New features are like food to the product’s soul, well crafted by developers to thrive in the competitive market. Developing a new feature is just the tip of the iceberg. Whenever you add a new feature to improve your product, effectively communicate the added value with the right message at the right time. You should ensure that you’re persuasive enough while announcing new features so that early adopters consider trying your product, and it also breaks the user’s inertia considering new features.
A well-thought feature announcement could help you reduce the churn rate, improve loyalty, and boost adoption and retention. It leads to product adoption by making users aware of its value and drives usage.
In this blog, we’re going to outline six strategies you can use to announce new features to drive product adoption without spamming your users. Following any one of these ways will help, but combining them all will give you the most considerable benefit. Let’s get started.
1. Create Screen Tips and Walkthroughs
Creating an intuitive product interface is essential to provide extra “hand-holding” for new users who want to learn about your product and existing users who want to get more value out of new features.
Screen tips and tutorials that can demonstrate exact value, help users better appreciate your product, and convert them into product adopters. You can use a user onboarding tool to create screen tips and tutorials without needing to hard-code anything into your app or website.
2. Leverage Website & In-App Messages
Each section of your app or website is designed to target a specific stage in the customer journey, and you should use it to experiment with announcements, CTA’s, prompts, and other elements that move users to the next step. Identify and segment your users you are targeting and add prompts or in-app messages to announce new features and take those users to the next level.
3. Add Subtle Mentions In Blog Posts
Mentioning your new updates or feature announcements in blog posts can be extremely effective in promoting your product and providing value to your audience. Ensure that you regularly publish blog posts that teach people how to accomplish specific goals with your product.
4. Engage with Email to Announce Features
Send emails that explain the feature. Include prompts and even direct CTAs to drive users to engage with your new feature. Instead of solely sending out a mass email to all users, try segmented email campaigns based on their user journey and in-app behavior. One of the best tools for rolling our emails is Upshot.ai. Its email feature provides 95% deliverability in the inbox and gives you a higher open rate.
5. Leverage Social Proof to Increase Feature Adoption
If you have a community of users on your website, app, or social platforms, give them special recognition and provide them early access to what you’re going to launch to help boost adoption for your new feature. Send them an in-app rating and feedback requests and boost your app store and play store ratings. Leverage positive ratings and reviews and share them with a more extensive userbase as social proof.
6. Humanize Notifications instead of Spamming Irrelevant Nudges
Send meaningful nudges that offer your users something that provides value and make their lives better at the right moment. At Upshot.ai, we have seen a massive increase of 88% in user engagement using personalized push notifications. Humanizing push notifications can increase your feature or product adoption rate.
Wrapping up
In this blog, we discussed the following 6 ways to announce new features to drive product adoption.
- Create Screen Tips and Walkthroughs
- Leverage Website & In-App Messages
- Add Subtle Mentions In Blog Posts
- Engage with Email to announce features
- Leverage social proof to increase feature adoption
- Humanize notifications instead of spamming irrelevant nudges
New features will never see significant adoption if the user base is unaware of them. So discoverability and the announcement process are essential parts of driving feature adoption. Introducing a new feature at the right time with a contextual message can help build familiarity and drive adoption. Leveraging the strategies mentioned above, you can create an ‘aha’ or ‘wow’ moment with new users. You can also engage disinterested users with new features announcement, thereby driving product adoption. Schedule a demo today to know how we can help you with the right feature announcement and product adoption strategy.
