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6 powerful customer activation examples to inspire your team
You’ve attracted an ideal customer and personalized connections with them across channels to get them to the point of conversion. But there’s still work to be done: it’s time to create delight by helping your customers experience the true value of your product.
To improve retention and prevent churn, businesses need to boost customer activation—nudging their users to move onto the next stage in their journey. Looking at examples of successful customer activation gives you the inspiration you need to do just that.
In this guide, we walk you through six brilliant customer activation examples—and give you tips to guide your customers toward engagement and success.
Activate new and existing customers with real insights
Use Hotjar’s tools to find out what customers need—and help them get to the next stage in their journey
6 customer activation examples and how to emulate them
Customer activation is the process of getting customers to experience ‘aha’ moments, or wins that let them see the value they’ll get from engaging with your product or website regularly.
Moments of customer activation, like when a customer creates their first email sequence on a marketing platform, and re-activation, like a customer making a to-do list on a productivity app after months away, are pivotal in the customer journey—and in ensuring the future success of your product and company.
Alban Brooke, Head of Marketing at Buzzsprout, a podcast-hosting platform, puts it this way:
Customer activation is the key to driving long-term retention and growth. It’s much more cost-effective to improve your activation metrics than to acquire new customers. And as you improve activation, you’ll improve customer lifetime value (LTV) and, in turn, be able to expand your cost per acquisition.
To boost customer activation, businesses need to learn more about their users’ needs and try new approaches to improving their product experience (PX).
Here are six examples of customer activation in action—along with tips to help your customers successfully complete their jobs to be done (JTBD), or goals, with your product:
1. Ausmed: simplifying onboarding
Ausmed is an Australian company that provides digital learning resources to healthcare professionals. The team wanted to increase product usage, customer retention, and revenue—and knew that boosting customer activation rates was crucial to improve all three.
Ausmed’s CMO Will Egan realized that only 15% of customers had activated by completing one learning task. To change that, he created a process to improve onboarding and increase customer activation rates.
Let’s take a look at Ausmed’s five-step customer activation process:
Launch surveys: the company used Hotjar’s Surveys (👋) to find out the primary benefit customers saw from their product.
Measure activation: using Intercom and Google Sheets, Ausmed kept track of quantitative activation data. They discovered a major bottleneck at an overly long intake form. Lightbulb moment 💡: the daunting number of fields on the form was preventing customers from documenting their first activity.
Redesign workflow: Ausmed then created a flow that guided users to document their first task, gave each onboarding panel a single purpose, and removed extra fields from their form.
Follow-up via email: next, Ausmed used event-based marketing tool Vero to email customers based on certain triggers in their onboarding journey. For example, if a customer didn’t fill out the documentation form, Ausmed emailed them to get feedback to understand why.
Reassess and re-evaluate: when troubleshooting obstacles for customer activation, Ausmed stayed aware of how implementing changes might have ripple effects elsewhere in the onboarding process. To maximize activation rates, they continually reassessed how things were going and tested new ideas.
The result? Ausmed increased its activation rate from 15% to 75% over two years through a customer-first approach.
Why it matters: onboarding processes present opportunities to personalize and highlight your product’s value early on. With the right onboarding steps in place, customers will feel valued: you’ve taken the time to get to know them and anticipate their needs.
The core of customer activation should happen in your application. This shouldn't be a routine checklist or a chatbot, but an understanding of what your customer is trying to accomplish and naturally directing them towards these wins.
2. Asana: personalization and segmentation
Work management tool Asana segments customers during onboarding to personalize their experience and nudge them to activate.
When new customers sign up, Asana asks them questions about who they are, and how they’ll use the product. This lets the company divide them up into broad categories based on shared characteristics, like role and product usage, to provide personalized, streamlined information.
Why does it matter? Customers come to Asana from many backgrounds with different use cases. Segmentation helps Asana deliver the most relevant product information for quick wins without all the noise of features that may not be helpful—moving customers along their journey toward activation.
