🗺️ Mapping the user journey for your PLG playbook
3 Levers, 7 touch points, 1 unicorn 🦄, and so much more!
In this article I’m going to cover an approach you can use as the foundation of your product-led growth playbook. We will begin with the concept of the 3 Levers of SaaS Growth, and then expand on each lever by mapping out critical touch points throughout the user's journey with your product to your business KPIs.
While there are plenty of approaches you can use when putting together your growth playbook, this approach has proven the most effective for me in the various Growth roles throughout my career.
This approach allows you to clearly identify the various touch points where users are dropping off, so you can develop and prioritize strategies to address it. Along the way you’ll discover gaps in your data and existing resources (technology and team), as well as the cross-functional dependencies that may be limiting your go-to-market strategy.
With that in mind, let's start with a simple framework that we can use to break down the various touch points of your user journey: The 3 Levers of SaaS Growth.
I can’t go on without giving a shoutout to Ben Cotton and his great article “There’s Only Three Levers to Grow a SaaS Business” . He provides a great articulation of 3 Levers concept, which I has been very informative to many people in or field.
3 Levers of SaaS Growth
I was first introduced to the concept of the 3 Levers of SaaS Growth when I was working at Cloudflare as part of the first cross-functional team responsible for growing the self-serve business. We used the 3 Levers as a starting point to map out the various touchpoints in a new user's journey adopting the Cloudflare CDN.
The idea behind the 3 Levers is simple: any tactic you implement in a SaaS business falls into one of these three categories - Acquisition, Retention, or Expansion. These levers become the building blocks you can use to develop strategies in your growth playbook. The 3 Levers are also effective when thought of linearly. Meaning - if you’re attempting to upsell a user to a more expensive plan (Expansion), before they’ve shown meaningful product usage (Retention), you likely won’t get the results you’re after.
Let’s dig deeper into each lever so we have a more tactical approach to developing your growth strategy.
Acquisition
Acquisition is the lever you pull to increase the number of customers that sign-up for your product. This lever allows you to impact critical metrics like sign-ups, both in terms of total numbers, and percentage growth over time. Acquisition can be broken down into:
Awareness: there’s a problem and you have the solution
Evaluation: you have the right solution
Activation: convincing people to sign-up or install your product
In the context of Growth, a Growth Marketing team will have the majority of responsibilities in this area, with support from Sales in certain situations, and in collaboration with the Product team since in a PLG motion the product itself is usually the last hurdle to cross to acquire new customers.
What about do Referrals?
Great question. You can bucket referrals from your existing user base either in Acquisition or Expansion, depending on your specific use case. For example - you ask your existing customers to “Refer a Co-worker”, if that would result in a net new sign-up, then bucket that into Acquisition. If the resulting activity adds a team member to an existing account, that may be better under Expansion. If you need help answering the question, feel free to reach out.
Awareness
Awareness is the stage when an individual is not yet aware that you offer a solution to their problem. Within this stage, it’s all about making your solution known within the market, and one of the most common goals is to get them to land on your marketing site where they can start evaluating your marketing materials and product documentation so they can ultimately get to the activation process.
Technical SEO and a SEO-centric content strategy are common tactics used by Growth teams to create more visibility in search engines, and as a result send more organic traffic to the marketing website. Paid advertising strategies like Google search and display advertising can be used, but in order to be economically viable, some level of integration between the product and associated ad-platform is generally required to enable programmatic campaigns.
Website traffic, both in terms of total users/new users/sessions and growth over time, may be one of your primary metrics within Awareness. There are plenty of tools available to help you monitor traffic on your website, and one of my favorites, which happens to be free, is Google Analytics.
Depending on how you implemented the tool, web analytics can be impacted by cookie consent requirements, and the data in your system may be lower than the actual traffic. Using server-side analytics can provide more accurate results for specific numbers like user count. Regardless, even if the data within your web analytics platform is not reflective of 100% of your traffic, the additional information it can provide in terms of traffic attribution, user demographics and content engagement provides robust data collection to help you make better decisions for improvements.
