How to Make Product Improvements?

Product improvements are essential for businesses to stay competitive in today's market. Improving existing products can be a great way to increase customer satisfaction and boost sales.

Making product improvements requires careful planning and analysis. It involves understanding customer needs, assessing the current product, and making changes that will bring value to customers. This process requires understanding the product life cycle, user experience design principles, and market trends.

Product improvements can range from small tweaks to major overhauls. Companies should strive to make changes that will benefit their customers while increasing their profits. Companies can create more attractive and valuable products for users by taking a strategic approach to product improvement.In today's article, we will look into some aspects that will help you improve your product.

What is product improvement?

Product improvement aims to assess where the product lags and how you can make changes to give customers a better version of your product. With the help of product improvement, you can extend your customer base, regain lost customers and add features that will build brand loyalty. There are three types of product improvements:

• Regular improvements: it is used to tweak existing features so customers can benefit from your product.
• Intentional improvement: when you know which feature your customers use the most, and you improve on it to add value.
• Adoption Improvement: you make this type of improvement when there is a feature that isn't getting noticed by your users. You add improvements to that feature, so it is more beneficial.

Why should I make product improvements?

To strive in such a competitive market, you must always keep up with your competitors and keep your users engaged. If your user loses interest in your product, it will be hard to get them back as they will opt for another product.

For higher user retention and a lower churn rate, you need to add new features and keep improving your product. You might feel overwhelmed by the idea, but it is just about getting organized and knowing how to resolve your users’ pain points.

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“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”-Benjamin Franklin

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You can go through the following steps to improve your product and add new features.

How to Make Product Improvements & Add New Features

To make the best use of your time and resources, you should have a plan as to how you will improve your product. I have compiled a guide you can follow to improve your product and add new features. Let's dive in:

Step 1) Defining user pain points:

It is an essential step when working on improving your product. When working on improving something, you first focus on the key aspect you want to improve. A product is only successful if your users find it helpful if they don't, there is no point in that product. There is no way that a product is 100% perfect; it needs constant improvement.

So in the first step, you will narrow down the pain point of the product you will focus on. With this step, you will be able to focus on one problem at a time and improve or fix it with success.

Step 2) Goal and Feature Requirement:

Just like defining the pain points, a clear goal is essential. Make your objective transparent so you can measure the impact of the improvement or new feature afterward. You can make your goals transparent by doing the following:

• Ask yourself what the feature will offer, such as: "this feature will attract 1000 users within the first month."
• Your goal should be measurable: "expect an increase of 5% in user retention."
• The most crucial bit is setting an achievable goal, being ambitious is good but don't set yourself up for failure with unachievable goals.

Step 3) Studying User Feedback & Metrics:

With the help of User feedback and metrics, you will have an insight into the user experience. In addition, you can analyze the key metrics and reviews from social media platforms and your website.

The metrics that you should consider are Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Churn Rate, lifetime value, and active users. For user experience analytics, you should collect data from different data tools such as Google Analytics, HotJar and SEMRush etc

Step 4)Competitor Analysis:

For a better solution for user pain points related to your product you should research what your competitors did solve a particular problem. With the help of competitor analysis, you will find a better solution and see how you can add features that are better than the products in the market.

Step 5) Defining Solution:

Now that you have researched, you can narrow down your solution. For implementing your solution, you should dedicate a document with the specifics of the product improvement. After doing so, you should consult your developers and designers so they can guide you and come up with the best way to move forward.

Step 6) Build a Minimum Viable Product:

With the solution's help, you can build a mockup to test your product improvement. You can test the mockup with users or your team members and see if the feature will be an improvement or not. Without testing, you will risk wasting your time and resources.

Step 7) Implementing Product Improvement:

Coming to the last step of product improvement is implementing it. You should run a couple of rounds of testing the new features and the product to ensure the improvement is beneficial. Make sure that the product works on any platform your user is using and is consistent.

Now that you have all your product improvement ready you need to get the word out to your customers. There are a couple of ways you can announce your product improvement and you can get some insight from the following guide.

Guide to Announcing Product Improvement

Coming up with a new improvement isn't enough. You need to announce that improvement to your users. There are different types of announcements that you can use to promote your product.
Before announcing your product improvement feature, you should do some homework so your new feature is a success.

You need to create a buzz beforehand on social media to give your audience a teaser as to what they have to look forward to. If you prepare your audience properly you will be able to achieve the following:

-Higher Retention Rate
-Brand Loyalty
-Re-engaging lost users

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In-App announcements:

In-app announcements are a great way to inform your customers about product improvements. They can be used to inform customers of new features, bug fixes, and other changes that have been made to the product. By using in-app announcements, you can ensure that your customers are aware of all the new updates and can take advantage of them as soon as possible.

This helps build trust with your customers and ensures they have a positive experience when using your product. Let's look at a few examples of In-app announcements.

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Example #1: Dropbox

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Example #2: Facebook

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When to use In-App Announcement:

You will use this type of announcement to highlight and bring users' attention to your new feature.

Social media announcements:

If you want your product to do well, you must stay with the latest trends and communicate with your customers through different social media platforms. With the help of social media, you can stay in touch with your users and increase your customer base. Some examples of product improvement announcements are:

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Example #1: Youtube

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Example #2: Spotify

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When to use Social media Announcement:

Use it when you want to expand your customer base and give an update to your existing ones about product improvement.

Email Announcement:

You must inform your customers about the product improvement and regain their interest. You can do that with the help of email announcements, but you have to be very careful when you will send the email and what it should contain. A few examples of email announcements are:

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Example #1: Asana

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Example #2: Weshare

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When to use Email announcement:

When you want to inform your customers of the update you made to the product, you should use email announcements.

Conclusion:

Updating digital products is a crucial part of staying competitive and ensuring that customers have access to the best product experience. Product improvement involves making changes to existing products in order to improve their performance, usability, and overall customer satisfaction.

This could mean adding new features or enhancing existing ones, as well as addressing any bugs or design flaws. By regularly updating digital products, companies can ensure that they remain ahead of the competition and provide customers with an optimal user experience.

If you want to get an expert’s opinion on your product and how you can improve it with updated features you should have a free consultation with our experts and give your product the boost it deserves. Will be looking forward to hearing from you!