your product, you can allow potential customers to evaluate its worth without having to commit upfront. Customers can experience the essential features of the product through free trials. Additionally, providing a free trial can draw in new clients and strengthen an existing one.

2. Seamless Onboarding:

A carefully planned onboarding procedure increases user activation rates. It assists users in rapidly realizing the main benefits of your product.

This strategy increases customer adoption with a reduced burden on the sales team. Users don’t need to speak with representatives to learn how to use the product. This is because resource centers provide in-app instruction.

3. Reduced Customer Acquisition Cost:

Product-led growth helps you to reduce your customer acquisition costs (CAC). Reducing acquisition costs allows you to invest in product development. Also, it provides an improved user experience to make your product more competitive.

4. Prioritizing value (Addressing User Needs for Enhanced Engagement and Growth):

Value comes first when it comes to product-led growth. Develop products that effectively address real users’ needs. User engagement increases when solutions are developed for pain points. PLG also facilitates product growth via word-of-mouth marketing. One of the scalable and most dependable growth engines allowing you to grow really fast.

5. Improved Product Development due to User Feedback:

Product-led companies benefit from the ease with which they may collect user feedback on SaaS solutions at scale.

Faqprime allows you to simply generate in-app surveys and activate them for specified user segments.

They enable product-led companies to better understand their customers’ pain points. They use those insights to influence product development.

How to build a self-selling product?

Developing a self-selling product involves creating a product that markets itself by providing value to users. This entails knowing user needs and utilizing features that encourage organic growth.

Here are some steps to follow to build a self-selling product:

1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP):

An ideal customer profile (ICP) describes the ideal customer you wish to attract to your business. You will need to understand your ideal customer to adjust the product experience. Develop features that will directly address their needs. How do you build an ideal customer experience? Let’s see: 

✔ Identify your super users 

Understanding the buyers you’ve already earned helps you generate targeted leads. 

Begin by compiling a list of your present customers and analyzing the data to determine who is benefiting the most from your product or service. 

✔ Request an interview 

Schedule a phone call with your ten exceptional users and ask them about their experiences with your product.

The goal is to uncover:

• Their purchasing practices.
• How they found you.
• Why did they purchase it?
• How do they gain from your product?

Finding the answers to these questions will help you understand how to target buyers who may have similar pain points.

✔ Analyze the data 

You’ve finished your interviews and gathered the responses. It’s time to understand all of this and develop the perfect client profile for your company.

Take all of the data you have gathered and search for similar characteristics. 

• Are there any recurrent patterns or traits among them? 
• Is there a connection between them? 

Once you’ve found any similarities, use these insights to inform your following steps.

✔ Build your ideal customer profile template 

This is the stage when you combine all of the data you have gathered to produce the perfect framework for a client profile.

✔ Refine your findings 

The ICP process does not terminate once it is created. You must always refine and improve your marketing and sales ICP to adapt to changes in your audience and industry. 

2. Design a Frictionless User Experience (UX):

Designing a frictionless user experience (UX) means ensuring a smooth interface between users and your product.

You have likely encountered something similar at some point: You visited a website, instantly recognized what you wanted, completed the checkout process with ease, and arrived on an order confirmation page feeling proud of yourself. Which seemed to happen in a matter of seconds. That is what we mean when we talk about a seamless user experience. 

Ways to reduce friction in your experience design:

✔ Reduce the number of steps in the user journey.

✔ Reduce content and features.

✔ Guide users through the journey.

✔ Improve accessibility.

✔ Prioritize clarity over creativity.

✔ Use recognizable UI UX patterns.

Elevate your digital experience with seamless navigation and intuitive design.

3. Implement Key PLG Features:

It is essential to integrate key PLG features that improve user acquisition and retention. Here are some key PLG features: 

✔ Free trial and freemium models

Provide a free basic version of the product and charge for optional upgrades that add more functionality. As a result, a larger user base is drawn in and eventually converted to paying clients. It’s a common strategy used by startups to entice customers to utilize their products or services.

✔ In-app tutorials 

In-app tutorials are interactive user guides that appear within an app’s user interface. They offer in-app guidance to newly onboarded users. They introduce basic features and give app training directly within the app to encourage user action.

Increasing product adoption through feature discovery and user action is the main objective of in-app tutorials. They play a critical role in quickening user activation and streamlining the user journey. This in turn promotes a more contented and independent clientele.

✔ User-centered designs 

Designers apply an iterative method that centers around the needs of users at every stage of the design process. Using a range of research and design methodologies, UCD design teams incorporate consumers into the design process to produce highly usable and accessible products for them.

✔ Product tours

Product tours are brief tutorials that make the process of onboarding new users easier. It teaches them how to get the most out of SaaS products.

A product walkthrough needs to be more than a showcase for new features. Its main goal is to assist new users in onboarding without wasting any time. For something to be effective, it must provide value to the user by enabling them to make greater use of the product or application.