If you’re trying to underhow who your domain is showing up before anyone even reaches your site, there are numerous tools to help you monitor aspects like social listening, share of voice, search volume, backlinks, and more. There is a lot you can do in terms of Awareness monitoring, and I’ll leave that for a future blog post. For now, at minimum, you should at least have Google Search Console setup to monitor your domain(s). If you want to learn more about Awareness metrics, check out Zapier’s article: How to measure brand awareness: 9 key metrics to track
Evaluation
Once a visitor is on the website, they’re considered to be in the Evaluation stage. In the Evaluation stage, the user is learning more about your offering and likely comparing you to your competitors. In the Evaluation stage, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a common tactic used by Growth teams to influence users to move to the next stage. CRO leverages A/B testing visual elements and content on the website, and requires specific software (e.g. VWO, Optimizely) to run, along with design and engineering resources to execute.
The primary metric within Evaluation would be conversion rates, calculated by the percentage of users who take a desired action (e.g. click the “Start free”) divided by the total number of users. As your efforts progress, you might refine this to include more filters such as "number of in-profile users" or "qualified users" to weed out “junk” traffic.
Conversion rates are usually framed within the context of CTR (click-thru rates) on specific pages. While CTR is the primary metric for success, additional metrics like bounce rates, pages per session, and average session duration provide deeper insights that allow you to create hypotheses for tests to help increase conversion rates. Most web-specific analytics platforms offer these metrics right out of the box without needing any additional configuration.
Activation
The final stage is Activation, and in this stage the user is attempting to gain access to the product. For most SaaS products, Activation begins on the sign-up page (usually outside of the marketing website), and ends when a user has finished the sign-up process. For self-hosted products that require install, Activation would begin at download and end once the product has been successfully installed.
Within the context of Activation, conversion rates can be calculated by the percentage of users that start the sign-up process, or initiate a download, divided by the number of completed sign-ups or successfully product installs. Heap, Amplitude or Mixpanel are common platforms used for product-specific metrics. For hosted products, analytics instrumentation is straightforward. Self-hosted products, including web downloads or from the CLI, may require some additional configuration to get proper telemetry. Since some self-hosted products may be behind a network firewall or are subject to offline installations, you may see some under-reporting. Regardless, even if data isn’t perfect, limited information can provide enough signal for data-driven decision making.
Retention
Retention starts as soon as a user has gained access to your product, having either completed the sign up process or having successfully installed the product. Retention is all about helping onboard users, and getting them to see the value your product provides as quickly as possible. User churn is a key metric associated with retention, and generally it can be helpful to break it up into additional cohorts, like a new user’s first 30 days and after. We can further break down Retention into three stages: A-ha!, Onboarding and Value.
In the context of Growth, you’ll often see a Product-Growth team shouldering most of the responsibilities for Retention, given the close connection they have with the in-product experience. A Growth Marketing team can contribute to retention efforts by creating out-of-product experiences that include triggered emails, content hubs with associated materials and more. Oftentimes this will be framed under the context of customer lifecycle marketing.
To support these efforts, consider implementing a marketing automation platform like Iterable, Braze or similar. These platforms can be complex and may require a significant amount of technical resources to implement. Once they’re properly set up, they allow the responsible teams to instrument various types of growth campaigns and experiences with little to no dependencies on other teams. These products also offer built-in metrics that can be used for reporting on the associated activities.
A-ha!
Getting to the A-ha! moment is about defining what the minimal steps that a user can take to realize the value your product provides. Asana provides a well known A-ha! example - after a user has created a list of tasks and checked a few off as complete, the user sees any animated unicorn that flies across the screen to remind them of the value provided.
Understanding what your A-ha! moment is for the user, and realizing the effort it took for them to get there can be easily overlooked, which would result in a missed opportunity to help retention. Asana’s unicorn flare is intended to make that moment more memorable by explicitly celebrating it to remind them what they accomplished using their product.
More complex products, like those you’ll find within the category of developer tools, cybersecurity, etc can require more effort from your end user to get up and running, and your target audience may not be as impressed with a unicorn flying across their screen once they’ve accomplished their first task. How the A-ha! moment is defined and how you explicitly showcase the value to your end users is product specific.
