AHA moment! The lasting impact of short TTV
Metric Stack Edition 24: Time to Value and more!
Do you think about what happens right after users first access your app? It may be cliche, but with good reason: first impressions matter!
Welcome to Metric Stack. I’m Priyaanka Arora, Content Researcher & Writer at Klipfolio. This week, we’re joined by our guest contributor, Donna Weber.
Donna is the customer onboarding expert and award-winning author of Onboarding Matters: How Successful Companies Transform New Customers into Loyal Champions.
In this edition of the Metric Stack Newsletter, we hear from Donna about how to optimize Time to Value: a fascinating metric that measures how fast your customers find value when using your product.
What is Time to Value?
Time to Value (TTV), also known as Time to First Value, measures the duration between when a user first selects your product and the moment they perceive the true value of your product. Here's the formula:
Time to Value = Initial Value Realization Date - Product Selection Date
Often referred to as the "aha moment", TTV measures how fast (or slowly) your customer is satisfied by their experience and finds the product useful. In other words, TTV captures how soon you can label a customer journey as successful.
Why is it important to track TTV?
Customers have nearly unlimited options, high acquisition costs, and high propensity to churn, especially in the SaaS world. Often, you have only one chance to make the right first impression - otherwise, customers leave.
Meanwhile, you can be almost certain that your competitors are creating ways to deliver value even before purchase and during the trial.
TTV is the first and one of the best indicators of customer satisfaction.
Think about what lengthens your TTV: confusing interface, hard-to-find features, or a difficult onboarding process. Since your customers pay a subscription fee, their low-commitment subscription allows them to leave more easily, which means you better quickly deliver first value.
And the sooner your customer receives that value, the more likely they’ll stick around to grow their lifetime value.
Onboarding has the highest churn - TTV can help
Onboarding is the stage of the customer journey that sees the maximum churn. 25% of users abandon apps after just one use. TTV warns you of a weak onboarding process leading to low customer satisfaction and high churn.
So what can you do? Our guest contributor Donna shares four top tips to improve your TTV:
Listen to your customers. Find out what’s meaningful to them. What’s their “aha” or “magic” moment?
Don’t use hope as a strategy. Once you define first value, create ways to drive customer actions to quickly reach the value. Rather than providing general product tours and walk-throughs and then hoping customers gain value, leverage in-product guides to drive their behaviour.
Engage with people. Your customers are human beings, not robots, and you need to treat them as such. Find out their goals and outcomes for using your product and then help them be successful.
Track TTV over time. First of all, get a baseline metric. Then, explore ways to decrease the time for new customers to get to first value. Over the long term, monitor trends for you to understand what delays TTV and then address it immediately.
As you can see, the emphasis is on communicating with your customers. This is really the key: TTV primarily measures the customer’s behaviour, rather than your product’s performance (although product performance influences customer behaviour).
And if you’re wondering how to get started tracking TTV, try a free, light-weight analytics tool like PowerMetrics.
This week on the Metric Stack podcast...
This week Solon Angel, founder of MindBridge joins us as our guest. Solon shares his unique perspectives on value creation, trusting your data, and how a group of highly committed individuals, like his team at MindBridge, has the potential to change the world. 🌎 Listen now on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.