Importance of Customer Communication After SaaS Lifetime Deal
Do not stop communicating with your Customers about your product.
Lifetime Deal is a high-intense period where SaaS Founders educate, engage, and help their audience understand their product every day.
Sustaining such customer communication after closing your Lifetime Deal is equally important. It ensures that your customers continue to stay engaged with your product.
However, once you close your lifetime deal campaign, the engagement that you have with your customers starts to wane.
You are left with only a very few channels to communicate with your customers. And most of them are ineffective, or highly resource-demanding, like webinars and workshops.
Customer Communication with Product Changelog
Product changelogs are a great way to communicate with your customers, as they provide an easy-to-understand overview of the changes you have made to your product.
Taking your product changelog as a communication channel is an effective growth hack. And a lot of SaaS founders seem to be missing out on this, which otherwise can help them perpetually.
Product Changelogs inform your customers about new features, bug fixes, and other improvements. If you do not have a public product changelog for your product yet, it is totally fine.
However, it is highly recommended to have a product changelog at least for your paying customers and your paid customers, i.e., your LTD customers.
It is one of the low-effort customer communication channels that allows businesses to keep customers informed and engaged with their products.
The Significance of Having a Public Product Changelog
A public product changelog not only keeps your customers informed about the changes in your product but also encourages them to try out the new features.
A public product changelog is particularly helpful if the new features are a result of your user requests. It effectively reduces the time-to-adopt for your users, thereby significantly increasing your product feature adoption rate.
If you’re not gonna be communicating those features with your customers, then they will have no other chance to know about what is it that you have recently rolled out. And how the product has evolved.
Because of this, you will be depriving your customers of the room to become your product advocate.
A public product changelog helps in building trust with your customers as they know that you are listening to their feedback and continuously working on making improvements to the product.
It is a crucial factor that you must emphasize since it will help you get more customers and retain them.
The Extended Benefits of a Public Product Changelog
Having a public product changelog helps to increase customer satisfaction and engagement.
By providing customers with an easy-to-understand overview of the changes that have been made to the product, customers are better informed about what the product can do for them. This in turn encourages customers to try out new features and use the product more often and more regularly.
Furthermore, a product changelog gives you an appropriate channel to collect feedback on your new features and updates.
This trust can go a long way in helping businesses attract more customers, as well as retain current ones.
Additionally, a consistently updated product changelog not only communicates how your product can be useful for them but also for their peers, customers, and clients.
Finally, by keeping customers informed of changes to the product through a public product changelog, businesses can reduce their time-to-adopt rate; this means that users are likely to adopt new features faster when they know what has changed.
In short, the benefits of a public product changelog extend beyond what is obvious.
What if You Don’t Have a Public Product Changelog?
Not having a public product changelog is totally fine.
It is not going to have any negative impact on your SaaS startup. However, the benefits of having a public product changelog are far more rewarding than missing out on.
So to start, you do not need to create an extensive product change log. And you do not have to make it public right away either.
Instead, you can share your internal product changelog with existing customers and allow them to stay up-to-date on the product updates.
This way, you can ensure that they are aware of any new features or updates as soon as they become available. It can significantly reduce the time to discover and benefit from a new product feature for your customers.
What to Include in Your Product Changelog to Communicate Better?
It is essential for businesses to communicate clearly and concisely with their customers whenever changes are made.
By doing this, customers can easily understand what has changed, when the change will take effect, and why it was implemented in the first place.
It encourages transparency and helps build trust between the company and its customers.
Here are a few things that you can include in your public product changelog:
- A concise list of all the new changes, features, updates, and bug fixes.
- A brief summary of the change or feature that has been implemented.
- The date when the changes will take effect.
- Any additional information or context about the change and why it was made
- A way for customers to provide feedback on the changes and updates
You may also include links to any relevant product/feature documentation. Also, if you have created tutorials or other educational materials the customer may need to understand how to use the new features, you can include them, too.
Conclusion
Having an up-to-date public product changelog is a great way to ensure that customers are informed of changes, updates, and bug fixes.
It builds trust between the company and its customers and encourages transparency. You also reduce the time-to-adopt rate as users can quickly discover new features and start getting value from them. A well-crafted product changelog should include a concise list of changes, a brief summary, the date when the change will take effect, additional information, and feedback options.