User insight allows you to segment your users to develop targeted strategies for each group. These might be different customer personas, or the same persona but at a different stage in their onboarding.
3. Loom: welcome emails
For Loom, a video messaging tool, activation occurs when a customer makes their first video. The company uses a welcome sequence to gradually prepare customers to create that video without stress.
Once customers subscribe, they receive an email with the choice to watch an instructional Loom or sign up for a weekly live session.
The subject line of Loom’s first email is: “Welcome to Loom, [Name]—we’re so glad you’re here!” While seemingly simple, each word conveys warmth, and the ‘we’ messaging emphasizes community, gently encouraging customers to stick around and make their first video to be part of a bigger community of Loom users.
The first email in Loom’s welcome sequence provides a personalized introduction to the product.
Why it matters: Loom knows that getting a customer to create a video is the key to customer activation and boosting user engagement. If the customer doesn’t see the value in the Loom or can’t figure out how to use it, the risk of churn increases.
4. Evernote: interactive walkthroughs
Evernote, a note-taking and task-management app, uses interactive walkthroughs to introduce product features. These walkthroughs don’t just tell customers what each feature does—they actually prompt customers to engage with the product.
For example, if a certain step or feature is particularly confusing, a brief video pops up to provide customers with an additional explanation. By the end of the process, the customer has created their first note or to-do list: initial activation, check! ✅
Why it matters: using a new product can be stressful. Interactive walkthroughs show that you’re empathizing with your customers, protecting them from being overwhelmed by breaking a seemingly large task into easy wins. In turn, you improve the overall customer experience (CX) and your customer activation rates.
💡Pro tip: before creating a walkthrough or demo, watch Hotjar Recordings to see how real customers use your product. Observe where they’re getting stuck to discover if they need more guidance. Then, create an action plan with ‘next steps’ to figure out how you can help them activate.
Hotjar’s Recordings tool shows how real customers interact with your product through clicks and scrolls.
5. Miro: new feature announcements
Miro is a virtual whiteboard company that continually adds new features to its platform—and it needs a way to introduce and communicate these releases to customers.
In addition to posting a monthly snapshot of all its updates, Miro tweets new feature announcements and offers live sessions to show customers how they work.
Miro tweets how-to videos and invitations to events showcasing new features.
Why it matters: new feature announcements help customers discover what your product can do, leading to more ‘aha’ moments where they find value and engage. Also, these announcements help reactivate customers who lapsed because a specific feature they needed didn’t exist.
6. SurferSEO: support and diverse learning options
SurferSEO, a search engine optimization (SEO) tool, helps businesses attract new organic traffic to their sites. But for the uninitiated, SEO can be a bit confusing or overwhelming.
So, the company created Surfer Academy to teach customers how to easily navigate the product and give them a seamless user experience in the process. Surfer Academy offers weekly live classes, a collection of guides for self-service, a community FB group of over 15,000 people, and a live chat option.
SurferSEO’s home page prominently features a customer support section.
Why it matters: SurferSEO meets the needs of diverse customers with varied learning styles by providing them with multiple support options. This level of support helps their customers overcome hurdles to achieve SEO wins with the product, leading to customer activation.
The value of customer support
Alban Brooke agrees that excellent customer support boosts customer activation rates. He says,
“Beyond tailoring the in-app experience, we've found great success with content marketing and improved customer service. We’ve reduced our average response time to under 20 minutes to make sure we’re helping our customers when they run into a roadblock.”
Effectively activate customers with user insights
Improving customer activation can feel like a long and frustrating path—with bumps in the road like churn, low product usage, and low growth.
But by collecting and analyzing user insights, you determine what your customers need—so you can implement more effective strategies to improve activation.
Activate new and existing customers with real insights
Use Hotjar’s tools to find out what customers need—and help them to the next stage in their journey
