What Was Your AHA Moment with Digital Marketing?

According to Merriam-Webster, an Aha moment is a moment of recognition, inspiration, insight, or sudden realization. The Aha moment is typically the first key moment in a customer's journey when they realize the value of a product. It can happen in the early stages of the customer's onboarding process.

According to Oprah Winfrey, an "aha" moment requires that the individual has already been aware of the significance of the concept. The individual can then articulate their knowledge in a way that lets their emotions resonate.

This concept can be applied to your product, as it can help your customers recognize the value of your product and its various features. An Aha moment is about helping your users remember what they already have. It doesn't mean that you're teaching them something new.

Your users are likely to experience an Aha moment when something clicks for them. This could be a feature they've already activated or a certain activity they're engaged in that helps them realize how valuable your product is. This is the difference between those who churn and those who become loyal customers.

Importance of the AHA Moment

The goal of product teams is to find a product's aha moment, which allows them to measure the time-to-value of their application. The more quickly a user finds that moment, the more likely they are to continue using it.

By understanding the average time, it takes to get users to a certain point in their journey, a product team can start to improve its UX and overall customer experience. This can help them reduce churn, improve free trials for paid users, and increase app usage frequency.

Popular Examples of AHA Moments

• Uber − For Uber, finding a ride is just a matter of minutes. Its users have realized the app's value and convenience since they first used it.

• Netflix − Through the app, Netflix users can find something to watch in around 30 to 90 seconds. Upon watching their first show, they have aha moments.

• Airbnb − Booking a stay through Airbnb is like entering a new world for many users. They often feel overwhelmed by the process and don't understand how it works until they have actually experienced it.

• Zoom − Setting up and holding your first Zoom video call are just some of the steps involved. Users cannot experience the differences between Zoom and other web conferencing tools before they make their first call.

• Slack − For instance, you can send up to 2,000 messages to your team members using Slack. By doing so, you have fully realized the value of the application.

• Grammarly − It's the time when people start seeing how much effort they've saved by implementing the Grammarly extension. They also start experiencing the errors that they can catch.

• Canva − It’s when people realize how easy it is to create professional-looking designs with Canva, even without experience in the field.

How to Find the AHA Moment for your Product?

A good product team should be able to find the aha moment easily, and it should be very intuitive for their users to complete. If it's too hard, they will give up before they can realize the value of the product.

Analytics is Crucial

You can start by analyzing your product analytics to see how your users performed. It will show you the actions that led to their retention and those that didn't.

You can also track the various success metrics of your customers as they move through your product. These include the conversion rate, lifetime value, and renewal rate. You can create a spreadsheet or visualize the data using a tool like Tableau.

Gather user Feedback

After gathering quantitative data, gather qualitative feedback from your users to validate and supplement what you've learned. If the data show that a correlation exists between retention and specific behaviors, your users can explain the "why" in more detail.

After collecting all of your deactivated users' feedback, analyze the data and identify the changes that resulted in their retention.

Through this step, you can analyze the data from your internal product to gain a deeper understanding of the product's user journey. You should then come up with a hypothesis that explains how certain behavioral patterns can affect retention.

Test Your Hypothesis

A/B tests are a continuous process that you can perform in order to improve the experience of your users. They will involve dividing them into groups and presenting them with various paths and messages that will help them find their aha moments. This is a great way to start measuring the effectiveness of your product.

You can perform a product review to get a better understanding of how your users interact with your product. This can be done through a software testing tool such as FullStory or through detailed interviews with users.

Ensure that one of the A/B tests' control groups is not exposed to the changes that you made. Doing so will allow you to test the current iteration against a new, experimental version. Another important aspect of testing is to only make one change at a time. Doing so will prevent you from having to go back and analyze the data later on to identify and fix any issues.

The goal of testing is to see which group performs better. For instance, if the metric for user retention or onboarding completion rate improved in the test group, that means that you have improved the path to aha moments.

Characteristics of an AHA Moment

If you need a mental image, imagine the moment when Archimedes, an ancient Greek philosopher, jumped out of his bathtub after suddenly realizing that he was called Eureka.

This was a saying used in the past that meant "I have it." Some people have misunderstandings about the meaning of the Aha moment.

It is a Precursor

Contrary to popular belief, the term "aha moment" is not a synonym for activation. It is the next step in the customer journey after the initial step, which is usually the task that a manager has assigned to a team member.

It Applies to new as Well as old Users

When it comes to product marketing, many new marketers think that the "aha moment" is a one-off occurrence. The key to successful product marketing is having a clear understanding of your core value proposition.

A good SaaS company will regularly add new features for its existing users. The concepts of activation and the Aha moment are also relevant to the secondary onboarding process.

It is Different for Every Customer

If you are a sales professional using Salesforce, do you think that you will be interested in the same features that your CEO uses? I find it incredibly improbable that this would happen.

You are more likely to be interested in the features that will help you hit your sales quota, while your boss will be more concerned with the bigger picture. The product experience that you will have when you go "Eureka" will not be similar to what your boss experiences.

Conclusion

One of the most important factors that businesses need to consider when it comes to building a strong customer base is the retention of their existing customers. This is because if they don't have a long-term customer base, they will not be able to effectively compete in the future. To build a successful, long-term customer base, you have to continuously engage them throughout their entire journey.