Make it a point to clearly define what the A-ha! moment is for your product. You can send that event to your analytics system to create funnel reports on users, and to your marketing automation platform to trigger an in-product experience, a personalized email, or maybe both! may be just as impactful. The key is not to miss the opportunity to celebrate the A-ha! moment with your user.
Onboarding
While it may be tempting to want to show the user everything at once, a "firehose" approach usually does not produce the desired outcome. A "firehose" approach is a metaphor for giving too much information to a user at once, which can be overwhelming and lead to the user not absorbing any of the information. By separating the A-ha! moment from Onboarding, you can provide users with information in a more gradual and digestible way.
Product onboarding is a most widely covered topic, so I won’t spend a lot of time rehashing what already exists. Instead, I will offer this - a lot of existing material lumps together various touch points, from sign-up to full product usage, under onboarding. Logically this makes sense, however, by teasing apart the sign-up flow from the A-ha! moment and then onboarding, I’ve found it easier to make meaning improvements across these touch points with a divide and conquer approach. Teasing these stages apart is also transferable to marketing automation platforms allowing you to trigger specific experiences that help move users along to being one step closer to an active user of your product.
Value
Similar to celebrating the A-ha! moment, the intention of the value stage is to remind users of the value your product provides, through thoughtful in-product experiences, personalized emails, alerts, etc.
Take the Cloudflare CDN for DDOS protection as an example. If your website falls victim to a DDOS attack, it can cause your website to go offline. That pain is very clear. With Cloudflare, that same DDOS attack will have no impact, so nothing happens to your website. That value can be missed.
Since Cloudflare CDN can be a set it and forget it type of product, a strategy that was implemented was a monthly analytics snapshot email. The email provides an out-of-product experience that includes personalized analytics showing the number of threats stops (amongst other things). This monthly email with personalized analytics is a reminder of the value they provide, with the intention of increasing overall user retention.
A key takeaway from the Cloudflare example is that the email is thoughtfully crafted and presents personalized analytics in a unique view not available within the product. This makes the email interesting, and most importantly useful to the user resulting in more opens and less unsubscribes, while reminding them of the value the product provides. There’s also something more below the analytics portion that is related to Expansion.
Expansion
Expansion is the last lever and includes the majority of your monetization efforts including plan upgrades, product cross-sells, usage increases, etc. It’s worth noting that monetization is not exclusive to Expansion. Getting users on a paid plan during Activation, or supporting additional use cases during Onboarding to encourage increased product usage include clear monetization components.
Expansion efforts primarily impact your recurring revenue, as calculated monthly or annually. Net Dollar Retention (NDR) is another important metric within Expansion that is used to calculate the percentage of revenue you’ve retained from your existing user base over a particular period of time. NDR can be calculated monthly or annually and includes all of your monetization activities as well as downgrades and user churn.
Expansion follows the broader path covered within Acquisition and Retention. First, you need to drive awareness around the additional products or services that you offer. For example, just because you have an active user on your free plan, doesn’t mean they know what is available on your paid plans, so you have to make them aware of what is offered. To encourage adoption, you have to expose them to material to evaluate the solution, and create experiences that showcase the (potential) value. Once they’ve taken the steps to upgrade (product Activation), it’s your job to help them realize the value by getting them to the A-ha! Moment and beyond, as quickly as possible. Finally, don’t forget to remind them of the value it provides, as quickly and as often as possible.
Using the previous Cloudflare email as an example, while the analytics in the email reminds existing users of the value they provide, below they include additional information on newly released products, features, and promotions to webinars. This provides users with material they can evaluate to support Cloudflare’s expansion efforts.
The key takeaway for Expansion is to not make the assumption your existing users know the additional products or services you offer, or the value they provide. Like getting a net-new user, you first need to drive awareness for the product, help them see the value it provides as quickly as possible, and remind them of the value provided as often as reasonably possible.
You want to plan on taking them through the journey just like you did to win them as a new user in the first place, and the result will be higher rates of expansion and better overall retention. This is the concept of a loop feeding a loop.
I hope you have found this information as useful and informative as I have using it in real-world applications. Let me know your thoughts and feedback in the comments below.
If you need help with your own PLG playbook, feel free to reach out to setup a chat.