Customer And Competitive Insights Guide Feature Changes For Chrome Extension Product
Want to grow user retention but not sure how? Your users like your product but forget to open it? Here I’ll share my research and sample recommendation.
I worked with a browser extension product to increase their retention. I recommended a feature using principles like Nir Eyal’s Hooked model. My recommendation targeted a 25% improvement in user engagement and a 10% increase in revenue.
I spent 2 hours 31 minutes writing this post.
I originally published this post on www.sparkcreativetechnologies.com on Feb 28, 2024.
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Context
Distill Web Monitor is a Chrome browser extension that has been operational for over ten years. Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, the company has 10 to 20 employees. Consumers and businesses use the browser extension to track changes on websites. Most users use the product on Google Chrome browser. For example, imagine you want to buy the latest Nvidia GPU to train your local LLM. But the webpage says it is “sold out”. You can use distill to notify you when “sold out” changes to “available”. So you can track the availability of products on e-commerce websites like Amazon. Watch a demo here. Legal, pharma, or insurance businesses also use Distill. Most users use it for free, but some pay for extra features.
Distill’s revenue fell after the pandemic. So, I worked with their CxO to find ways to increase revenue.
Funnel For Freemium SaaS Product
We did not know funnel metrics for our product, so did not know whether the problem was at the top, medium, or bottom of the funnel.
I’ve drawn a funnel splitting the stages for a customer on a freemium product into the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. I created this diagram because I didn’t find any good funnel definition for products with subscription pricing and a freemium plan. More on this funnel here.
I’ll walk through my work into two steps:
Research and find funnel baseline metrics.
Customer-first thinking to recommend a feature to increase engagement.
Research to Establish Customer Acquisition Funnel
I was in for a huge surprise.
I gathered data about the product and users at each stage of their customer journey. I used these tools:
Google Analytics,
Chrome Extension App Store Analytics, and
Telemetry data via SQL and Metabase.
We noticed many users were uninstalling the Chrome extension. This was a problem at the bottom of the funnel. This was a surprise and suggested we focus our energy to fix the ‘leaky bucket’ retention problem.
SaaS products have a retention challenge. Finding new users is one thing, but keeping or upselling to existing users is key for growth.
Research Insights Through Customer Interviews
I interviewed 13 users across these segments:
New,
Old,
Free,
Paid, and
Recently churned customers.
This helped us understand reasons users upgrade from free to the premium plan, and reasons they leave the product.
Users usually install the Chrome extension to solve one issue. After solving it, they often forget to use it for other similar problems. So, how can we remind customers to use our product in the right context?
Customer Journey Map From Research
Combining all research insights, I built a customer journey map to understand how users discover our product. I noticed retention was an area for improvement.
Learn about customer journey mapping here.
Research Competitive Insights And Stakeholder Feedback
I used examples of other Chrome extensions as a proxy for user interest and technical feasibility. Many popular browser extensions notify users, which boosts their usage. For example:
DeepL pops up in every text box, offering easy text translation.
Google Translate pops up on websites in a foreign language, offering easy page translation.
Grammarly pops up in every text box, offering easy grammar checks.
Honey pops up on e-commerce checkout pages, testing coupons for easy savings.
Designing Feature Mockup Using Research Insights
I combined these 4 research steps to design the feature:
Data analysis,
Customer interviews,
Competitive research, and,
Stakeholder conversations.
In designing the feature mockup, I kept a few things in mind:
Users get notified only if the product is out of stock; otherwise, they don't.
Users can see a call-to-action (CTA) to set up an alert.
Users can dismiss the notification for the current page or turn it off completely.
I recommended a gradual release plan:
Start with a beta release for a small group of customers.
Begin by alerting on English language Amazon pages.
Inform users about the feature through emails targeted to a user segment.
Estimating Impact At The Bottom Of The Funnel
This feature aimed for a 25% boost in user engagement. It tackled the issue of users forgetting about the product, thus lowering churn.
Let’s connect the dots between some numbers:
70% of our users stopped using the product after 6 months. A good churn rate is 60% (or 40% retention), and a great one is 30% (or 70% retention). Our churn rate was not up to par.
Over 80% of our active customers engaged with our product on at least one eCommerce site.
At any given time, 15% of product pages on eCommerce sites are out of stock.
Over 63% of eCommerce shoppers face out of stock each year. This is once a year.
40% of the product revenue came from users who joined within the last 24 months.
Using these data points, I predicted a 25% increase in usage of product. This will increase revenue by 10%.
Nir Eyal’s hooked model explains driving user engagement. I used a similar approach.
Trigger: remind users on out-of-stock pages
Action: Users create a webpage monitor.
Variable reward: Users may or may not get notified about product availability sometime. Don’t know when.
Investment: The notification of product availability furthers their investment in using our product.
By reminding users about our product on eCommerce out-of-stock pages, we can boost usage. More usage likely leads users to hit usage limits and upgrade to premium pricing. This strategy helps users buy what they want while increasing our revenue.
First-cut Recommendations
To boost your product's retention, start by understanding what keeps your most active users so active. What attracts them to the product? Track how many new users sign up each month and how many leave.
After grasping the problem's depth and learning from retained customers' examples, find ways to
encourage more users to adopt the behaviors of retained users, or
find users similar to those you manage to retain.
What have you seen work well to improve your product retention?
I originally published this post on www.sparkcreativetechnologies.com on Feb 28, 2024.
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