4. Optimize for User Activation and Engagement:

Retaining users and making sure they get value out of your product depend on optimizing for user activation and engagement. Creating a smooth onboarding experience is part of this approach.

Here are some tested and trusted strategies:

✔ Simplify user sign-up flow 

The registration process must be as easy as feasible.

Keep in mind that you want users to sign up fast. It will be delayed by a drawn-out, difficult registration process. Even worse, excessive friction at this point has the potential to totally deter consumers from continuing.

Eliminate any extraneous stages from the process. For instance, don’t bother asking for the user’s address confirmation until after they’ve accessed and used the product.

✔ Use progressive profiling to collect customer data

Since you can tailor the product experience for each customer, it’s customary to begin the onboarding process with a welcome survey.

But occasionally, businesses go beyond and ask too many questions. This has the same effect on activation as extremely difficult sign-up forms. They lengthen the time to value and create friction.

Make sure you just request the necessary information to avoid it.

As the user progresses towards activation, think of segmenting the survey and obtaining the data gradually.

✔ A/B test onboarding flows to maximize user activation

For every user persona you design, make several iterations of the onboarding journey and conduct trials to see which works best.

In A/B testing, two distinct flows are simultaneously performed for two user groups with identical attributes to determine which performs best.

Your objective is still to learn more about how customers interact with your product to test a hypothesis for improvement.

✔ Implement in-app messaging to guide users toward value

Short alerts that appear on your mobile app as you open it are called in-app messages. Users who are actively using the app and are engaged receive in-app messaging.

They act as a brief tutorial that helps users accomplish specific activities or navigate the app’s capabilities. Through in-app messaging, you may also receive customized recommendations.

✔ Create a gamified experience to boost user engagement

The process of gamifying user onboarding involves incorporating entertaining game design elements into SaaS product user experiences. The ultimate purpose is to motivate a particular desired behavior from users.

The process of reaching the activation point becomes much more entertaining.

Getting new customers to complete the first two or three crucial steps that will help them recognize the value of your product is the aim of new user onboarding.

5. Integrate Data-Driven Insights:

Modern company operations require data-driven insights because they give executives the full picture:

✔ Improve customer experience

You can determine the preferences and pain areas of your customers with the use of data-driven insights. Afterward, you may modify your marketing strategies to better suit those demands. Utilize the information to enhance and personalize the client experience.

Using data to improve customer experience can be done in the following comprehensive ways:

• Create a comprehensive customer profile.
• Assess customer sentiment.
• Apply data insights to enhance customer interactions.
• Continuously measure and refine your approach

✔ Make data-driven decisions

Companies may stand out from the competition and cultivate a devoted clientele by offering high degrees of personalization to enhance the consumer experience. It gives a deep understanding of customers and increases retention. Companies have several options for enhancing the customer experience with data.

To make business decisions using a data-driven approach, you must:

• Understand your business goals: Establishing your marketing goals will assist you in determining the information required to meet those targets. For instance, you might want to improve customer retention or enhance conversion.

• Collect data: Gather information, either organized or unstructured, from many data sources and data points. This can include information from social media platforms, website analytics, or customer reviews.
• Visualize data to uncover insights: Data visualization speeds up the process of understanding your data. It is simple to find patterns in data and communicate them to non-technical stakeholders using charts, graphs, and maps.
• Analyzing data-driven insights: Examine your data more closely to understand the trends you’ve discovered.

Checklist: Your Self-Selling Product Action Plan

To ensure that a product can effectively market and sell itself, several strategic procedures must be taken. Here is a self-selling product action plan:

✔ Determine and Comprehend Your Target Audience

• Perform market research to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP).
• Create user personas that include demographics, requirements, and pain areas.

✔ Develop a User-Centered Product 

• Concentrate on using your product’s features to address actual user issues.
• Ensure that users can immediately benefit from the product from the very first interaction.

✔ Create a Seamless User Experience (UX)

• Provide a user interface (UI) that is easy to use.
• Use tooltips and guided tours to ease the onboarding experience.
• Make sure the product functions smoothly and is responsive across all platforms.

✔ Implement Free Trials or Freemium Models

• To reduce the entry barrier, provide a free trial or a freemium version. 
• Highlight the main features and advantages during the trial period.

✔ Optimize for User Activation and Engagement

Provide a seamless onboarding experience for users by: 

• Using in-app messaging, tutorials, and tooltips to guide them
• Constantly engaging users with personalized content and notifications.

✔ Incorporate Self-Service and Support Features

• Offer thorough knowledge bases, FAQs, and support centers. 
• For real-time assistance, incorporate chatbots or live chat.

✔ Focus on Customer Success

• Create a customer success plan to assist users in using your product to accomplish their objectives.
• Provide proactive assistance and instructional materials, like tutorials and webinars.

✔ Ensure Continuous Product Improvement

• Release updates and new features on a regular basis in response to user input and data analysis.
• To verify modifications and gauge their effect on user engagement and retention, do A/B tests.