Let’s face it: Product launches are some of the most nerve-wracking experiences for product managers. The reason is simple: if you blow it, nobody will notice your new product despite all the hard work you’ve put into building it.

You need a solid product launch strategy to minimize the risk of your product launch flopping.

In the article, I will outline:

• How to create a successful product launch strategy.
• Tried and tested product launch tactics
• How product managers can use Product Fruits to facilitate new product and feature launches.

What is a product launch strategy?

A product launch strategy is a comprehensive plan to bring a new product to market. Contrary to what many believe, it doesn’t just define what happens on the launch day.

Strategy coordinates all aspects of the launch—from defining the target audience and product’s value proposition to setting marketing, sales, and support tactics—so that each team member knows how and when to act.

Why is a product launch strategy important?

A product launch strategy ensures that every aspect of your product launch is coordinated and aligned with your overall business goals.

Specifically, it enables:

• Clear targeting and positioning forces you to define your ideal customers and why they need your product, making it easier to differentiate the product in the market.
• Cross-functional team alignment: A successful launch involves many departments—product, marketing, sales, and customer success. A clear launch plan spells out the roles and responsibilities so everybody knows how they fit into the bigger picture.
• Efficient resource allocation: Mapping out a launch strategy allows you to allocate your budget, time, and staff to the most impactful activities.
• Effective launch success tracking: By defining success, such as launch KPIs, you can measure the outcomes and adjust as necessary.
• Scalable and replicable processes: A structured and well-documented launch framework helps you learn from each launch to refine your tactics over time.

How to design a winning launch strategy

Here’s the 5-step new product launch strategy design process we follow at Product Fruits:

1. Conduct market research: Gather feedback from surveys, interviews, and industry reports to pinpoint customer challenges and preferences. Analyze competitors to identify underserved user personas and unmet needs that can help your product stand out.
2. Define product positioning and messaging: Translate research insights about your target market into a compelling value proposition. Highlight your product’s distinct benefits to ensure potential customers instantly understand how it solves their problems.
3. Build your MVP: Develop a streamlined product version, focusing on core features that address your users’ most acute pain points. Collect feedback to validate product-market fit early and iterate before a full-scale launch.
4. Define launch success KPIs: Choose metrics to track, such as user adoption rate, and set measurable goals. Monitor and adjust these metrics in real-time.
5. Develop a marketing strategy: Create a marketing plan that ties each promotional channel—content, social media, and ads—to the product’s value. Align all teams on your marketing efforts and their timing to ensure a cohesive go-to-market experience.

BTW: Watch our 20-minute webinar on creating successful in-app communication and learn Adam’s expert tips for maximizing your in-app campaigns!

Product launch strategies

Now that you know how to develop an overarching product launch strategy, let’s look at a few tactics to help you implement it.

Run prototype tests to validate ideas

Before you commit your resources to developing a full-fledged product version, validate the ideas through prototype tests, starting from low-fidelity and making them increasingly more complex.

Here are a few ideas on how to do it:

• Organize a crowdfunding campaign to see if people are ready to pay for your product.
• Conduct fake door tests to assess the demand for new features or willingness to pay.
• Run the Wizard of Oz experiment (sell the product as if it were ready and manually do all the work in the background to assess viability before you build it).

Dogfooding and beta tests

Launching your product gradually, not to all users at once.

If it’s another product in your portfolio or a new feature, start with dogfooding. Launch it internally and test its performance among your employees. Only then roll it out to your users.

Do it one segment at a time, run tests, collect feedback, analyze its performance, and iterate so that each subsequent release offers more value.

The practice of releasing the product to a small representative user group to collect their feedback is called.

Beta tests not only offer valuable user feedback but can help with new customers.

When Slack launched to the general public in February 2014, 8,000 customers signed up within 24 hours. The main driver of such success? The beta tester word-of-mouth.

Launch it on Product Hunt

Product Hunt is a six-million-strong online community of entrepreneurs, tech enthusiasts, and investors who showcase and discover new products.

Launching your product on the platform can generate buzz, attract early adopters, and spark valuable feedback.

When you launch the product, the community can upvote and comment, giving you immediate exposure. Engage by answering questions and thanking supporters can raise your visibility even further.

The ultimate goal? To end up on the front page.

Orchestrate a multi-channel communication strategy

Your communication strategy should cover how you announce the new product on the launch day, create hype around the product in the run-up, and keep your audience engaged afterward.

Regardless of the launch stage, don’t rely on a single communication channel. Various channels allow you to reach various audiences.

