Top SaaS Product Marketing OKRs to Track

What are OKRs? It sounds like another complicated marketing and sales acronym with equations and interpretation behind it, but it’s actually really simple: objectives and key results. OKRs is simply looking at what you want the long term result to be, what steps you’re taking and what results you’re getting to make adjustments along the way. It’s a way for your team to better look at the full picture and break it down to attainable goals and track them.

What are product marketing OKRs?

OKRs, or objectives and key results is a way of organizing your goals and current metrics to align what your team is achieving with each task related to your product and long term growth. OKRs for product marketing should be specific to the growth and development of your product in a way that it ensures the success of your product. OKRs are a way to measure the success of product marketing managers which can be difficult otherwise. Product Marketing OKRs are easier to measure for SaaS as you have multiple possibilities to measure, segment, and analyze digital information. All areas of your business are indicators of how your team is doing and can provide you with information on where to improve and how.

Here are the top Product Marketing OKRs to track for SaaS:

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1. More users
2. More paying customers
3. User engagement
4. Churn rate

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[anchor id="more_users"]1. Get more users.

This is what all SaaS companies want. The more users you have and month over month, year over year, signifies real growth. It means that your product is working. Customers are finding success with your product. So what are some of the key results you want to look for to track if you are on your way to gaining more users? There are plenty of steps to watch and improve upon to see your user base grow.

Traffic to home and sign up pages:

How do you acquire new users? Likely through a process that starts on your home page or other page of your site that you’re directing traffic to. It’s a number game at that point. The more traffic that comes in, the more conversions are likely, and the more users you're likely to end up with. It’s key to watch not only how much traffic is coming into your site but also:

• How much traffic is required to create a conversion to a user.
• What rate does traffic bounce and what percentage take a next step on your site?
• What is more likely to convert: organic or paid traffic?

Tracking and being able to interpret these results into information on what you need to improve to get more users is key. Be specific about what you want your key results to be. For example: We want to improve our organic traffic by 5% month over month.

Number of free trial sign ups or demos booked:

Naturally, users start somewhere and that’s usually with a free trial sign up or booking  a call with your team. Getting this far with a lead is a big feat and it’s important to fine tune all the steps prior to making one of these two actions happen. More sign ups or more demos is a key win in the process for gaining new users. All your marketing and sales efforts should lead to these actions. Learn more about free trial vs demo and which is better for your SaaS.

[anchor id="more_paying_customers"]2. Get more paying customers.

Here’s the catch: more SaaS users doesn’t necessarily mean financial success or viability of your SaaS business model. You want more paying customers. You want more people who see enough value in your product to pay for it month over month without churning out. This is how you generate growing and sustainable revenue. To do this, you have to watch closely the process between “sign up” and “enter your credit card information”.

Convert X number of users to premium accounts:

A free user base, if you have a freemium model, is great because you have a built in bank of users (though some may not be highly engaged) that you can “sell” to. You always have opportunities to upgrade these users to paying users by presenting them with something that is valuable enough for them to start paying month over month. This could be:

• Creating a new premium feature,
• Offering additional customer support  
• Increasing usage allowance, etc.

Determining what makes users make the jump is important so you can repeat actions that make users see the value in your product.

Get X number of users to try a premium trial and enter their credit card info:

One way you can incentivize this and build a step that may help your team communicate the value of your premium product better is to offer a premium trial with credit card info to freemium and new users. This way they can see the full benefit for your premium product for themselves and make a purchasing decision. It’s stronger than just hearing about premium features. This way, your key result could be just focusing on convincing users to sign up for a premium free trial.

[anchor id="user_engagement"]3. Increase user engagement.

Happy users are engaged users. Engaged users don’t churn and keep paying to use your product. User engagement is the foundation of your product’s success and is indicative of customer success. User engagement can be a pretty broad goal so we break it down into a couple of different areas to aim to do better in and to watch.

Increase active users with a sticky product:

How much time users spend on your product and how many times they come back to your product can tell you a lot about how much of a valuable tool your product is to their work and how it is integrated into their processes. “Active” users are ones that frequent your product and regularly engage with it. The more active users, the more likely they are to be paying and continue paying to use your product. Users engage with and come back to a “sticky” product, or one that is interesting or useful enough to keep their attention. Here are some ways:

• Notifications that bring users back to your product
• Creating a sense of urgency with expiring information or opportunities
• Communicate changes and updates to users effectively

Increase time spent within your product and pages viewed per session:

The more time spent exploring your product and actually on your product, the better. Think about time spent on apps that you can check on your phone. It’s clear which ones are most important to you and less likely to be forgotten by the amount of time you spend on them. Pages viewed is more indicative of how much users are moving through your product and actually engaging. For example, if users come to your product and immediately click out after one page, it’s likely because they didn’t find anything useful or of interest. If every time they come to your product they click through multiple pages, they are more engaged. How can you improve time spent on your product and pages viewed?

• Incorporate sticky features like social features or time-sensitive features
• Allow users to invite peers and their team and interact with them
• Encourage next steps at every point: always have a next step lined up

Get more actions taken on new features:

Your new features are a great way to drive engagement from existing users and also promote your product to leads. New features show that your product is growing and improving according to what customers want. For new features to be effective, you want actions to be taken by users when you announce them. Users should be engaging with and adopting new features. Long term user engagement follows!The best way to communicate new features and get users using them right away is to share them using Beamer.

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Beamer is an in-app changelog where you can announce new features, bug fixes, updates, etc. in context where users are most likely to engage. Your Beamer feed sits right within your product or website and users can open it by clicking a simple “What's New” tab in your navigation or an icon in your interface.

Include engaging visual elements:

You can include photos, videos, and GIFs to make your updates more visual and new features more easily understood. You can include CTAs to encourage users to begin using new features right away.

Bring users back with Beamer:

You can also enable push notifications to bring users back to your product when you announce a new feature. You can also segment notifications by demographics, language, location, and past behavior so that users see what is relevant to them to boost engagement.

[anchor id="churn_rate"]4. Lower churn rate.

Your churn rate tells you the number of users leaving your product compared to the number coming in. It’s like a leaky bucket. You want to keep the “holes” that make users leave to a minimum while increasing the number coming in. When users leave faster than they come in, you have a problem. To get users to stay, they have to be happy with your product and see a reason to continue to use it compared to competitors. Here are some ways you can lower churn rate by staying competitive:

• Include a feedback form when users leave to learn why they leave
• Collect feedback via NPS surveys in your product
• Ask users what their favorite features and what they would like to see change when you announce updates and changes

[notice type="info"]Learn more about why SaaS users churn (and what to do about it). Read it all here[/notice]It’s not enough to have goals. Your team should break them down in methods similar to this so that you can be actionable an intentional week over week in achieving your ideal bigger picture. Without clarity, priority and action can get lost in everyday work. Try Beamer for the most effective way to communicate updates to your users and boost engagement.