While the buzzwords viral marketing and viral adoption are certainly overused, there is no doubt that they can be powerful tools for increasing brand awareness and increasing sales. Viral adoption can be particularly relevant to SaaS, where profitability (or internal corporate success) depends on quickly achieving and retaining a critical mass of users.
The term viral refers to individuals using existing social networks to share their experience/excitement about a product/service, creating the potential for exponential growth (analogous to the self-replicating spread of pathological viruses). In the best designed case of viral adoption, users become your sales force and PR team.
There are multiple way to design a SaaS application for viral adoption:
- Design the product/service to offer such a great user experience and give users sufficient feelings of perceived control that they become rabidly loyal and evangelistic (think Mac and iPhone users).
- Design the product/service with sharing and the value of sharing as an intrinsic functional component. From a mechanical perspective this means finding the right conceptual model so you can build a UI and workflow that make it easy and clear how to share. From a desirability perspective, this means strategically designing the product/service so that it's value increases as more user join. (think Skype or LinkedIn where inviting others to join is essential to using the product more fully).
- Design the product/service to target a niche (preferably under-served by current offerings) and provide an intuitive interface/features to help these users connect and interact. (think vertically-targeted SaaS).
- Build in ways for your community to actively influence product development to create a sense of ownership. Critical to this is to build in monitoring to identify when a customer succeeds or fails at each phase in the SaaS lifecycle. Use this information to proactively ask for feedback on how to improve the software or increase performance.
SaaS applications designed with viral functionality as an integral component of the customer lifecyle will create referrals, increase usage, and reduce customer churn. While you cannot force viral adoption, you can intentionally design your SaaS application to facilitate and organize communities and encourage "virulence".
Categories: SaaS