For example:

• In-app messaging is perfect for engaging your active users and driving product adoption.
• Social media campaigns can capture the attention of potential customers.
• Emails allow you to reach and re-engage inactive users or those who use it occasionally.
• Paid ads and retargeting can get the new product in front of users who have visited your website before.

Track your product launch success and iterate on the insights

How can you know that your launch is successful?

You can’t unless you track your product launch success metrics, including:

• Sign-ups
• Activation rate (the percentage of customers who reach the activation milestone, that is, experience the product value).
• Product adoption rate (how many users use the product ‘habitually’).
• Month 1 retention rate (the percentage of sign-ups who keep using the product after the first month).
• Free trial/freemium conversion rate (the percentage of users who upgrade to a paid plan).
• Product-market fit score, or PMF (a measure of how disappointed users would be if they could no longer use the product)
• Net Promoter Score, or NPS (a measure of how likely users are to recommend your product).

In addition to quantitative data, qualitative insights are collected from open-ended survey questions, reviews, social media mentions, or customer support and sales conversations.

BTW: Discover how FitnessPlayer doubled its user base and reduced churn 💪

How Product Fruits can help you execute your product launch strategy

Product Fruits is an AI-powered onboarding platform with feedback capabilities. Which is exactly what a product manager needs when launching a new product or feature.

Announce new product/feature

With Product Fruits, you can announce your new features and products to existing customers via in-app messages.

These are super easy to create in the WYSIWYG editor without writing a line of code. So is making the announcement copy—the AI text assistant will craft it from scratch or edit it for you.

But wait—there’s more:

Thanks to the integrations with Customer.io and ActiveCampaign, you can target customers, existing or prospective, with email announcements to ensure they don’t miss your launch.

Onboard your customers

When users sign up for your newly launched product, you want them to experience its value quickly. Because the longer it takes, the more likely they are to churn.

Product Fruits offers a range of onboarding tools that will help your users reach the Aha moment:

• Onboarding checklists: lists of tasks vital for user activation.
• Product tours: sequences of in-app messages that showcase the main product features and their benefits.
• Feature walkthroughs: sequences of tooltips that teach users how to use features and prompt them to engage.

Thanks to user segmentation, you can personalize the onboarding experiences for different user personas so that they learn only about the features that they need to achieve their goals.

The best part?

You no longer have to create them manually. Tell our AI assistant what your product does and your onboarding goals, and it will create a bespoke onboarding experience in seconds.

Provide self-service support

Product Fruits supports a knowledge base where you can upload support resources like product documentation, how-to guides, or video tutorials. Users can access it from the Life Ring button on the user interface, along with checklists and other onboarding resources.

Creating such resources is a one-off investment. Once ready, they can support multiple users simultaneously as long as they remain current. This is a more scalable alternative to traditional high-touch customer support.

Sure, it can’t solve all user problems. But, it allows you to dramatically reduce the number of support tickets by helping users solve simple problems independently. In the meantime, your agents are free to deal with more complex issues.

Drive adoption with contextual guidance

You can engage users and drive new product adoption with Product Fruit’s contextual in-app messages.

Imagine that a user needs to engage with a particular feature five times to adopt it. You can configure the triggering settings so that a tooltip prompting them to use it appears every time they navigate to the relevant screen—until they use it five times.

You can also trigger in-app messages for your users based on their previous actions.

Collect customer feedback to inform future iterations

Thanks to the in-app survey functionalities, you can use Product Fruits to collect user feedback about your new product.

This includes quantitative data, like NPS, PMF, CSAT, or CES, which can be tracked over time, and qualitative insights from open-ended questions.

Capturing the authentic voice of the customer not only informs further iterations but also shows you how users talk about your product. So you can tweak your product messaging to better resonate with your target audience.

Just like in-app announcements, creating surveys requires no coding, so all product launch team members can launch them regardless of their technical skills.

Also, don’t forget about the feedback widget, which allows users to submit passive feedback and requests whenever they feel like sharing them.

Recruit beta testers

When you already have a product in place and are launching a new feature or a complementary product, recruit your beta testers from the existing user base.

With Product Fruits segmentation, you can pick the right candidates for the test to ensure a representative sample.

Once you define the ideal tester criteria, you send a targeted beta test invite to all users who meet them via an in-app message. And collect their details via a survey.

Further reading: Dark Launch: How to Release Features Safely 101

Conclusion

A product launch strategy is essential for coordinating the efforts of cross-functional product teams before, during, and after the launch.

To pull off a successful product launch, you need tools that will allow you to gather user insights to inform your product development and messaging strategy and communicate with them throughout the process.

Book the Product Fruits demo to learn how it can support your next product or feature launch.