How we gave our SaaS product a personality

The most important step for a SaaS company is to build the product. But just because you built it doesn’t mean they’ll come.

The second most important step for a Saas company to take is to build the product’s personality. A company’s personality isn’t just a mash-up of funny tweets, color schemes, and approachable blog copy- it is the synthesis of all of the customer-facing product functionalities, design, and communications. In a sea of SaaS options for every business need- a company personality can help a prospective user cut through the chaos and choose your product.

Branding and building a personality is not just for marketing teams. Every person in every team has a role in personality building.

Developers strive to make useful, problem-solving products that work consistently. Designers aspire to deliver a seamless user experience with an attractive and intuitive design. Marketers work towards building out communications processes and creating content that will grow the user base, increase engagement, reduce churn, and strengthen brand loyalty.

Independently as well as collectively, these teams create a brand persona for the company that can have personality traits commonly associated with a human being. Apple is imaginative. Doritos is youthful. Slack is down-to-earth and friendly. Google is intelligent. Here at JotForm, we’re working on being known as fun and easy to use.

As the first WYSIWYG online form builder a decade ago, we’ve reaped the rewards of being the leading company and SEO was on our side. JotForm has grown organically to 1.5 million users before the marketing team was formed.

Now that several strong competitors have emerged, and we are in the thick of the design-led era of the internet, we needed to give users a reason to like JotForm. We could no longer rely on our product’s functionality speaking for itself, especially since customers won’t even get to that point if our competitors scoop them up first.

The first 20 years of the web were won by those that built the best infrastructure. Now it’s won by those that build the best experiences.” — Aaron Levie, co-founder & CEO, Box

We’re working towards engaging our audience more deeply

Before the marketing team joined, there was 1 automated email sent to users upon signup. It contained their account information for their records, and that was about it. Then, it got dressed up a bit, but still wasn’t showing our users who we were. It had too many call-to-actions, did nothing to make our users smile, and distracted users from the core action that we wanted them to take: create their first form.

We’re in the process of testing our on-boarding processes and automated email actions, and learning a lot along the way.

Here at JotForm, the marketing team aspires to be thought of as fun and easy. Why those traits? We discovered through surveying our users that they already thought of our product as enjoyable to use and easy to operate. We wanted to work to our advantage and spread that message far and wide.

Our designers dreamed up and created a cartoon cat mascot, Podo, to serve as a face to our brand. Podo is there as a helpful, yet mischievous guide that we use throughout our website as well as in communications like email.

Giving your product a personality means engaging your audience more deeply, and having the product resonate with them emotionally. Years ago, working towards building a product’s personality was considered a “nice to have,” but now it is the difference maker across many industries, including technology. The industry leaders have worked out how to optimize for customer engagement in a way that suits their company personality.

We’re working towards becoming a friend to our users.

We didn’t want customers’ only interactions with JotForm to be when they reach out to customer support when they’re experiencing a problem.

We’re building out different points of communication between us and the user. We’re now sending on boarding emails with bite-sized useful tips presented in an easy to understand, fun way. We’re encouraging users to engage with the product and learn more about the ways that it can help them achieve their goals.

In much the same way that friends catch up with each other when they haven’t hung out in a while, we’re sending our users a monthly email newsletter that updates users with what’s going on with us. We announce new features and integrations, and give them tips and tricks to improve their online forms. Every email newsletter also comes with a form theme that our customers can use for free.

The personality of a product is what makes it feel like a friend, or a stranger. In the same way that you’d help a friend, you can help a company. This can come in the form of giving feedback or engaging in another way. Personality can make you want to root for the company; you want them to win. You’d forgive a friend when they’re not perfect, and companies can get to that point too.

We continuously listen to users, and their voices get heard. We’ve created features and built integrations that our users have requested. We personally read and respond to blog comments, and reach out to specific subsets of users and are conducting market research continuously. Opening up the lines of communication with our users has allowed us to learn about our users, the industries and roles that they’re in, and what they’re looking for.

In our quest to product user delight at various stages of our user’s usage, our interface is making moves toward greater simplicity, we’ve segmented our messaging, and we try to add fun into SaaS!

Our users were not free from our mischievous ways. On April Fool’s Day they got pranked: upon signing in to their JotForm dashboard, dozens of animated balloons bobbed on their screen, needing to be popped with a click to get them to disappear.

We keep things fun and accessible because it’s part of our brand personality, but every company has its own. What is your company’ personality?